AFTER THE long-running glut of female forensic pathologists, I suppose it was only a matter of time before we had an obstetrician heroine. At least they are equally used to the sight of blood and gore.

Tora Hamilton has been plucked from the familiar ease of southern England to follow her husband and take up a job in his native Shetland. A bit of a wrench but she is getting on with it, enjoying sailing and horseriding until one day - digging a peatbog grave for a much-loved pony - she uncovers the perfectly preserved body of a young woman.

Such a discovery is bad enough under any circumstances, but it is made much worse by the fact that she has had her heart ripped out, apparently while still alive, and pagan runes carved into her back. And she had only recently given birth.

The mystery is how little the local police want to know, initially convinced that peat's extraordinary preservative powers mean that the body could be ancient. Only a newly arrived glamorous female sergeant called Dana Tulloch shares Tora's obsession, especially when a post mortem examination reveals that death occurred just two years earlier. (The second lesbian policewoman to debut in British fiction this year: is this a trend?) But their attempts to discover the dead woman's identity lead them nowhere, as do those to decipher the runes, which are found all over the islands, including in Tora's own basement. Her smooth-talking hospital boss, the local police chief and even Tora's husband, Duncan, try to persuade her to leave things alone.

But then Tora links the runes to old legends, myths of the “Trowie folk” - a local corruption of the Norse “troll” - and recurring stories of young girls who disappear, never to be seen again. The legends acquire sinister significance when she discovers a pattern in deaths of women of childbearing age.

What links them, and what is the significance of the clusters of male children born every third year with the initials “KT” next to their names in the hospital birth records? And what about the mysterious maternity facility on the otherwise uninhabited neighbouring island of Tronal?

The mystery deepens when the corpse is identified - by her husband - as a woman who died of cancer two years earlier and was cremated, while Dana and Tora find that their lives are also at risk.

S.J. Bolton comes from Lancashire and lives near Oxford. She admits that she knew next to nothing about the Shetlands before discovering a book of folk legends in Aylesbury library. She will not have endeared herself to the natives with this splendidly crafted, deeply disturbing first novel, unless it is by doing wonders for the tourist industry.

Sacrifice is almost a 21st-century Stepford Wives having Rosemary's Baby for The Wicker Man. Except for one thing: all of those were written by men (two of them by Ira Levin). I can hear the sexist allegations already but this is written by a woman and feels like it.

This debut novel will deservedly be a bestseller, but it remains just a whiff of testosterone short of a masterpiece.

Sacrifice by S J Bolton
Bantam, £10

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