The Hon. Mr and Mrs Bede Lambton, of Abberton Hall in Worcestershire, persuade their nephew Gregory to enter a competition run by the Syrian Ministry of Tourism. Gregory, a student in the archaeology department of Bristol University, produces a paper called ‘The Syrian Sapphire’. Subsequently Gregory’s housemate Sheena Morrison is murdered.
The Alkan Murder is a crime novel in the best British traditions of the genre, with red herrings and stimulating asides galore. The story is set in the present in a North Yorkshire hamlet. It allows the alert reader to identify the murderer in a helter-skelter of an investigation conducted by a seasoned but baffled detective team.
The book is a light-hearted detective story set in an eighteenth-century Yorkshire village. The vicar finds himself at the centre of an intrigue which leaves him bewildered – and in danger! - and no one else seems able or willing to investigate it. His reaction to the explanation, when he blunders into it, is both effective and humane.
This supernatural thriller pivots on two powerful characters; Ben Blake, the gifted British Intelligence officer embarking on his first undercover assignment, and Jake Snell, the rugged Earl full of vices, the rogue who has to tease out that single thread of goodness inside his crumbling shell. He is Ben’s only lifeline in this treacherous game.
While renovating the derelict twelfth-century chapel attached to their new house in rural Worcestershire in 1972, Grace and Benjamin Hothersall uncover three skeletons, which have clearly been the victims of murder. Inspector Wickfield is called in to investigate.
The Percival diamond disappears when twins, William and Elsie Percival, are children. Not too long afterwards, their parents die. They unearth a trunk in the attic; the contents : the secret to the Percival diamond, and set out to find out what happened to it. A weekend party to unravel the secret results in a poisoning, shooting and much more.
Multi-millionaire Walter Sinnet is crooked and ruthless. He builds an impressive underwater folly on his property. Wishing to show off, Walter welcomes a house party to his home, but an angry storm lashes down on the village and traps everyone inside the estate. A guest’s jewellery goes missing and a dead body is found floating in the lake.
Returning to a Scottish Borders churchyard, on the winding banks of the River Tweed, and suffering from a queasy stomach – the editor's golden boy, young reporter Leonard McFadden, staggers and grasps a tombstone for support, and plunges headlong into a strange and deadly mystery that fate has diabolically thrust across his path.
On the night of a blizzard an elderly couple are summoned to their daughter’s cottage two and a half miles away on urgent but unspecified business. When they reach the cottage they find it warm but empty. Unable to face the journey back home that night, they retire to bed in their daughter’s cottage. The following morning, they are found dead.