Excerpt from Bog Queen by Anna North, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

From then on it was different, her work, her life. She felt a sense of purpose that was larger than herself, like a voice calling to her across a distance. She feels it every time she works on a case, feels it even now—perhaps especially now, when she is alone and far from home, with nothing else to guide her.

Kieran is right: This body is unusual.

Like metal, is her first thought, a metal cast of a human being. That perfectly made, that detailed. The eyebrows, eyelashes. The tiny lines on the skin of the lips. Agnes is still accustomed to bones blown dry and crackling in the desert wind. This body is as though transformed into something precious—on the taut smooth skin of the forehead, the cheeks, an aureate dark-bright glow. Full fathom five, she lets herself think, she has never been a reader, but she likes that one, her father used to read it aloud to her. Rich and strange indeed.

She circles, taking her photographs. Joy and calm descending on her as they always do, her heartbeat growing regular.

The body lies in the fetal position, the hands folded beneath the head. The legs too are bent and drawn toward the chest. The left leg is skeletonized and the bones of the foot are mostly missing; she counts phalanges, metatarsals, and two cuneiforms lost to the bog.

And yet from the waist up the skin shows almost no sign of decay or degradation. Agnes can see a round scar on the skin of the left arm, perhaps from chicken pox or a childhood accident. Just under the ribs on the right side is a wound at least ten centimeters long, where something sharp has punctured the flesh. It might have been a branch during the body's years in the bog, or perhaps her husband stabbed her before he pushed her down the stairs; "fighting," after all, can mean many things.

The head is bare and shining, the hair rubbed or worn away. The forehead is high-domed, the chin pronounced. Parietal and occipital bones both appear undamaged, but that means little—an impact doesn't have to break the skull open to be fatal. The neck is thin and delicate; Agnes can see the seventh cervical vertebra pushing up against the skin.

The face suggests a young person, the cheeks unlined, the skin smooth around the eyes. But the bones will tell a better story. Agnes is careful not to read too much into the expression—the pressure of the peat may have deformed the skin and facial muscles into new shapes. All the same, there's a surprising animation to the features, the mouth open, a deep furrow in the brow. It does not look like fear—it looks, perhaps, like rage.

"Okay," she says. "Let's look inside."

Kieran lays the body out on the bed of the X-ray machine. His movements are careful but assured.

And then it appears on the monitor above the X-ray bed: the skull. The coroner whistles low. He must be looking at the brain, which is shrunken but extraordinarily well-preserved. You can see the transverse fissure and even the folds of the cerebrum, delicate gray lines against the white. But what excites Agnes is the bone. It has lost some of its calcium to the acid of the bog, as she expected, and it is hard to distinguish in places from the flesh—the effect is one of layers of gauze or spiderweb laid one on top of the other. But the basic structure is intact—now she can see the evidence of impact, a network of microfractures to the frontal bone.

"He said she fell backward, right?" Agnes asks.

"Yeah," Kieran says. "But it was almost sixty years ago. Maybe he misremembered."

Agnes nods. The blunt-force injury those fractures indicate could have been fatal, but Agnes wants a CT scan to be sure. For now she ticks the rest of the head and neck bones off her inventory, all undamaged: maxilla, mandible, cervical verts one, two, three. She flips to the odontogram.

Here she stops.

"We have the dental records?" she asks.

"The dentist in town burned down in 1967," the coroner says. "We were able to get her records from Spain, but they're from childhood. 1953. So there might be some discrepancies."

Excerpted from Bog Queen by Anna North. Copyright © 2025 by Anna North. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.