Tag: Jake Jackson

A Twist in the River by Stig Abell

Cover of A Twist in the River shows a stream winding through countryside, the sky overhead blue, but reddish toward the horizon.Harper Perennial
Published June 23, 2026
Reviewed by Meredith Frazier

Former London detective Jake Jackson left the police and moved to the country hoping to find a quieter way of life. So far, that hasn’t entirely worked out for him. A Twist in the River is the fourth in Stig Abell’s series, and when women begin disappearing only to be discovered drowned in the river that Jake walks along daily, Jake and his friends begin to wonder if the coincidence isn’t a bit unlikely, even though there’s no real sign that the women have been murdered. However, as Jake begins to look into the deaths, stakes get raised, and Jake realizes that he and those he loves may be in real danger.

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The Burial Place by Stig Abell

Cover of The Burial Place shows a windblown tree on a hill with a stone wal and cross, with black birds flying up against a red sky.Harper Perennial
Published August 26, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister

Jake Jackson has left a crumbling marriage and a punishing job as a police detective in London to take up residence in an off-the-grid country property left to him by a deceased uncle. He’s leading a very different kind of life, now, a pastoral idyll of rural life, but crime has a way of finding him, even in the tiny community nearby. In this third book in the series, he’s curious about an expansive dig where layers of British history are being slowly unearthed by a collection of professionals, graduate students, and volunteers under the supervision of an archaeologist. A filmographer has been making a series of films about the dig and is thrilled when a valuable horde is discovered some distance from the site. It’s not clear who owns the land its on, and it could make some of the dig participants wealthy. But in the meantime, the group is troubled by a series of threatening letters that protest the very idea of digging up the land, purporting to be from someone anonymous who has taken the name of an Anglo-Saxon leader. Though they ask Jake for advice, no one is sure if the threat is serious – until one of them is killed, poisoned with a chemical they use to clean artifacts.

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