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
Araminta Jewell is one of the beauties of her day. Even her marriage to the staid and ugly Sir Martin Culthorpe has not discouraged her hordes of admirers.
It is during her first sitting for a portrait painted by the fashionable French artist Jean-Paul Villemot that the...Read more
In the sleepy English village of Sanford Angelorum, Professor Gervase Fen is taking a break from his books to run for Parliament. At first glance, the village he's come to canvass seems perfectly peaceful, but Fen soon discovers that appearances can be deceptive; someone in the village has...Read more
West of France, 1989.
A weeping killer deposits the unconscious body of nineteen year old Lucie Martin, her head wrapped in a blue plastic bag, into the water of a picturesque lake.
Lot-et-Garonne, 2003.
Fourteen years later a summer heatwave parches the...Read more
The discovery of the bodies of two young girls leaves D.I. Jack Frost in a race to hunt down the killer before he, or she, can strike again. At the same time, he faces a crisis at Denton police station which could result in his being sacked.Read more
Dr. Lorrimer appeared to be the picture of a bloodless, coldly efficient scientist. Only when his brutally slain body is discovered and his secret past dissected does the image begin to change. Once again, Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh learns that there is more to human beings than meets...Read more
An elderly sex-pest is at large in DI Purbright’s home town.
Leaping out from behind bushes at unsuspecting females, making lewd suggestions and, when challenged, scuttling away with odd off-balance leaps, he soon earns the nickname of the ‘Flaxborough crab’....Read more
In the heart of the leafy Cotswolds a body is found. A teenage girl, probably local, somebody's daughter who went out one evening and didn't come back. It is not long before she is identified: fifteen-year-old Lynne Wills who habitually drank underage in 'The Silver Bells' pub and, on the...Read more
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
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
The body was on the pointed rocks alongside the stream. The artist might have fallen from the cliff where he was painting, but there are too many suspicious elements—particularly the medical evidence that proves he'd been dead nearly half a day, though eyewitnesses had seen him alive a...Read more
Barrister Trish Maguire tackles a thirty-year-old terrorism case when distinguished biographer, Beatrice Bowman, hires her to fight a libel claim by a new ennobled member of the House of Lords who says she misidentified him as one of the terrorists who killed a busload of young children....Read more
When Meredith Mitchell bumps into her old schoolfriend Rachel Hunter at the Chelsea Flower Show it doesn't take Meredith long to realise that she and the effortlessly self-confident blonde have even less in common now than they had as teenagers. Apart from one thing - Meredith's companion,...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
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
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
A DI Hardcastle Investigation - June 1917. - Ernest Hardcastle, head of the Whitehall CID, is called to investigate the murder of Sir Nigel Strang, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Munitions. Given his work, Hardcastle wonders whether the Germans might be responsible. Then another...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
London is the scene for a card party given by a social-climbing hostess. Suddenly, the seemingly civilized game of Duplicate Bridge is interrupted by a double murder, both victims murdered by the same sinister method, strangled with picture wire. The crimes seem identical, but were they...Read more
A body in the back of a taxi begins an elegantly constructed mystery, perhaps the finest of Marsh's 1930s novels.The season had begun. Debutantes and chaperones were planning their luncheons, teas, dinners, balls. And the blackmailer was planning his strategies, stalking his next victim.But...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
'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
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 a bloody, pulverized body is found lying beneath the rustic timbers of an authentic torture device so vicious and complicated as to be blood-curdling, there's sufficient unrest in tiny Forbes Abbot to call in Chief Inspector Barnaby. Was Dennis Brinkley done in by crooked business...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
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
Medieval monk Brother Cadfael races to save a young man he believes is falsely accused of robbery—in the Silver Dagger Award–winning mystery series.
In the gentle Shrewsbury spring of 1140, the midnight matins at the Benedictine abbey suddenly reverberate with an unholy sound—a...Read more
When eighteen-year-old Chloe Emery returns to her West London home she finds her mother missing, the house covered in blood. Everything points to murder, except for one thing: there’s no sign of the body.
London detective Maeve Kerrigan and the homicide team turn their...Read more
Cookery expert Darina Lisle and her Detective Inspector husband, William Pigram, are honeymooning in the south of France. Entertained to lunch by another cookery expert, Helen Mansard, her partner, Bernard Barrington Smythe a retired Lloyd’s member and agent, shows them the olive oil mill...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