Dead reckoning

Earnshaw's mill is one of the last remnants of Bradfield's prosperous past and its future is hanging in the balance. But the family which still owns it is riven by dissent, the threatened workers are on strike and DCI Michael Thackeray is not the only one who fears racial violence on the streets. The discovery of a body on the moors heightens the tension to breaking point. Meanwhile Thackeray's girl-friend, reporter Laura Ackroyd is looking at the more personal problems faced by the Muslim community, young people's opposition to some of its strict religious codes and the threat posed by the increasingly threatening far right political group which is making its presence felt. And why, she wonders, has a promising Asian student at the university apparently disappeared?