Sabrina & The Secret of The Severn Sea: A River Will Always Give Up Its Dead... Kindle Edition

Gloucester Cathedral Police Officer Jorge Winter returns to his small-town roots in Berkeley to track down the missing Reverend Luke Lyons, whose coat and hat have been found abandoned beside the River Severn. This is where he and Luke grew up together. It is also the place where Luke saved him from drowning in the nearby estuary, which makes this, his first case as a church detective, deeply personal.

In the absence of a body, the local police treat Luke’s disappearance as unsolvable, just as they did his grandfather’s years ago. Sean vanished on the night that two petrol barges blew up and destroyed the railway bridge over the river at Sharpness in 1960. Luke has always idolised this man he never met as someone who died trying to save drowning sailors.

Jorge finds evidence for Luke’s apparent suicide less than convincing, the more he learns about his good work as chaplain in the local prison for sex offenders. Also, Luke was preparing to officiate at his sister Ellie’s wedding in nearby Berkeley Castle. It seems unlikely that he was intending to disappear, so what changed his mind? What secret?

Luke’s criminal parents ran the Severn Sea Gang in the 1970s and 80s, burgling large stately homes, until his father Rex Lyons fatally wounded the pregnant Lady Sara Greene, for which he was sentenced to life in prison. Sara’s baby daughter Eva had to be cut from her womb.

Embittered inmate Frank Cordell tells Jorge that he shared a cell with Rex before he was stabbed to death in a fight with a fellow prisoner. In his drug-fuelled dreams Rex spoke of a treasure of stolen antiques worth £80 million, accumulated by his gang, but which has never been recovered. Eight months ago, just prior to his disappearance, Frank asked Luke to locate the hoard and use it to finance urgent medical care for his critically ill grandson, whom the NHS had deemed untreatable. Instead, Cordell is convinced that Luke has simply run off with the loot. "Find it, and you’ll find the man," he says.

Clues to the hoard’s exact location are hidden in a copy of Rex’s prison Bible. Jorge tracks the Bible down, to put him on the treasure trail, too.

From Spain’s Costa Del Sol, Luke’s estranged mother Jessica harbours her own ambition. She wants to find the antiques before she grows any older, using two former gang members who also resent being cheated by Rex of their share of the loot.

The day after his release from prison, Frank Cordell is found murdered.