Sally A Spencer
A miscarriage of justice for DCI Woodend
Though it is thirty years since Margaret Dodds was tried and executed for the brutal murder of her second husband, many troubling questions raised during the trial are still left unanswered. Why would she choose to commit the crime in such a way that the finger of suspicion...
2) Fatal Quest
'You should have worked out by now that nobody wants this case solved!'
These words, delivered by Eddie, a Liverpool thug brought down to London especially to put the frighteners on him, send a shiver down newly-promoted DS Charlie Woodend's spine. Because Eddie is right. Nobody does seem interested in bringing the killer...
The night after the mysterious appearance of the legendary Dark Lady on the road outside Westbury Park, a German efficiency expert, Gerhard Schultz, is found battered to death in the woods and Chief Inspector Charlie Woodend is faced with his most puzzling case yet. Why did Schultz seem...
4) Death Watch
Angela Jackson, a young girl abducted from Whitebridge Corporation Park, has been missing for over twenty-four hours and, in the opinion of Dr Stevenson, the psychiatrist who Woodend turns to for advice, her kidnapper will first torture and then kill her.Woodend is aware of the damaging strains operating within his own team.
Inspector Bob Rutter seems unable to control his infatuation...
Pamela Rainsford, found on a lonely canal path in the middle of a dark night, has not only been raped and strangled, but her face has been hacked to pieces. At first it seems a random killing, but as the case progresses, Woodend begins to suspect that the death of the mild-mannered, respectable secretary may have been a result of her own secret...
DCI Monika Paniatowski investigates a case that could be the making – or, more likely, breaking – of her career
DCI Monika Paniatowski has only been back from maternity leave for three days when she is called in to investigate a nightmare of a case. Not only is the murder victim a mother of three small children, but...
7) Dead End
The discovery of a body on a local allotment site re-opens an unresolved cold case for Monika Paniatowski and her team.
He was going to have to terminate Monika, he decided. It was a pity, but there it was.
The body has lain buried for years, and has no face and no fingertips. Monika Paniatowski's team have no real leads,...
8) The Company
Bristol, 1991. Crammed into a hire car, on their way to a vital appointment, five representatives of Conroy Enterprises are running very late. Rob Conroy, the black sheep of the family, is torn between spiteful amusement at his Uncle Tony's irritation and anxiety for the future. If Conroy Enterprises...
With the help of Paco Ruiz a former policeman, living in disgrace since the Spanish Civil War Woodend embarks on an unofficial investigation which provides more questions than answers. Why was the dead man travelling under a false passport? Who are the men he...
10) Best Served Cold
Old grudges resurface with deadly consequences in this gripping, twisty mystery featuring DCI Monika Paniatowski.
On the night the Whitebridge Players staged their last ever performance, the idealistic young actors in the company resolved that twenty years on they would return to the same theatre and stage the same play.
But two decades later, old resentments have grown and new jealousies have germinated,
...11) The Red Herring
12) Dangerous Games
When Terry Pugh's headless body is found floating in the canal, DCI Woodend at first believes that Pugh had merely miscalculated the amount of rope he needed to hang himself. But why would Pugh commit suicide when he had a loving wife who was expecting their first baby, and was just about to start an exciting new job?
Other disturbing...
13) The Witch Maker
To be Witch Makers in the moorland village of Hallerton is both a great honour and a heavy burden. It is he who, after years of painstaking apprenticeship, constructs the effigy of Meg Ramsden - he who ties it to the stake and burns it before a bitterly jeering crowd. But this Witch Maker - only the twenty-fourth in the 450 years of the ceremony - never lives to witness his moment of...
14) Stone Killer
'Spencer expertly balances personal and prfessional angst in this tense, compelling tale' - Kirkus Starred Review
Prove my wife is innocent or the hostages die!
Never before has DCI Woodend had to work under such terrible and terrifying pressure. He has just a few...
The investigation into the brutal murder of a Blackpool policeman during holiday season was never going to be easy, but the case is not Chief Inspector Woodend’s only problem. His new boss, DS Ainsworth, is just waiting for an opportunity to stick a knife in his...
A man and a young woman are found blasted away by a rifle in a remote farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors. But where is the farmer, why did he have such swanky furniture in his living room, and who on earth are the victims? Charlie Woodend isn't amused with the people who are getting under his feet as he starts to grapple with these questions, but his steps are abruptly...
17) A Long Time Dead
When Captain Robert Kineally went missing from Haverton American Army base in Devon in 1944, it was generally assumed he had lost his nerve and deserted. But now, twenty years after the War ended, a body found on the near-derelict base seems to tell an entirely different story. DCI Charlie Woodend has strong reasons for not wanting the case.
As a sergeant on secondment to the...
Monika Paniatowski's boss is trying to destroy her career, but the dead end case he assigns her turns out to be something else entirely . . .
DCI Monika Paniatowski recognises her latest assignment as advisor to the Earl of Ridley's rock festival for what it really is – an attempt by the chief...
19) The Enemy Within
The tenth in the acclaimed Inspector Woodend series
There had never been a murder in Whitebridge like this one. What kind of man would decide to slash the throat of an inoffensive middle-aged widow who was already terminally ill? Why did he decide to place her lifeless body in the middle of a children's bonfire, and then set it alight?...
A small mining village is rocked by a shocking murder in the latest Monika Paniatowski mystery...
Tensions are running high in the small mining village of Bellingsworth. There has been a call for further strikes, and retired miner Len Hopkins, who was known to be against a new strike, is murdered. Detective Inspector Monika Paniatowski learns that Len had been threatened the night before he died by another old miner. Was he killed due to the
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