329 Pages

3 and 1 / 2 stars

Archeology, murder and smart detectives…What more could a girl want in a mystery novel?

Jimmy is clearing an area of the bogs with his digger for a conservation project. He comes upon a body. Soon, the area is deluged by a team of archeologists, complete with a professor to lead them. This will be the first bog body found in this area of Britain.

Sadly for the team, the body turns out to be much more recent than expected. It has only been in the bog for about twenty years. Enter the detectives, DI David Lancaster and DS Marie Videt.

The belt with which the male victim's hands were tied leads back to a bespoke tailor. The belt is traced to a member of high society. The detectives must tread carefully, even though the man is now deceased himself.

The trail to find out what happened to their now identified North African young man leads the detectives to France and other places around England.

Only a chance encounter solves this case in a surprising fashion.

This book is well written and plotted. It gets tedious in places. (Romances are not my thing.) I liked the characters, even the murderer.

I want to thank NetGalley and Cranthorpe Millner Publishers for forwarding to me a copy of this good book for me to read, enjoy and review. The opinions expressed in this review are solely my own.

While this book was a little slow, I did have fun reading this. If you're a fan of archeological things as well as murder mysteries, you may like this. This was my first by this author and I liked his writing style.

The moment Jimmy’s digger blade cut through the soft peat, he knew what he’d exposed. It was flesh. Human flesh. On the remote moors of Dartmoor, the discovery of a sacrificial ‘bog-body’ is cause for great excitement amongst archaeologists. But when it is discovered that the body is not the well-preserved remains of a long-dead ancestor, but rather that of a murder victim from a twenty-year-old cold case, DI David Lancaster and DS Marie Vidêt are immediately called in to investigate! Good book! This book had suspense, intrigue, action, murder, great mystery, a good who done it and a few twists and turns. The story was interesting! I definitely recommend reading this book! Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for sharing this book with me!

At first they thought it was a bog body lying under the peat, a person dead for perhaps thousands of years. But further examination proves that the body is a much more modern murder victim. The detectives in charge are on the lookout for a decades old murder, and their investigation will lead them into the lives and homes of the wealthy elite

For All Your Endeavours by David Sharp begins with the discovery of a well-preserved "Bog Body" in a remote area of Dartmoor,which naturally causes much excitement amongst the group of archaeologists doing a "dig" nearby.
This soon turns to excitement of a different kind when it's discovered that the body is that of a murder victim and possibly that of someone who went missing 20 years ago rather than in the depths of antiquity. Plymouth-based police officers DI David Lancaster and DS Marie Vidêt are tasked with investigating and the case becomes far more involved and complicated than it first appears.

I really enjoyed this book,at first I thought it was going to go down an exploitative route as mention of a notorious London address and the predilections of some of the characters hinted strongly at it taking that direction. It's far more subtle than that and what initially appears something quite sordid goes in a totally different direction. Author David Sharp cleverly leads the reader,and his main characters ,down a number of cul de sacs and the story twists and turns without resorting to grandstanding twists.

There are no punch-ups of car chases here,it's more for readers who enjoy the William Wisting , Kurt Wallander and even Inspector Morse books. I don't know anything about author David Sharp but this story holds up well against any of the previously-mentioned classic detective stories.
Being local to some of the locations I also know which architectural monstrosity offends D.I. Lancaster as he looks out on it from his office.

A great read, Lancaster and Vidêt are a great team and hopefully there's scope for a series here. I'm always interested in trying new authors, I was more and more impressed with this book as the story progressed and I hope to read more from David Sharp.