1970s Hollywood: O'Connor, a free-spirited young journalist known for her penetrating celebrity interviews, is bent on unearthing secrets long ago buried by the showbiz team of singer Vince Collins & comic Lanny Morris. These two desirable men, once inseparable, were driven apart by a bizarre & u...
An unidentifiable woman is found on a roadside - beaten into a coma and raped. The man who finds her, troubled by his inability to resuscitate her, spends hours at her hospital bedside, talking to the woman everyone calls Elise. Two years later Elise s condition is downgraded to persistent vegeta...
Living in rural Kent, Caffy Tyler believes she has well and truly left her old life behind. However her contentment is short-lived, for she sees a dead body through the window of a house she is painting, and then runs into her drug-dealer ex-boyfriend. Forced to assume a new identity she finds li...
This is not finished BUT I'm marking it as read and placing it in my 'not finished' pile of books on here. I just can't get into this book at all. I was drawn to it because of the cover and I like to read things to do with Chinese culture/people.But 50 or so pages in and they will still farting a...
Spring 1810. Young Parson Tobias Campion is excited to be taking over the small Warwickshire parish of Moreton Priory. But his first night in the village brings excitement of the wrong kind when Tobias intervenes in an attempted rape and becomes hero to housemaid Lizzie Woodman. As Tobias settles...
Kate Power is newly promoted and is now in charge of her own police station. Soon she is plunged into a case involving a missing police officer, illegal immigration and prostitution. Her colleagues think the officer is swinging the lead but Kate is sure something sinister has happened to him.
There was some good news to start with: his colleagues had found a tarpaulin after a hunt through rubbish tips, and yes, there were appropriate bloodstains, so he could push forward his inquiries. The second paragraph tersely invited me for a lunchtime pint the following day, which I couldn’t hel...
She’d ignored them, believing that with one theoretically asleep and the other doing homework all would be well. Perhaps just checking would allow somewhere in her mind to throw up some answers on the Duck problem. She tiptoed into Jenny’s room: seraphically asleep. Possibly. But quiet and breath...
‘It’s lovely out there now – all those clouds seem to have lifted and a bit of sun does us all good. And nothing beats a woman-to-woman talk without a helpful man around. I’ll tell Mark’s secretary you’re nipping out. And I’ll tell Mr Gates’ secretary you’re out following a vital lead.’Fran shook...
I didn’t especially want to talk about them or their doings, so, attack being the best means of defence, I asked Griff what on earth he’d been doing in Kent Police HQ. ‘I thought you’d gone down to Winchelsea to return Dilly’s pendant,’ I added. ‘That was what I was really worried about.’ ‘At lea...
However rushed and flustered she felt, Fran always tried to look cool. If she’d combed her hair and applied some slap, senior officers believed the flannel she had to fob them off with, and junior officers trusted her to deal with their problems. Like Tom now, for instance. She even popped a con...
We just didn’t have enough in common, which sounds amazing when you consider our work. I tried to get him talking about all the research that goes into authenticating a picture – or damning it to the ‘School of’ category, of course. He just wanted me to pull identification rabbits out of a hat he...
He and Mark sat at a table placed on the pavement, perhaps in the hope of making Maidstone look like the home of bohemian café culture. Mark didn’t care overmuch if it failed to. He couldn’t remember when Dave had last suggested lunch together without a challenge in his voice: this time there had...
I was amazed she’d come out in person, since she was really a number-cruncher these days, as she was the first to point out. However, perhaps she liked to escape into the real world from time to time, especially when it was Robin who put in the call. ‘Cheap and cheerful makes, easy to get hold of...
Why should anyone want to burgle my flat? Well, you’ve seen! There’s nothing worth nicking!’ Stephen sat down heavily at Kate’s kitchen table. ‘There isn’t now, certainly,’ Kate said. ‘Especially not in your filing cabinets. Either of them.’ She heaped sugar into a mug of tea, and passed it to hi...
So, I fear, it seemed with our various journeys to Ditton Priors, the village in Shropshire nearest to the remote manor house that had formed part of her ladyship’s dowry. As Lady Chase had said, her own nurse, Mrs Rooke, a sprightly dame not much above sixty, lived in retirement in the dower hou...
He’d joined Fran as soon as the reporters had dispersed, embracing Zac and Bethany again as if he was their father. All four, plus their ever-present FLO, whose smile would have driven Fran to murder in an hour flat, walked to the waiting car. For half a minute Zac had played truant, taking Mark ...
Nella was furious, but also, I thought, embarrassed. Perhaps furious was winning. She put something down so that she could point at me, her voice carrying easily but foolishly. It was she, not the men, who were attracting attention. ‘Handling stolen goods, indeed! It’s she you need to speak to, n...
‘And I can’t wait till I’m old enough to retire.’ He leaned against the corridor wall outside Andy’s room. He’d ushered us all out, though Andy plainly wanted me to stay, and he was supposed to be going back in to support the inspector. But he was clearly in no rush. His face was longer, more lug...
In response to his quiet but meaningful cough, Hansard smiled and gestured: the butler was one of us, temporarily, with information to impart. ‘As you know, I sent young Henry to Lord Wychbold with one of your notes, Dr Campion, and William to Lord Hasbury with the other. ...
He didn’t look old enough to have left school, let alone to cast such a final opinion. ‘But—’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It’s your surface, love. Look at it, all breaking up. See?’ He bent and scraped a bit more away with his finger nail. ‘Now, if I lay it on that, you’ll have lumps and hollows in...
Still not Caddie. Greg, with a funny note in his voice. Would I meet him at the barn conversion he’d mentioned the other day? Now?I could think of no particular reason to be awkward, not when he sounded so boyishly eager, so I set off straight away.Before I’d even parked, I could see the reason f...
That is the best I can say about it. I got home weary after my evening class to find on the doorstep a spray of flowers and a note from Aberlene. Inside on the mat, with several bills, lay a note from Aggie, who now had the flu herself. Had I remembered the binmen and her plants? I did the weeken...
I wish I could say it was because I’d been too busy to give it another thought, but the truth was my outbursts had always left me feeling as though the Duracell bunny had nicked my battery and run off with it. As soon as I’d downed my share of that wonderful cream tea, I’d simply fallen asleep, m...