Simon Prebble
In a Sussex town on the south coast of England, a widely disliked art teacher at a posh private girls’ school disappears without...
As a New Year begins in Bath, Ben Brace proposes to his long-term girlfriend, Caroline, the daughter of notorious crime baron Joe Irving, who is coming to the end of a prison sentence. The problem is that Ben’s father, George, is the Deputy Chief Constable....
4) Stagestruck
Pop diva, Clarion Calhoun, has packed the house with a celebrity appearance in Bath's Theatre Royal production of I Am a Camera. But within moments of her much-anticipated onstage appearance, she's pulled...
Delia Williamson, a waitress and mother of two young girls, is reported missing. She is soon found in a public park, hanging from the crossbar of a children’s swing set. The postmortem reveals that she has been murdered. Her current partner, ex-husband, and a traveling salesman...
En route to investigate a late-night disturbance, a patrol car spins off the road, killing one of the cops...
9) The Summons
John Mountjoy has escaped from prison and kidnapped the chief constable’s daughter. The only person he’ll parley with is Detective Peter Diamond, who arrested him four years earlier for the murder of a young journalist. Mountjoy, who still maintains his innocence, has a simple request for Diamond. All the detective has to do is find the...
10) The Circle
Widowed van driver Bob Naylor is prodded into joining the Chichester Writers' Circle by his teenage daughter. Bob writes limericks and jingles, and fears he will be out of his class among the literati. But the members of the circle come from all walks of life and practice many forms of writing, from fantasy to household hints. There seems to be nothing about any of them to incite a serial killer. However, there is an arsonist in their midst, burning
...At an auction house in Bath, England, a large slab of carved stone is up for sale. At the height of what turns into very competitive bidding, there is a holdup attempt by three masked raiders who are trying to steal the stone. They shoot and kill the highest bidder, a professor who has recognized the female figure carved in the stone as the Wife of Bath from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The masked would-be thieves flee, leaving the stone
...In the first entry to the series and winner of the 1992 Anthony Boucher Award for Best Mystery Novel, Diamond must locate two missing letters attributed to Jane Austen to solve the murder of the "Lady in the Lake."
A woman’s body has been found floating in the weeds in a lake...
In the small hours of a Sunday morning in the city of Bath, a policeman on beat duty is shot dead by an unseen gunman—the third killing of an officer in Somerset in a matter of weeks. The assassinations are the work of a sniper who seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once, always a step ahead.
The emergency services are summoned. Ambitious to arrest the Somerset Sniper, the duty inspector, Ken Lockton, seals the crime scene, which
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