Disordered Daggers : Between Two Evils by Eva Dolan (2020)

 

( They drove out of the city in silence, skirting the suburbs and endless housing estates, making fast progress on the parkway that snaked through the blocky landscape of warehousing and big-box megastores, heading into the bustle of the sprawling Eastern Industrial Estate, with its scent of green waste and rubble dust and epoxy. Then the city fell away with an abruptness that always struck Zigic as slightly unreal and ahead the fenland unfolded, wild and flat, and near lawless, all the way to the Wash. The sky was vast and cloudless, heat shimmering up off the road, haze in the distance, the light wind stirring up the threat of dirt storms as the fields lay parched from the rainless weeks. Crops were wilting, standing unharvested, vegetation yellowing, fruit dying on the stem. The shortage of seasonal labour was beginning to tell now. Hardly any sign of activity in the fields they passed. People who went home for Easter had decided against returning, heading for more welcoming options instead. )

Update at 12 pm - And it did indeed make the Steel Daggers longlist.