Detective Chief Inspector Wilfred Dover is the most idle and avaricious hero in all of crime fiction. Why should he even be bothered to solve the case?

For its own very good reasons, Scotland Yard sends Dover off to remote Creedshire to investigate the disappearance of a young housemaid, Juliet Rugg.

Though there's every cause to assume that she has been...

The classic fictional memoirs of a hapless schoolmaster.

There is chalk in his fingernails and paper darts fill the air as A.J. Wentworth, mathematics master at Burgrove Preparatory School, unwittingly opens the doors that lead not to knowledge but to chaos and confusion.

In his collected papers, he sets out the truth about the fishing incident in the...

Why would a good person commit a terrible act?

Fifteen years ago, Jeannie’s relationship with a close friend ended in rape. With the rise of the #MeToo movement, recurring nightmares of the event that plagued her as a girl have returned. To process her conflicted feelings of betrayal and take back control, she resolves to face her trauma head-on by...

My Father’s Glass Eye is Jeannie’s struggle to honour her father, her larger-than-life hero, but also the man who named her after his daughter from a previous marriage, a daughter who died. After his funeral, Jeannie spends the next decade in escalating mania, in and out of hospitals - increasingly obsessed with the other Jeanne.

Obsession turns to...

Time for the Machine Republic to Kurl Up and Dye

It’s a year since the Battlestar Suburbia broke free from Earth and the human rebellion is hiding out in the asteroid belt. Their leader, Admiral Janice, is assembling a fleet she hopes can topple robot rule – except on Wednesday afternoons when she can do you a half head of highlights for 30 quid.

Janice...

The story of poison is the story of power...

For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family’s spoons, tried on their underpants...

Welcome to Batch Magna, a place where anything might happen. And often does...

Sir Humphrey has offered to play Father Christmas at the local hospital, but disaster strikes when he realises he won’t be able to buy the sack of toys he’d promised the children.

Rupert, a gentleman of the road, is found asleep in an old car in the Hall’s coach house. He is...

Bone is a marvel, an adaptable and resilient building material developed over 500 million years of evolutionary history. It has manifested itself in wings, sails, horns, armour, and an even greater array of appendages since the time of its origin. In dinosaur fossils, skeletons are biological time capsules that tell us of lives we'll never see in the flesh...

A fascinating journey through the atmosphere that will leave you breathless.

With seven million early deaths a year linked to air pollution, air quality is headline news around the world. But how do we measure air pollution and what on earth is an odour panel? Why are property prices higher upwind of cities? Should we buy, hold on to, or avoid a diesel...

A heart-racing adventure into the dark heart of human origins

When a young archaeologist goes missing in the Congo basin, Professor Randolph Harkness and troubled tearaway Ross McCartney go in search of her only to stumble upon a conspiracy to conceal ancient horrors lost to the passage of time.

Evading spies and trained killers, can they expose this...

Community music projects always spread harmony… don’t they?

When players in Stockwell Park Orchestra fear they may be getting out of touch with their local community, they invite children from two nearby schools to join them for a season. Supercilious, rich Oakdean College pupils have never mixed with the rough Sunbridge Academy kids, and when things go...

The Butcher's Daughter is a richly atmospheric story of a young woman's struggle to define herself in a world of uncertainty, intrigue and danger in a time of great upheaval during the Tudor era.

It is 1535 and Agnes Peppin, daughter of a West-country butcher, has been banished, leaving her family home in disgrace to live out the rest of her life cloistered...

You mustn’t go into the Darkwood, children. Not even to get your ball. Leave it. That ball belongs to the Witches and the Beasties, now. Those wicked Witches. Stealing your ball.

Sometimes fairy tales are not what they seem . . .

Magic is forbidden in Myrsina, along with various other abominations, such as girls doing maths. This is bad news for Gretel...

Cheese has never been this serious – or this deadly…

Governor Bill Hoeksma of Michigan is a simple, gun-loving son of a billionaire who idolises George W. Bush.

When a mysterious illness afflicts members of his inner circle, his conspiring advisors point to a rumoured viral weapons attack – via monkeypox-carrying prairie dogs – launched by the Wisconsin...

The spirits move Hettie and Tilly to investigate an old murder mystery, where all the cats involved appear to be dead...

Psychic cat Irene Peggledrip is being visited by a band of malevolent spirits who all claim to be murderers. Not only is their message disturbing, but they cause chaos with indoor snowstorms, flying books and the untimely demise of a...

Welcome to Batch Magna, a place where anything might happen. And often does…

When Sir Humphrey Strange, 8th baronet and squire of Batch Magna departs this world for the Upper House (as he vaguely thought of it, with God presiding in ermine), what’s left of his estate passes, through the ancient law of entailment, to distant relative Humph, an amiable...

The First World War is over, and in a quiet Hampshire village, artist Stanley Spencer is working on the commission of a lifetime, painting an entire chapel in memory of a life lost in the war to end all wars. Combining his own traumatic experiences with moments of everyday redemption, the chapel will become his masterpiece.

When Elsie Munday arrives to...

A witty, fast-paced thriller with a dash of mathematics and a large dose of danger

Life is not going smoothly for Tom Winscombe. His girlfriend Dorothy has vanished, taking with her all the equipment and money of the company she ran with her friend Ali. Now Tom and Ali are forced to eke out an awkward shared bedsit existence while they try to work out...

Mr Edgar Finchley, unmarried solicitor's clerk, aged 45, is told to take a holiday for the first time in his life. He decides to go to Margate. But Fate has other plans in store…

From his abduction in a Bentley by a cheerful crook, to his smuggling escapade off the south coast, the timid but plucky Mr Finchley is plunged into a series of the most...