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

Agnes pages through the papers in the folder. She looks again at the image on the screen. Something is wrong.

Isabela Navarro's childhood dental records show early signs of decay to the right cuspid and bicuspid, which is not surprising. Drinking-water fluoridation wasn't widespread in Spain until the 1960s, and dental hygiene at that time wasn't what it is today. By the time Navarro disappeared, when she was in her early twenties, she would have had either fillings or severe cavities, perhaps both. But the image on the X-ray screen shows no sign of decay whatsoever—the teeth lie smooth in the cup of the jaw, like stones. And there's something else, even more unusual: The molars are so deeply worn they are nearly flat on top, the cusps all sanded down to almost nothing. Sometimes you can see this level of abrasion in people in their sixties or seventies, but by that age, you'd expect fillings too, even crowns or bridges. It doesn't make sense. Agnes has seen a jaw like this only once before, and it's not in the records the coroner got from Málaga.

Agnes hands the folder back. She shakes her head. A moment of utter confidence, of pure cool clarity.

"I'm sorry," she says. "This isn't her."

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.