The Calving Season Killings
A 1970s Rural Veterinary Thriller

About this book:

The brass alarm clock drives Neil Bannerman upright at 4:20 a.m. into a Yorkshire winter so cold the thermometer reads four degrees below freezing—inside the bedroom. It's March 1974 in Wensleydale, where central heating is a rumor, the Land Rover's diesel coughs to life on faith alone, and a nine-hundred-guinea Friesian heifer is dying in a stone byre on the fells. By the time Neil saves the cow but loses the calf, old Harry Horner mutters something that doesn't sit right: *Bloat don't usually leave a beast bleeding from the nose.* Two hours later, at a neighboring farm, Neil finds a champion shorthorn dead from a ruptured uterus—and embedded in her abdominal cavity, a practice trochar needle stamped *H. C. B. & F.* Hardisty, Cundall, Bannerman, and Finch. One of his three partners has been here. One of them is killing cattle.

Atmospheric, clinically precise, and steeped in the brutal beauty of the Northern Dales, *The Calving Season Killings* opens a veterinary thriller unlike any other. Neil Bannerman—thirty, unmarried, still earning his stripes in a practice where the senior partners hold secrets like calving ropes—must navigate a landscape where a dead beast means a year's rent lost, where the Ministry tests for anthrax and finds "heart failure," and where the fourth partner, Julian Finch, drives the icy lanes with white knuckles and a face like a man fleeing a fire. The copper sulphate drench. The missed post-mortems. The knacker's wagon arriving before the vet. Every call-out tightens the net.

From the frost-rimed fells of Great Shunner Fell to the steam-heavy byres of Askrigg, this is crime fiction with mud on its boots and blood under its fingernails. No forensic labs, no DNA—just a young vet's hands, a fountain-pen ledger, and the terrible knowledge that the killer shares his surgery, his tea breaks, and the dispensary shelf where the trochars live. As the snow deepens and the lambing season approaches, Neil has twenty-six chapters to uncover which partner has turned healer into executioner—before the thaw reveals a trail of bodies no knacker's wagon can hide.