The Deer Park Mysteries · Book 2
The Wrong Snares
Release: 1 December 2026
The snare on the deer path isn’t Dad’s.
Shop links will appear here on release.
The snare on the deer path isn’t Dad’s. Roy knows his father’s snares the way he knows his own boots, and this wire is the wrong gauge, set in the wrong place, for the wrong animal.
It is 1970 at Knole Park. Roy is thirteen, out rabbiting with the ferrets and dreaming about the brand-new Triumph Stag. Then a deer is found in a snare, and somebody is taking venison out of the park by night.
There are van lights on the golf course after dark. A new under-keeper on the next beat is seen with a lamp where he shouldn’t be. A menu card turns up from a smart London restaurant. And at home, things are changing in ways nobody quite wants to talk about.
Roy, Jackie, Jane and Mick start a log, and the evidence starts to add up. But catching poachers who know the park as well as they do means getting up even earlier than usual.
Book Two of The Deer Park Mysteries, for readers aged 12 to 17.
Opening extract
The fires came first. They always did.
Roy was down the stairs at a quarter past five on the last Monday in August, in his socks, with his jersey pulled on over his pyjama top, and the Keeper's Cottage was doing what it always did at that hour: creaking quietly to itself, like an old man turning over in bed. Summer or not, the walls held the night's cold. They were two feet thick in places, they had been holding cold for over five hundred years, and they saw no reason to give it up just because it was August.