British Fiction

October 1891. A stranger is discovered hanging from a tree in the Malvern Hills. Detective Inspector Ravenscroft and Constable Crabb are called in to investigate. But how can they solve the murder if no one can identify the victim? Whoever killed the man must have really wanted him dead—they strung him up and watched as he suffocated. This may be the most dangerous case Ravenscroft has ever worked. Will the Herefordshire Hangmen ever be brought to justice?

It is 1918, six months after the end of World War I, and Rosalind awaits the return of her father from the war. While it is common practice for British children in India to be packed off to boarding school at the age of 6, Rosalind is unusual because she lives and is schooled in India because her mother insists.

With London's streets deserted, a young flower girl is murdered. But why was she out so late on the foggiest night of the year? Inspector Witherspoon of Scotland Yard has nowhere to even begin looking for a suspect. However, Mrs. Jeffries, his housekeeper, is even more accomplished at detection than she is at household management. A policeman's widow herself, her quick wits allow her to nudge the inspector in the right direction to solve the mystery.

Winchester, England, has always been home for Flora, but when her mother dies after a long illness, Flora feels untethered. Her family expects her to apply to university and take a larger role in their tea-shop business, but Flora isn’t so sure. More than ever, she’s the chaotic “hurricane” in her household, and she doesn’t always know how to manage her stormy emotions. So she decides to escape to Miami without telling anyone—especially her longtime friend Gordon Wallace. But Flora’s tropical change of scenery doesn’t cast away her self-doubt.

Normally dead bodies in a graveyard are buried - but not this one. When a woman is found strangled in a North London cemetery with an old newspaper clipping clutched in her hand, Inspector Witherspoon is surprised to find that he and the victim have crossed paths before. Alice Robinson was a respectable widow who ran a quiet Islington lodging house. None of her lodgers have any apparent motive to murder their landlady.

Spiritualism has captured the public’s imagination. Séances are all the rage, and Detective Ian Hamilton’s otherwise sensible aunt Lillian is not immune to their allure. But for Ian, indulging her superstitions has its limits. When members of Lillian’s circle of séance friends begin turning up dead, Ian doesn’t need a medium to tell him these aren’t freak accidents.

The Bahamas, 1941. Newly widowed Leonora “Lulu” Randolph arrives in Nassau to investigate the governor and his wife for a New York society magazine. After all, American readers have an insatiable appetite for news of the duke and duchess of Windsor, that glamorous couple whose love affair nearly brought the British monarchy to its knees five years earlier. What more intriguing backdrop for their romance than a wartime Caribbean paradise, a colonial playground for kingpins of ill-gotten empires? Or so Lulu imagines.

Five hundred years from its launch, the colony vessel Lovelock is deep into its sub lightspeed journey, carrying four thousand humans in search of a habitable planet. When a series of explosions tear the ship apart, it is forced to land on the nearest possible location: a polar section of the Helix—a vast, spiral construct of worlds, wound about a G-type sun.

Penniless and stranded in France after a bid to escape her cruel uncle goes awry, Cornelia Shaw is far from the Parisian life of leisure she imagined. Desperate and out of options, she allows herself to be recruited to Napoleon’s Grande Armée. As a naturalist, her mysterious ability to heal any wound with herbal mixtures invites awe amongst the soldiers…and suspicion.

An intruder shot dead to be seen rising from the grave, an escaped psychopath with a hidden murderous intent, and a forgotten mansion lying in the midst of an ancient Norfolk marsh.

When a promising local artist disappears, the victim's brother begs Detective Tara Thorpe to take the case. It seems there's no evidence of foul play...he simply disappeared without a trace. Tara agrees to do some digging...never mind that her unorthodox approach to policing has got a few of her colleagues' backs up. Amongst them is her former supervisor Detective Patrick Wilkins...he's had enough of Tara calling the shots and will do anything to knock her down. She must be careful.

1957: Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper in the southeast suburbs of London. Clever but with limited career opportunities and on the brink of forty, Jean lives a dreary existence that includes caring for her demanding widowed mother, who rarely leaves the house. It’s a small life with little joy and no likelihood of escape.

He's British. She's American. They meet on vacation. And agree to fake-name each other. One is lying about everything. The other is telling the truth. They're about to embark on a sexcation. But what happens when it's over?

It’s Christmastime in London, and Sherlock Holmes takes on two cases. The angelic three-year-old child of a wealthy couple is the target of a vicious kidnapper, and a country aristocrat worries that his handsome, favourite son has mysteriously vanished from his London pied à terre. Holmes and Watson, aided by the colourful Heffie O’Malley, slip slide in the ice to ensure a merry Christmas is had by nearly everybody.

Between her work in Cornwall’s oldest library and catching up with old friends over tea and chocolate biscuits, Jemima Jago is spending the season the only way she knows how: sunbathing, swimming, and sailing. But her postcard-perfect summer is turned upside down when the body of well-to-do businessman Hermie Castleberry is found on the sweeping white sands at the foot of Candlewick Castle.

DI Sheridan Holler is used to solving crimes on Liverpool’s streets, but after a decayed corpse turns up in a cemetery, she finds herself reopening not one but two cold cases. Seven years earlier, two women were gunned down and the only suspect, small-time drug dealer John Lively, was never seen again. Case closed. Until the body in the cemetery is identified as his.

Ella has discovered a secret room in the Yellow Cottage, but with it comes a ghost. Who was she? And how did she die? Ella needs to find the answers before either of them can find peace. But suddenly, things take a nasty turn for the worse.

DCI Lesley Clarke is back in Dorset, and her world has turned upside down. One of the people she's closest to is to under arrest for the murder of DCI Mackie and a body has been found in the remote lighthouse at Portland Bill. And not just any body, but the body of someone she investigated before moving to Dorset. Can Lesley win the trust of the close-knit Portland community and find the killer? And can DI Zoe Finch of the West Midlands force help her track down potential suspects?

Once known to all in her village as the rector's daughter, Lucy is now a mother herself - to a wonderful 18-month-old son, Ned. Upon discovering that she is expecting a second child, Lucy and Robert are delighted. In anticipation of the new arrival, Lucy is set on expanding her nursery staff. When Agnes, her current nurse, recommends her cousin, it seems like the perfect solution. But trouble arrives along with the new nursery maid from London. When a farmer finds her lifeless body in a drainage ditch, Lucy and Robert fear foul play.

A crippled cargo ship drifts helplessly in the face of an oncoming hurricane-force storm. On board, a passenger whose presence means the world is watching. Only the skill, determination and raw courage of a lifeboat crew and the British military forces despatched to save them offer any hope of survival. But set against the savagery of the Atlantic even that might not be enough....