British Fiction

When the bonds of brotherhood are strained, who do you turn to? The celebration of the Viking Festival of Scira ensures that thousands descend annually on the small coastal town of Sheringham, but when one man dies amidst the grand finale, it falls to DI Tom Janssen and his team to identify who the victim was and how he met such a grisly end. The victim was a local man, successful, hard working, and well respected. A motive proves to be elusive. As the case progresses it becomes evident that not all is at it seems.

D-Day is approaching. They don’t know where or when, but the Germans know it’ll be soon, and for Felicity "Flick" Clariet, the stakes have never been higher. A senior agent in the ranks of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) responsible for sabotage, Flick has survived to become one of Britain’s most effective operatives in Northern France. She knows that the Germans’ ability to thwart the Allied attack depends upon their lines of communications, and in the days before the invasion, no target is of greater strategic importance than the largest telephone exchange in Europe.

This third and final volume of the unexpurgated diaries of Sir Henry 'Chips' Channon begins as the Second World War is turning in the Allies' favour. It ends with a prematurely aged Chips descending into poor health but still socially active and able to turn a pointed phrase about the political events that swirl around him and the great and the good with whom he mingles.

From the #1 New York Times best-selling author comes an epic saga of intrigue and mystique set in Edwardian England. Cavendon Hall is home to two families, the aristocratic Inghams and the Swanns who serve them. With World War I looming, both families will find themselves tested in ways they never thought possible. Loyalties will be challenged and betrayals will be set into motion. In this time of uncertainty, one thing is sure: these two families will never be the same again.

August 1911. Emily Hardcastle and her inimitable lady’s maid Florence Armstrong are enjoying a fine summer until Harry, Lady H’s brother, turns up out of the blue with a mystery for them to solve. A routine parachute test at a local aeroplane factory has gone horribly wrong - with pilot Dickie Dupree plummeting to his death. Harry is certain there is more to this ‘tragic accident’ than meets the eye, having discovered that someone at the airfield is leaking top secret intelligence to foreign rivals.

Summer 1911. A scorching heatwave engulfs the quiet town of Littleton Cotterell and brings about an unusually early harvest. The villagers are thrilled, but events quickly turn sour when one of them turns up dead in an apple orchard, stabbed through the heart. Amateur sleuth Lady Hardcastle and her trusty lady’s maid, Flo, suddenly have a juicy case on their hands. Might the mysterious stranger they recently met in the village be to blame?

Unremarkable legal assistant Gary Thorn goes for a pint with his coworker Brendan, unaware his life is about to change. There, Gary meets a beautiful woman, but she leaves before he catches her name. All he has to remember her by is the title of the book she was reading: The Clementine Complex. And when Brendan goes missing, too, Gary needs to track down the girl he now calls Clementine to get some answers. And so begins Gary’s quest, through the estates and pie shops of South London, to find some answers and hopefully, some love and excitement.

There's nothing Ruth Galloway hates more than amateur archaeologists, but when a group of them stumble upon Bronze Age artifacts alongside a dead body, she finds herself thrust into their midst - and into the crosshairs of a string of murders circling ever closer.

Pity poor Captain Alan Lewrie, Royal Navy! He's been wind-muzzled for weeks in Portsmouth, snugly tucked into a warm shore bed with lovely, and loving, Lydia Stangbourne, a Viscount's daughter, and beginning to enjoy indulging his idle streak, when Admiralty tears Lewrie away and order him to the Bahamas, into the teeth of ferocious winter storms. It's enough to make a rakehell such as he weep and kick furniture!

Yorkshire Dales, Summer 1997. Vicky Mott slips out the door of her remote cottage, and into the pale dawn light. She scrawls a note for her friends. Gone to see the sunrise. V xxx That's the last anyone ever hears from twenty-year-old music lover Vicky. Another victim of the Fellside Strangler? That would make Vicky the fourth young woman to lose her life this summer. Snatched by a mysterious killer who stalks the fells . . . But Vicky's body is never found.

Bernard Samson is a spy on the run, forced to abandon his life and job and plunge into hiding. But in the murky, dangerous streets of Berlin, he knows where to hide. Wanted for an act of treachery he has not committed, he must not only escape the grasp of London Central, but get to the bottom of a tangled conspiracy that is about to change everything. In the thrilling penultimate installment of the Hook, Line, Sinker trilogy, Bernard's personal and professional life collide with devastating consequences.

In the black days of a Shetland winter, torrential rain triggers a landslide that crosses the main road and sweeps down to the sea. At the burial of his old friend Magnus Tait, Jimmy Perez watches the flood of peaty water and mud smash through a croft house in its path. Everyone thinks the croft is uninhabited, but in the wreckage he finds the body of a dark-haired woman wearing a red silk dress. Perez becomes obsessed with finding out her identity and what she was doing there.

Amid the tragic mayhem of the morning of 9/11, failed Brighton businessman and ne'er-do-well Ronnie Wilson sees the chance of a lifeline: to shed his debts, disappear and reinvent himself in another country. Six years later the discovery of the skeletal remains of a woman's body in a storm drain in Brighton leads Roy Grace on an enquiry spanning the globe, and into a desperate race against time to save the life of a woman being hunted down like an animal in the streets and alleys of Brighton.

Daughter of New York financier Leonard Jerome, Jennie was born into wealth—and scandal. Upon her parents’ separation, her mother took Jennie and her sisters to Paris, where Mrs. Jerome was determined to marry her daughters into the most elite families. The glamorous city became their tumultuous finishing school until it fell to revolt.

As the mists roll over the fens and enigmatic lights twinkle in the distance, only the locals know their way along the hidden paths through the mysterious watery terrain of one of England's most beautiful and sometimes dangerous places. Detective Matt Ballard may have retired but there's still plenty going on in the fens to keep him busy. Someone trashes an old lady's garden and daubs her isolated cottage with hateful graffiti. Emilia Swain seems to be totally harmless, so why is she being targeted?

Emilia Ward lives in suburban London with her husband, their young son, and a teenager from her first marriage. Emilia is an ordinary mom—and she’s also the bestselling author of the Miranda Moody detective novels. But when writing her tenth—and most difficult—book, life takes a disturbing turn: an incident mimicking the plot of one of her novels occurs in real life. Just an unsettling coincidence, right? Until it happens again. And again.

With the Cold War drawing to a close in the East, Bernard Samson is still haunted by the events that have turned his life upside down over the last ten years. But when he takes a train from Moscow to Berlin, he stumbles across a clue that may lead him to the truth at last—even though, in finding the answers, he could lose everything. Bringing the Faith, Hope, and Charity trilogy and Bernard Samson's story to a stunning conclusion, this final volume brilliantly shows the human cost of the spying game.

Commander Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard has just published a new book of poems and has taken a brief respite from publicity on the remote Larksoken headland on the Norfolk coast. A psychotic strangler of young women is at large in Norfolk, and getting nearer to Larksoken with every killing. And when Dalgliesh discovers the murdered body of the Acting Administrative Officer on the beach, he finds himself caught up in one of the most baffling murder cases of his career.

May 1912. After the previous year’s deadly heatwave, it’s been an uneventful spring in Littleton Cotterell. Though for Lady Hardcastle and her fiercely loyal lady’s maid Flo, at least there are the provincial delights of the village’s inaugural art exhibition—and bicycle race—to look forward to. But at the exhibition opening, there’s a panicked shout of ‘Fire!’ In the confusion, the main attraction—an extremely expensive book—is stolen from under everyone’s nose, as is a valuable painting lent by Sir Hector Farley-Stroud.

Claire Barclay is enthusiastic about her British Mystery Book Tour business. She enjoys taking her guests, usually from America, to the settings of mystery novels where bodies are long dead. Her neighbor's plea for help to deal with a recently murdered well-known author unsettles her. She leaves the body to the police and takes her guests to Cornwall, including a British tourist who far is too interested in the dead author.