ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am hugely grateful, as ever, to a great many people for helping to drag this one across the finish line. Without them, it still would be suffering from stitch on the first bend while everyone else had changed and gone home . . .

Thanks to Elizabeth Orcutt for advice on newspaper print deadlines and to John Manlove PhD for his help with the rather more esoteric business of extracting porcine DNA. Wendy Lee was brilliant as always and I remain extremely fortunate to have benefited from the copy-editing skills of Deborah Adams. Both have stopped me from looking foolish on many occasions.

For the umpteenth time, I am in the debt of Professor Lorna Dawson from the Environmental and Biochemical Sciences Group at the James Hutton Institute. Not only was her professional expertise invaluable, she possesses a darkly twisted imagination that would put a great many crime writers to shame and a wicked sense of humour. As evidence of this, I need only point out that the subject line of one of her emails, in which she was casually discussing insect infestation on the charred body of a pig, was Smoky Bacon. Thanks, Lorna, and the pork scratchings are on me.

Thanks to Michael Weston King and Lou Dalgleish. The songs of My Darling Clementine have been with me throughout the writing of this book and working with them on The Other Half has been an unalloyed pleasure. Long may the heartache continue.

‘Thank you’ in neon letters fifty feet high to David Shelley and Sarah Lutyens for being the best in the business. And above all, as always, thanks to Claire. Unlike those unfortunate enough to come up against Tom Thorne, I continue to get away with murder.