Books

A village of secrets finds its past lies waiting.

When mourners gather in the village of Lower Gladdock, the grave is found to be already occupied. The victim is soon linked to a tragedy that tore the village apart five years ago.

Detective Sergeant Guy Poole is hoping to put his traumatic past behind him and settle into his new station at Bexford. Detective Inspector Sam Brock has a new recruit to take under his wing, and he's determined this one isn't going to die. As if that wasn't enough of a headache, his wife is coming home and may be on the verge of discovering the lie he's been telling her.

Newly paired duo Brock and Poole must track down the killer before more lives are lost.

When showbiz gets ugly...

The world of showbiz comes to Bexford when the new series of hit TV show Foul Murder is launched there. Soon, life imitates art as a murder is committed, live on stage.

Luckily, Detective Sergeant Guy Poole and Detective Inspector Sam Brock are in the audience to take charge of the scene. When it becomes clear that one of their own is the prime suspect, they are determined to help prove his innocence, no matter how annoying he is.

The launch of a new exhibit at Bexford museum is derailed when Brock and Poole discover a body in its midst. With rumours of a lost treasure, a confusing array of suspects and a personal stake in the case, they must focus to find their culprit.

Detective Sergeant Guy Poole is dreading confronting his mother with the truth and faces losing a second parent from his life. Detective Inspector Sam Brock's life is changing, and there are big decisions to make for the future.

Detective Sergeant Guy Poole's mother is missing, presumed kidnapped, but with no ransom demand, for what purpose?

Kept away from the case, Detective Inspector Sam Brock is instead landed with a seemingly impossible murder as a man is found stabbed in a locked room surrounded by witnesses who swear no one entered or exited.

As the duo follow the confusing trail it becomes clear the two cases are related and that by solving the unsolvable they may just uncover the truth about Jenny Poole's whereabouts and put to bed demons that have surrounded the family for years.

As changes loom at Bexford police station, Detective Sergeant Guy Poole seeks a distraction and finds it in the camaraderie of a village pub team. But when one of his new friends is murdered, Poole quickly realizes that he and his new partner must learn to work together seamlessly, or risk letting the killer slip through their fingers.

There are many changes coming to the station and to Chief Inspector Brock's life. His child is due any day, he is being promoted and they have a new case where everyone in the village had reason to kill the victim.

Mary Blake had it all. Actress, icon and darling of the nation, she was the queen of TV crime drama. Then she turned fifty.

When replaced on the show by a younger woman, she thinks her days in the limelight are over when an invitation to a murder mystery party from an old friend throws her back into the public eye. This time as a murder suspect.

After playing a detective for years, Mary must now become one as she tries to prove her innocence with the help of her puppy-like brother and her surprisingly useful friend and assistant, Dot.

When Mary Blake is called to help an old acquaintance who's being blackmailed, the last thing she expected was to find herself in the midst of a murder investigation... again.

Within 24 hours of her taking on the case there is a suspicious death and the staff of the Rudolph Hotel are thrown into chaos before their big Christmas event.

With the police unconvinced of foul play, Mary throws herself into the case along with her assistant Dot and her brother Pea, attempting to track down the killer and prove themselves for the new career they have planned.

Amid rumours of the supernatural, history repeats itself.

Mary Blake is trying to get her new private investigation business off the ground when tragedy strikes. Mary's local village of Bloxley is shocked when a decades-old murder appears to have been repeated.

As tensions in the village rise and an ever-increasing list of suspects appear, Mary's reputation is on the line. As well as that of her new business.

1920's England — A group of strangers gathers at an isolated house for the reading of a will.

Tensions rise as the mysterious Mr. Badala's fortune comes with unexpected conditions. Cut off from civilization by a raging storm, the guests must uncover the truth when one of them dies in an apparent accident.

As paranoia and accusations mount, it becomes clear that there is far more at play than a simple inheritance.

Jessie Circle has a new case, and she's dragging Flo Hammond along for the ride.

A priceless coronet is missing from Trelawny house, home to a collection of exotic animals and even stranger house guests, and the clock is ticking.

As the bodies pile up, Flo and Jessie attempt to unravel the mystery and avoid being eaten by a tiger called Duchess.

Lord Hugo Bingham is a simple chap with simple needs. A glass of something feisty, a nice cigar, and an absolutely corking dinner and he's in heaven. Unfortunately, life has a way of throwing dead bodies his way. Luckily, his steadfast valet, Gladstone, is always on hand to solve the case.

Lord Hugo has taken a break from life in Oxford to visit the seaside. When a man he had an altercation with dies outside his hotel room, he and Gladstone must solve the mystery before his mother the Duchess arrives and ruins his holiday.

When Hugo Bingham is invited to his friend Freddie's family home, the last thing he expected was to be searching the grounds for a dead body that keeps vanishing.

With Gladstone in tow though, whatever situation he finds himself in, he's in safe hands.

While escaping his valet Gladstone's wrath over a rather bright pocket square, Hugo Bingham is ready for a fine lunch at The Ocelot's club.

However, when the hated Sir Rupert Hasenby drops dead at the dining table, he's soon a murder suspect and lunch is on hold.

With increasing tensions, body count and stomach rumblings, Hugo is in the soup. His only hope, his currently disgruntled valet.

Woodstock, March 1950. Jean Penrose, a young tutor at Woodstock House, is found drowned in Fair Rosamund's Well on the grounds of Blenheim Palace. The police call it an accident. Hester Croft calls it murder.

Jean was clever, beautiful, and cruel — a collector of secrets who played games with the people around her. Now she's dead, and half of Woodstock had reason to want her that way.

Hester Croft, a sharp-minded woman with a dark past of her own, and her oldest friend Gertie Bundle, the irrepressible landlady of The Old Pyed Bull Inn, begin asking questions the police won't. But in a town preparing for the Palace's grand public opening, powerful people want this matter closed — quickly and quietly.

As Hester and Gertie pull at the threads of Jean's little games, they discover that the secrets she kept weren't just scandalous. They were dangerous. And the person who silenced her isn't finished yet.

But Jean's death has stirred something in Hester too. Old memories, a family darkness she has spent thirty years trying to outrun. To find the killer, she may have to confront the one thing she fears most. Herself.

Ding Dong Bell is the first mystery in the Woodstock Mysteries series — cosy crime with a sharp edge, set in 1950s Oxfordshire.

Harold Fenton rang the bells every Tuesday for forty years. This Tuesday, someone made sure he stopped.

Woodstock, June 1950. When the church sexton is found dead in the bell tower, the police see a tragic accident. Hester Croft sees a rope wound too neatly and hands without a mark on them.

Harold had been asking questions — about the war, about Blenheim Palace, about silver that went missing and was never found. Now his notebook is gone and his questions have died with him. Or so someone hopes.

As Hester and Gertie dig into a conspiracy that reaches back a decade, the killer moves to protect themselves — framing an innocent man with the one detail only a murderer would know.

Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement's. You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St Martin's…

Everyone owes something in Woodstock. The question is who's willing to kill to clear the debt.

Oxford, 1912. A distinguished professor collapses at the High Table of Christ Church.

The college physician calls it cardiac arrest. The Dean calls it closed. A young man with his dead father's papers calls it murder.

Oliver Fenchurch has proof that the great Professor Craithe built his career on stolen work — and he believes the timing of Craithe's death is no coincidence. He needs someone who can see what a room full of scholars missed.

Roderick Fane is twenty-seven, sharp-eyed, and hungry for his first real case. Within minutes of entering the Great Hall, he sees what a room full of scholars missed.

A Death at High Table is the prequel novella to the Fane & Blackwood Mysteries. The case that made Roderick Fane's name, before the war changed everything.

Sharp, witty detective fiction set in Edwardian Oxford — in the tradition of Dorothy L. Sayers.

Oxford, England. 1925.

Nell Blackwood is nineteen, furiously intelligent, and invisible. The youngest daughter of a prominent academic family, she is expected to smile at dinner parties and marry well. She has other plans.

When a respected professor is found dead at the foot of his staircase, the police rule it an accident. Nell, who has known the family since childhood, is not so sure. Something about the grieving household doesn't sit right — the wife whose hands never tremble, the daughter who doesn't sleep, the son who wasn't even in the house.

She takes what she's seen to the one person who might understand it: Roderick Fane, a once-celebrated detective who hasn't left his decaying North Oxford villa in ten years, crippled in the war and forgotten by the world. He is bitter, brilliant, and entirely uninterested in company.

She is his eyes and ears beyond the front door. He is the mind she is learning to match.

The Staircase is a country house mystery and the first novel in the Fane & Blackwood series.

A body in a locked room. A house full of secrets. And a nineteen-year-old woman who sees what the police cannot.

When Frederick Wyndham is found dead in the ice house of his family's Oxfordshire estate, stabbed and sealed inside a room with one door and no way out, the police are baffled. The case goes cold.

Nell Blackwood arrives at Braeburn Hall posing as a library assessor. Secretly guided by Roderick Fane, a reclusive detective confined to a wheelchair in his crumbling North Oxford study, she must unpick the household's tangled loyalties, buried affairs, and a fraud that has been hiding in plain sight.

But the closer Nell gets to the truth, the more dangerous the house becomes. Someone at Braeburn has killed twice and planned months ahead. And Nell is running out of time to prove it before she becomes the next loose end to tidy up.

The Ice House is the second book in the Fane & Blackwood Mysteries — a whodunnit series set in 1920s Oxford.