Damien Boyd’s “Head in the Sand”

A golf course. The bunker (sand trap) for twelfth hole, in fact. A severed head. No body. The body is eventually found in a car parked on a beach and set on fire.

In Damien Boyd’s Head in the Sand, Detective Inspector (DI) Nick Dixon of the Avon and Somerset CID in Britain and Detective Constable (DC) Jane Winter have their work cut out for them. The victim is a local woman, whose husband and son were watching television at the time of the murder.

And then another body is found. Headless but the head nearby. This time a man. He’s been dead for some time. Boyd and Winter search to find a link between the two gruesome murders.

And they will find a link, buried in the past. Unsolved murders very much like the two they’re dealing with. Murders from almost 40 years before.

Damien Boyd

Head in the Sand is the second in Boyd’s police procedural series of novels. It’s fast-paced, full of surprising twists and turns. This is not so much a story to be read to figure out who the murderer is as it is one to watch the two detectives and especially Dixon use inspired police work to solve the killings.

Boyd is the author of four other Nick Dixon mystery stories: As the Crow Flies;  Kickback; Swansong; and Dead Level. He has extensive experience in criminal law in the UK and worked for a time with the Crown Prosecution Service, and all that experience undergirds the stories.

Head in the Sand is a good rip of a mystery.

Related:

My review of Damien Boyd’s As the Crow Flies.

Photograph by Alex Grichenko via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.