In this gripping mystery by CWA Diamond Dagger winner Catherine Aird, the village spinster dies behind a fortune teller's booth, and Calleshire's greatest detective looks into the future-and sees justice The annual Horticultural Society Flower Show would have gone off without a hitch were it not for one very pesky murder.   When nurse Joyce Cooper goes missing from the parish's fortune-telling booth at the flower fair, her friends at the local church...

From a former Fleet Street journalist and an accomplished British suspense writer comes a complex puzzle wrapped in a plot that could almost be ripped from contemporary U.S. headlines. Imagine what would happen if a vanished woman's body lay underwater for almost three decades, the police unable to charge her guilty-as-sin husband until her remains are finally discovered by pure chance... 27 years ago, Clara Marshall and her two young children vanished...

Possibly the most unusual mystery ever written. A murder is committed, behind closed doors, in bizarre circumstances. Three amateur detectives take the case: Lord Simon Plimsoll, Monsieur Amer Picon, and Monsignor Smith (in whom discerning readers will note likeness to some familiar literary figures). Each arrives at his own brilliant solution, startling in its originality, ironclad in its logic. Meanwhile Sergean Beef sits contemptuously in the background....

"Thomas Wells Hart drifted into a dodgy career as a private investigator and grew clever at tailing suspects and all the other tricks of the game. Not quite clever enough, however. Coming across Hart�s shot-up body, Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and Assistant Chief Constable Des Iles have to work out their own explanation as to how he came to be executed behind the wheel of a Ford Focus in a quiet suburban street. The trail will lead...

"Tensions in the community are mounting following the gruesome deaths of two men, both of whom were accused yet acquitted of the murder of an undercover police officer. It looks like vigilante justice, but who is responsible? Alarmingly, suspicion falls on Assistant Chief Constable Iles. Matters escalate when a TV show investigating the murders is aired, further implicating Iles. Iles seems at ease with the accusations, as are his superiors in the...

One has to admit that the timing was peculiar. No one could doubt that Mr. Percival Pyke Period was genuinely distraught to hear that his neighbor, Harry Cartell, had turned up dead in a ditch. But how is it that Mr. Percival Pyke came to write the letter of condolence before the body was found? And how is it that Mr. Cartell came to inspire such violence? Yes he was boring, yes he was stuffy, but who would kill a man for the crime of being a bad...

In "Opening Night", a leading actor is found gassed in his dressing room. It looks like suicide, until it transpires that he was widely detested. Inspector Alleyn quickly realizes that almost everyone in the theatre had a motive for his murder. "When In Rome" finds Inspector Alleyn joining a group of highly suspicious tourists on a visit to a Roman catacomb. The corpse he finds in an ancient sarcophagus has been very recently murdered.

For years Colin Harpur's dubious boss, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles, ran a questionable but practical arrangement with Mansel Shale and Panicking Ralph Ember, owner of the Monty Club: Iles would protect their businesses if they ensured peace on the streets. But the arrangement fails when violence erupts.