They Also Raise Chickens

On the outskirts of a small English market town where nothing ever happens until it does, an amateur archaeologist discovers human remains. One body, three sets of DNA. While detective Harry Dangerfield and the local constabulary try to catch a killer who is targeting the town and the surrounding countryside, the Catholic and Anglican priest are engaged in an unholy battle to win the souls of the townsfolk. But it is to Albert Flowers the local undertaker we must look for the answers. Is the body that of his son Daniel, missing all these years? Are the remains those of the WW1 infantryman that folk say haunts the forest? And who is the mysterious stranger killed by a runaway cow? As attention turns to the upcoming meet of the Merrydale Hunt and the lives of the townsfolk are about to be turned upside down, the only certainty is that Farmer Bamber will once again be giving his wife a piglet on the occasion of their wedding anniversary. This is a very English novel, charting the lives and deaths of some unremarkable people caught up in remarkable times. Set over several periods spanning the last 100 years, the author has given us an array of highly memorable characters, all of whom share a secret and all of whom are linked in some way or another to the chain of tragic events that begins in 1917 in the muddy trenches of a First World War battlefield and ends in a small town's market place one Boxing Day in an indefinite near future.