Have the smugglers made a grave mistake?

Customs & Excise are tracking a gang of cigar-smugglers who operate on the quiet Kent coast near Plummergen, home to retired art teacher Miss Emily Seeton. Their attempt at a midnight ambush goes wrong, and a man is found dead.

As Miss Seeton sketches the most notorious tomb in Plummergen churchyard – the one...

Classical music can be a dangerous pastime…

What with love affairs, their conductor dropping dead, a stolen cello and no money, the Stockwell Park Orchestra is having a fraught season.

After Mrs Ford-Hughes is squashed and injured by a dying guest conductor mid-concert, she and her husband withdraw their generous financial backing, leaving the...

Christmas by the sea – that sounds romantic, right?

Tansy Merriweather is down on her luck. She’s lost her business and her relationship, and instead of a glamorous London apartment, her home is now a campervan on a Dorset beach. And as if things couldn’t get any worse, a scruffy dog called Brian with a taste for sardines has adopted her.

When...

Children are, in many ways, born philosophers. Without prompting, they ask some of the largest questions about time, mortality, happiness and the meaning of it all.

Yet too often this inborn curiosity is not developed and, with age, the questions fall away. This is a book designed to harness children's spontaneous philosophical instinct and to develop it...

A geriatric coming-of-age story …

Retired expat, Tony Metcalfe, is going through a three-quarter-life crisis. Viva España, his bar in a mountain village beyond Spain’s Costa Blanca, is failing. Tony started the bar for the English post-war babies who retired early on good pensions - the por favors, as the Spanish call them - flocking to the dream of wine...

Something doesn't add up about Archie and Pye ...

After a disastrous day at work, disillusioned junior PR executive Tom Winscombe finds himself sharing a train carriage and a dodgy Merlot with George Burgess, biographer of the Vavasor twins, mathematicians Archimedes and Pythagoras, who both died in curious circumstances a decade ago.

Burgess...

In space, no one can hear you clean…

When Darren’s charge-cart gets knocked off the Earth-to-Mars highway and lost in space forever, he thinks his day can’t get any worse.

When Kelly sees Darren accidentally short-circuit a talking lamppost, and its camera captures her face as it expires, she thinks her day can’t get any worse.

When ...

Classical music can be a dangerous pastime…

What with love affairs, their conductor dropping dead, a stolen cello and no money, the Stockwell Park Orchestra is having a fraught season.

After Mrs Ford-Hughes is squashed and injured by a dying guest conductor mid-concert, she and her husband withdraw their generous financial backing, leaving the...

Spanning much of the 20th Century, and revolving around the infamous gentlemen’s club of London, SCOUNDRELS is the jaw-dropping memoirs of the disreputable spies, Major Cornwall and Major Trevelyan.

The Majors recount scandalous tales of murder on Everest, panda hunting with the last Chinese Emperor, and the theft of a uniquely sordid item from...

Revolving around the infamous gentlemen's club of London, Scoundrels: The Hunt for Hansclapp continues the combative joint memoirs of adventurer-spies, Major Cornwall and Major Trevelyan.

In this second volume, the Majors recount tales of kidnapping in the Congo, manslaughter on the Orient Express and romance at the Stasi's Christmas Party. The Majors...

All aboard for the Summer of Fluff!

Meet Hettie Bagshot, a long-haired tabby cat whose whiskers twitch at the first sign of a mystery, and her best friend Tilly Jenkins. Together, they run the No. 2 Feline Detective Agency, and nothing will stop them from untangling each brain-teasing case that comes their way.

In scorching temperatures, Hettie Bagshot and...

If you like your humour dark and twisty, then you’ll love Tim Dorsey’s outrageous Serge Storms series of crime novels.

For over 25 years Tim Dorsey has made a speciality of depicting the bad, the ugly and the redneck in American society – with the help of his anti-hero creation Serge Storms. Part spree killer, part local...

In Flaxborough’s posh neighbouring village, Mumblesbury, the local solicitor, Richard Daspard Loughbury, has suddenly died. 

Natural causes it appears, but DI Purbright and the ever-helpful Miss Lucy Teatime are taken aback by the quality of Loughbury’s art collection – including a Paul Klee, a Corot, and even a fragment of the “True Cross”.

...

Sergeant Love is a sucker for a picturesque country cottage.

But he finds himself quite literally knocked out by the little bas-relief plaster cottage that’s on display at Flaxborough’s antiques auction. This pretty but rather crudely painted trinket mysteriously sells for hundreds of pounds having sparked a heated bidding war, while the Sergeant gets...

Lucky Miss Seeton! A modest Premium Bond win means a whole week in legendary Glastonbury. She can draw and drink in the surroundings, just what she needs for her scene-painting role in the village production of ‘Camelot’.

By coincidence, the kidnapped Heir to an industrial family may be hidden around there and Chief Superintendent Delphick has asked the...

A peculiar pornographic movie has been wowing viewers in the Gulf.

One of the more scurrilous English Sunday papers gets a tip-off that this exotic blue production stars respected residents of the coastal town of Flaxborough, and a team led by the well-known investigative journalist Clive Grail arrives in a Rolls Royce.

Word of the looming scandal soon gets...

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 river cruiser, the Lively Lady, is ruthlessly sunk, shortly after Hatch’s night-time shenanigans had...

With old-world charm and a military air, Mortimer Rothermere makes a most convincing conman.

Just now he is employed by the Cultox corporation, to ensure that no breath of scandal taints the reputation of their successful pet food company near Flaxborough, as the acrimonious marriage of its unsavoury MD, David Harton and his wife Julia, threatens to boil...

The first in Marshall's unforgettable, classic series of police procedurals - suspenseful and hilarious in equal measure.

Yellowthread Street is the sort of place that breeds more crime than any cops can handle.

Among the gangsters and the goldsmiths of Hong Bay, Chief Inspector Feiffer and his police department had their hands full . . . tourist troubles...

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’. No one can identify him, and it turns out that quite a few older gentlemen have begun exhibiting...