When a bomb devastates the office of London's most unusual police unit and claims the life of its oldest detective, Arthur Bryant, his surviving partner John May searches for clues to the bomber's identity. His search takes him back to the day the detectives first met as young men in 1940. In Blitz-ravaged London, a beautiful dancer rehearsing for a...

London, 1881. Constance Langton lives in a gloomy home with a distant father and a grief-stricken mother; seeking refuge and comfort, she secretly attends a séance which has tragic consequences. Left alone, her only legacy is a mysterious inheritance that will blight her life and take her deep into a world of apparitions, betrayal and blackmail, black-hearted villains - and...

One night, Arthur Bryant witnesses a drunk middle-aged lady coming out of a pub in a London backstreet. The next morning, she is found dead at the exact spot where their paths crossed. Even more disturbing, the pub has vanished. Bryant is convinced that he saw them as they were over a century before, but the elderly detective has already...

Jealousy and greed form a deadly alliance in the highly charged world of international showjumping. Ross Wakelin, a talented American rider with a chequered past, has come to England hoping for a fresh start. But soon after he arrives at Oakley Manor yard he learns that all is not as it seems. Bellboy, a winner of the Hickstead Derby, was...

'The newspapers referred to it as the case of the seventy-seven clocks. There was quite a fuss at the time. We got into terrible trouble. Dear fellow, it was one of our most truly peculiar cases. I remember as if it was yesterday.' In fact, Arthur Bryant remembers very little about yesterday, but he does remember the oddest investigation of...

Discover the classic mystery from Dick Francis, one of the greatest thriller writers of all time 'Well-researched and expertly written, it is gripping from start to finish' 5***** Reader Review 'You really feel that you are involved with the plot and feel for the characters' 5***** Reader Review ______ On Royal Ascot's first day, bookmaker Ned Talbot watches helplessly as...

The twenty-second book to feature the classic crime-solving detective, Chief Inspector Wexford. Wexford had almost made up his mind that he would never again set eyes on Eric Targo's short, muscular figure. And yet there he was, back in Kingsmarkham, still with that cocky, strutting walk. Years earlier, when Wexford was a young police officer, a woman called Elsie Carroll...

A sinister figure stalks the gas-lit groves of Cremorne Gardens, the last pleasure-ground on the banks of the Thames. His weapon, a sharp pair of scissors. His victims, young women in the first bloom of youth. HIs crime - merely to remove a lock of their hair. Inspector Decimus Webb of Scotland Yard suspects a harmless lunatic is at large....

A sexual predator is at large on the streets of Imperial Vienna. The killer is no ordinary 'lust murderer', but rather an entirely new phenomenon, his deviance revealing the darker preoccupations of the age before the First World War. Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt appeals to his friend, psychoanalyst Dr. Max Liebermann, for assistance. But to understand the killer's behaviour, Liebermann...

Fact: Five thousand years ago, the Mayans carved thirteen crystal skulls. Fact: To protect humankind, they sent them to the four corners of the globe. Fact: They gave a precise date for when they thought the world would end: 21 December 2012. Fact: They said that this time the destruction will be of man's making. Fact: Only when all thirteen...

Two years ago he had been a promising young novelist. Now he survived - you could hardly call it living - in a near derelict cottage with only an unhooked telephone and his own obsessive thoughts for company. Two years of loving Drusilla - the bored, rich, unstable girl with everything she needed, and a husband she wanted dead. The...

John Stone, a man so wealthy that in the years before World War One he was able to manipulate markets, industries and indeed whole countries and continents, has been found dead in mysterious circumstances. His beautiful young widow commissions a journalist to carry out an unusual bequest in his will but as he begins his research he soon discovers a...

The twenty-first book to feature the classic crime-solving detective, Chief Inspector Wexford. Searching for truffles in a wood, a man and his dog unearth something slightly less savoury - a human hand. The corpse, as Chief Inspector Wexford is informed later, has lain buried for ten years or so, wrapped in a purple cotton sheet. The post mortem can not...

After two high-risk missions, CIA special agent John Wells is living on the edge, his nights filled with disturbing dreams. He knows he has no time for rest - and he has made many enemies. But what happens next shocks him to the core. First, he is targeted by assassins sent by a psychotic arms dealer out for revenge. His...

Gus Dury is a changed man. He is off the Edinburgh streets and back with estranged wife, Debs. He has promised her that he won't get involved in any more dodgy cases which the police can't or won't solve. And above all, he's off the drink. In his pocket at all times is a half bottle of Scotch, but although...