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.
A young woman goes to an isolated Warwickshire monastery to visit her brother, who is a monk there. She is dropped off at the door, meets her brother in the parlour; they say goodbye and part; and she is never seen again. The monks, however, have a cast-iron alibi. The diffident and cultured Inspector Wickfield is called in to investigate.
In this third chronicle from Sherburn, the accident-prone vicar tells of his attempts to identify the murderer of his servant George. He becomes involved in more legal hot water than he has ever experienced before and is within a whisker of being transported for life. His dogged search eventually brings success – and a dilemma of conscience.
One February evening, Fr Wilfred, the parish priest of the Sacred Heart Catholic church in Droitwich, tumbles out of his confessional, stabbed to death. His sister demands the best detective in the force, and Stan Wickfield is appointed to the case. Unfortunately he cannot identify the means, motive much less the perpetrator of the murder.
The discovery of the body of a petty criminal one winter’s night in 2011, in a quiet Yorkshire hamlet, sets in train a series of events which stretches Inspector Walter Moat’s capabilities to the utmost. His wily opponent, as he eventually discovers, is an elusive master-criminal called Lomax.
The peaceful estate of Wichenford Court, in deepest Worcestershire, is convulsed by a bizarre murder which mirrors a murder committed on exactly the same spot in 1791. Inspector Wickfield undertakes an investigation in which the killer’s tracks are covered so successfully that the case is in danger of remaining unsolved.
James Poynter is a young man out for revenge. Set up for a crime which he did not commit, and by someone whom he felt he could trust implicitly, his sole focus becomes one of retribution against his former employers. Murder, deception, drug trafficking and embezzlement combine to derail the futures of everyone connected to the company.
Inspector Wickfield and Sergeant Hewitt find themselves caught up in a saga of murder, illicit money-making and racist thuggery as a young girl’s body is found one morning on the banks of a canal.
On Saturday 8th April 1975, in a fit of rage, Paul Townley took the life of his father, Harold. The significance of that single event was to affect the rest of his life, as he resolved to make it his mission to rid society of all evil.
