"The Maigret of the Dales" Detective-Sergeant Cluff is at home in the bleak, moorland market town of 1960s Gunnarshaw. A gruff and gloomy loner, he has spent a lifetime observing local folk - and knows their lives inside out. They know him, too - a bulky, macintoshed figure who watches from the shadows of Gunnarshaw's ginnels as they go about their daily business, his dog Clive always at his side. But it's not just criminals Cluff has to watch out for. Never satisfied with easy answers to cases, Cluff is a maverick and no flatterer to authority - much to the bemusement of Detective-Constable Barker, but much more so to the despair of the hapless Inspector Mole, who tries at every opportunity to outwit or contain Cluff's singular methods of detection. But beneath Cluff's dour exterior beats the heart of a truly compassionate man who possesses a deep understanding of human nature, in all its sordid and depraved details - details which frequently push Cluff to bend the rules in his pursuit of moral justice. More Deaths For Sergeant Cluff When the police are called to a crime scene at a Gunnarshaw grocer's shop, it looks to be a straightforward case of burglary - but not to Detective-Sergeant Cluff, whose subsequent investigations, following a boy's brutal discovery of a dismembered body on the moors, force him to confront the most gruesome murder he has ever faced. Cluff calls on his intimate knowledge of the folk of Gunnarshaw to push forward his investigation, but when events escalate and lives are under imminent threat, he must abandon his unorthodox methods in favour of immediate action - which even Inspector Mole must admire - but in doing so, and in his haste to bring the case to a close, he puts himself in great personal danger.
