One of Ngaio Marsh's most famous murder mysteries, which introduces Inspector Alleyn to his future wife, the irrepressible Agatha Troy. It started as a student exercise, the knife under the drape, the model's pose chalked in place. But before Agatha Troy, artist and instructor, returns to...Read more
One of the novels featuring Inspector Luke Thanet, of which "Last Seen Alive" won the 1985 Crime Writers' Silver Dagger Award. Thanet is anonymously alerted to the murder of a young man, and soon another body is found - that of an elderly prostitute whom he had picked up the night before...Read more
When Mary Dinwoodie is found choked in a ditch following a night out with her boyfriend, a mysterious caller phones the local paper with a quotation from Hamlet. The career of the Yorkshire Choker is underway. If Superintendent Dalziel is unimpressed by the literary phone calls, he is...Read more
'We're spies,' said Lamb. 'All kinds of outlandish shit goes on.'
Like the ringing of a dead man's phone, or an unwelcome guest at a funeral . . .
In Slough House memories are stirring, all of them bad. Catherine Standish is buying booze again, Louisa Guy is raking...Read more
A rare day off from policing leads DCI Vera Stanhope across the tidal causeway to Holy Island, the lure of crab sandwiches there too hard to resist.
While on the island, she is reminded of the day decades before when, as a teenager, she went with her father Hector on another day...Read more
It seems fitting that the final resting place of a girl's body should be in a graveyard. But this is no peaceful burial. This is a brutal murder scene.
Under strict orders from his doctor to indulge in no criminal investigation, Wexford is sent...Read more
For an instant the two trains ran together, going in the same direction side by side. In that frozen moment, Elspeth, riding in the one train, witnessed a murder in the other. Helplessly, she stared out her carriage window as a man remorselessly tightened his grip around a woman’s throat....Read more
When young actress Gloria Scott throws herself from Waterloo Bridge, the news sends shockwaves through her film studio. Luckily Gervase Fen is in London to investigate.
But when someone acts fast to cover up any evidence – removing all signs of Ms Scott’s identity from her...Read more
As Miss Lucilla Teatime often remarks, there is no lack of entertainment in the delightful town of Flaxborough.
What could be more wholesome than the Folklore Society’s quarterly “revels”, with dancing, a bonfire, and a quaffing bench? Well-upholstered matrons...Read more
THE MESSAGE
DI Tom Thorne has seen plenty of dead bodies in his time. But when he starts receiving sick photos of murder victims on his mobile phone, he soon realises that the next body could be his.
THE KILLER
And even when the man who has been sending the...Read more
London 1887: a year of Continental anarchist- and American-financed Fenian violence. The suspicious death of Patrick O’Rorke’s boyhood friend Tom O’Brien – the internationally famous tenor known as Tomaso Briani – propels the former colonial detective into dangerous places when he is called...Read more
It was 2.47am when Chief Inspector Alan Banks arrived at the barn and saw the body of Keith Rothwell for the first time.
Only hours earlier two masked men had walked the mild-mannered accountant out of his farmhouse and blasted him with a shotgun. It was clinical. Clearly this is...Read more
When the quiet Little Vestry of St. Matthew's Church becomes the blood-soaked scene of a double murder, Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgliesh faces an intriguing conundrum: How did an upper-crust Minister come to lie, slit throat to slit throat, next to a neighborhood derelict of the...Read more
When the body of fifteen-year-old Natalie Ouspensky is found strangled near a public park in Stansfield, England, Detective Inspector Judy Hill and Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd have their work cut out for them. For Natalie wasn't quite the innocent her mother believes, and her classmates...Read more
TILL DEATH DO THEM PART . . .
Doran Fairweather and her husband, ex-vicar Rodney Chelmarsh, are both secretly relieved when she decides to sublet a friend's London apartment for a while. Maybe the separation will put the spice back into their relationship.
But the...Read more
Patrick Aldermann inherits the splendid Rosemount House and gardens on the death of his aunt, and there he is able to indulge his horticultural passions without restraint.
When his boss, Dick Elgood, suggests that Aldermann is a murderer, then retracts the accusation, Peter...Read more
Detective-Inspector Luke Thanet is hard-pressed to discover who pushed beautiful but unpleasant Nerine Tarrant over the second-story balcony of her manor "High Gables" to her death below. There is no lack of suspects, and Thanet, with stolid, respectable Sgt. Lineham at his side, is kept...Read more
'Kill us? They've never needed to kill us,' said Lamb. 'I mean, look at us. What would be the point?'
A year after a calamitous blunder by the Russian secret service left a British citizen dead from novichok poisoning, Diana Taverner is on the warpath. What seems a gutless...Read more
A mother and her teenage daughter are found brutally murdered in a remote farmhouse, one defiled by multiple stab wounds and the other left lying like Sleeping Beauty waiting for her Prince. Reluctantly, clinical psychologist Joe O'Loughlin is drawn into the investigation when a former...Read more
INTELLIGENCE HAS A NEW HOME
A governmental think-tank, whose remit is to curb the independence of the intelligence service, has lost one of its key members, and Claude Whelan-one-time head of MI5's Regent's Park-is tasked with tracking her down. But the trail leads straight back...Read more
Three old men die on a stormy November one by deliberate violence, one in a road accident and one by an unknown cause, Inspector Pascoe is called in to investigate the first death, but when the dying words of the acident victum suggest that a drunken Superintendent Dalziel had been behind...Read more
Flaxborough has its share of fat-cat businessmen—‘wheels’ (in US gangster parlance)...
Like the brash Councillor Henry Crispin and snobbish Arnold Hatch, proprietor of the Floradora Country Club. Their bitter rivalry is well known, so when Crispin’s luxury...Read more
On a winter's evening in Notting Hill, Dawn Arrowood drives home after a doctor's appointment confirming her pregnancy. She is terrified. Her older husband has made it clear that he wants no children, and Dawn is not even sure that the child is his. But as Dawn arrives home, she is attacked...Read more
Why would a fifteen-year-old boy commit suicide?
Mind you, who cares when he's a no-good kid on trial for bludgeoning an elderly couple to death?
But when the senior investigating officer is then found brutally murdered, DI Charlie Resnick is put on the case, and...Read more
Helena Lanark is the only one who knows about the horrors which once occurred in her family's house. The heiress of an immense family fortune, she now resides in a luxurious care home; her mind and memory fading fast. Jane Tennison is leading a murder investigation into the recent brutal...Read more
Can you ever trust anyone, however much you care about them?" ""Things aren't always what they seem . . ." " "In the eighth Trish Maguire novel, Abandoned as a baby and brutalised in care, sculptor Sam Foundling is the obvious suspect when his wife Cecelia is found beaten to death in his...Read more
Guilt and grief have driven a wedge between long time crime-fighting partners psychologist Tony Hill and ex-DCI Carol Jordan. But just because they’re not talking doesn’t mean the killing stops.
Someone is killing women. Women who bear an unsettling resemblance...Read more
The second Dorothy L. Sayers classic to feature mystery writer Harriet Vane, Have His Carcase. Harriet’s discovery of a murdered body on the beach before it is swept out to sea unites her once more with the indomitable Lord Peter Wimsey, as together they attempt to solve a most...Read more
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When a distinguished New Zealand businessman is murdered in London, Detective Inspector O'Rorke is once again called in by Scotland Yard to help find the killer. But O'Rorke is soon enmeshed in the secrets of the past involving the chaos of the Crimean War thirty-four years previously and...Read more
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