Showing results for "gordon griffin" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

"The first concern of an author is to do down his colleagues." In the long, hot Roman summer of AD 74, Falco, private informer and spare-time poet, gives a reading for his family and friends. Things get out of hand, as usual. The event is taken over by Aurelius Chrysippus, a wealthy Greek banker and patron to a group of struggling writers, who offers to publish Falco's work.

In the court of King George IV, Major Mearns - an old dog of war and veteran of Willington's army - is the guardian of Windsor Castle. Some would call him a spy; he calls himself a "watcher." Working with his close friend, the resourceful Sergeant Denny, the pair maintain a cool facade behind which they go about their duties quietly and unnoticed. Unnoticed, that is, until the day Mearns receives a parcel containing a gruesome surprise: a pair of severed human legs.

With the tourist season well and truly over in South Devon, Detective Inspector Wesley Peterson is looking forward to a quieter month in the CID. But when a man is shot dead on Bonfire Night, he finds he has a disturbing and complex murder case on his hands. The body of Patrick North was found in woodland connected to Nesbaraton Hall, a grand estate dating back to the eighteenth century. North worked for the Smithson family who now own the estate.

What did he eat last? Whom did he eat, in fact? Lumbered with working alongside reptilian Chief Spy Anacrites, Falco has the perfect plan to make money - he will assist Vespasian in the Emperor's 'Great Census' of AD 73. His potential fee could finally allow him to join the middle ranks and be worthy of long-suffering Helena Justina. Unexpectedly confronted with the murder of a man-eating lion, Falco is distracted from his original task, uncovering a bitter rivalry between the gladiators' trainers.

Despite many years living in South Devon, DI Wesley Peterson has never visited the tiny island of St Rumon's. That is until erosion from a storm reveals three bodies buried outside the local churchyard. Two are ancient skeletons, but one is far more recent, and Wesley realises he has uncovered a case of murder. But whose remains are they? And who killed them? The island has only a small number of inhabitants. Yet one resident keeps cropping up in Wesley's investigation: the author and self-styled academic Quentin Search.

A Richard and Judy Book Club Selection
What should you do if the world has turned against you? When Father Anselm is asked this question by an old man at Larkwood Priory, his response is to have greater resonance than he could ever have imagined. For that evening the old man returns, demanding the protection of the church. His name is Eduard Schwermann and he is wanted by the police as a suspected war criminal.

1895. Former Scotland Yard detective Daniel Wilson, made famous from his days working the Jack the Ripper case, and his archaeologist sidekick Abigail Fenton are summoned to investigate the murder of a young woman at the Manchester Museum. Though staff remember the woman as a recent and regular visitor, no one appears to know who she is, and she has no possessions which identify her. Seeking help from a local journalist, Daniel hopes to unravel this mystery, but the journey to the truth is fraught with obstacles.

In 523 BC, the Persian pharaoh Cambyses dispatched an army across Egypt's western desert to destroy the oracle at Siwa. Legend has it that somewhere in the middle of the Great Dune Sea his army was overwhelmed by a sandstorm and lost forever. Two and a half millennia later, a mutilated corpse is washed up on the banks of the Nile at Luxor, an antiques dealer is savagely murdered in Cairo, and a British archaeologist is found dead at the ancient necropolis of Saqqara.

When a counterfeit currency racket comes to light on the French Riviera, Detective Inspector Meredith is sent speeding southwards out of the London murk to the warmth and glitter of the Mediterranean. Along with Inspector Blampignon, an amiable policeman from Nice, Meredith must trace the whereabouts of Chalky Cobbett, crook and forger.

1895. A senior executive at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is found in his office with a bullet hole between his eyes, a pistol discarded close by. The death has officially been ruled as suicide by local police, but with an apparent lack of motive for such action, the museum’s administrator Gladstone Marriott suspects foul play.

AD 173. The Danube lies frozen. On its banks gather the clans of Sarmatia, their riders winter starved by sickly herds and blighted crops. Petty feuds cast aside and their disparate numbers united in the face of a great enemy. For across the frozen waters stands the mighty Roman Empire, and its Legion marches ever closer.

With some trepidation Nigel Derry approaches the country house of his enigmatic and unpredictable aunt Gwenny for an Easter holiday visit. After a tense few days in which her guests' interactions range from awkward dinners to a knife fight, a disgruntled aunt Gwenny departs for Europe. Receiving a telegram from Le Touquet inviting him to join Gwenny in the south of France, Nigel finds himself on a vacation cut short by murder as a cold shadow of suspicion eclipses the sunny beauty of the Côte d'Azur.

Halloween 1861. A special train with two carriages steams across the Lake District at night on its way to a place notorious for its record of supernatural incidents. Lighting inside the carriages is poor, and without warning, the lamp goes out in the last compartment of the second carriage, plunging it into darkness. When the special reaches the end of its journey, the passengers pour out on to the station platform. There are almost 60 of them in all, laughing and jostling.

"I’ve always wanted to see something of the Empire outside Rome." AD 71. Germania Libera: dark, dripping forests inhabited by bloodthirsty barbarians and legendary wild beasts, a furious prophetess who terrorises Rome, and the ghostly spirits of slaughtered Roman legionaries. Enter Falco, an Imperial agent on a special mission: to find the absconding commander of a legion whose loyalty is suspect.

Welworth Garden City in the 1940s is a forward-thinking town where free spirits find a home - vegetarians, socialists, and an array of exotic religious groups. Chief among these are the Children of Osiris, led by the eccentric High Prophet, Eustace K. Mildmann. The cult is a seething hotbed of petty resentment, jealousy and dark secrets - which eventually lead to murder. The stage is set for one of Inspector Meredith's most bizarre and exacting cases.

"Already it looked as if the police were up against a carefully planned and cleverly executed murder, and, what was more, a murder without a corpse!” Two brothers, John and William Rother, live together at Chalklands Farm in the beautiful Sussex Downs. Their peaceful rural life is shattered when John Rother disappears and his abandoned car is found. Has he been kidnapped? Or is his disappearance more sinister - connected, perhaps, to his growing rather too friendly with his brother's wife?

I was the new boy, so they saddled me with the worst jobs.' Rome, AD 71. Against his better judgement, Falco secretly disposes of a decayed corpse for the Emperor Vespasian, then heads for the beautiful Bay of Naples with his best friend Petronius. He conveniently forgets to mention to his companion that this will be no holiday. They have been sent to investigate the murderous members of a failed coup, now sunning themselves in luxurious villas and on fancy yachts.

DS Wesley Peterson, newly arrived in the West Country town of Tradmouth, has his hands full when a child goes missing and a young woman is brutally murdered on a lonely cliff path. Then his old friend, archaeologist Neil Watson, unearths the skeletons of a strangled woman and a newborn baby in the cellar of an ancient merchant's house nearby. As the investigation continues, Wesley begins to suspect that these deaths, centuries apart, may be linked by age-old motives of jealousy, a sexual obsession and desperate longing.

Thomas Chaloner is relieved to be summoned back to London. His master, the Earl of Clarendon, has sent him to Tangier to investigate a case of corruption. Chaloner will be glad to be home, to be reunited with his new wife, but the trivial reason for his recall exasperates him - the theft of material from the construction site of Clarendon's embarrassingly sumptuous new house just north of Piccadilly.

May 1915. As zeppelin bombs fall on London and with the sinking of the Lusitania, anti-German hysteria reaches fever pitch and attacks on German immigrants surge. Not even the West End of London is immune. Jacob Stein's bespoke tailoring business comes under brutal attack, leaving his safe ransacked, his daughter, Ruth, raped and Jacob dead.