Lizzie Martin, lady's companion, has been sent from London to the New Forest to comfort a young woman whose baby has tragically died. A sad enough task, but things take an even darker turn when a rat-catcher is found murdered, and the young woman is discovered beside the body, crying and covered...

Superintendent Alan Markby and Meredith Mitchell are in desperate need of a holiday—and the Cotswold village of Parsloe St John seems the perfect choice.

It is 1864 when Lizzie Martin takes up the post of companion to a wealthy widow who is also a slum landlord. Lizzie is intrigued to learn that her predecessor disappeared, supposedly having run off with an unknown man. But when the girl's body is found in the rubble of one of the recently...

When Meredith Mitchell bumps into her old school friend Rachel Hunter at the Chelsea Flower Show, she is shocked to discover that she was the first wife of her companion, Chief Inspector Alan Markby. But the meeting is not the only surprise - before the afternoon is out, Markby has a death on...

London, 1867. As Inspector Ben Ross of Scotland Yard walks homeward one Saturday night, the fog that swirls around him is like a living beast. After it has lifted a woman lies murdered in Green Park. Allegra Benedict was the beautiful Italian wife of an art dealer. As Ben begins his...

Meredith and Markby are almost ready to leave on a long planned canal barge trip, but Meredith is having reservations. Then the twelve year old corpse of a missing teenage girl is dug up in the local graveyard. The vacation is off, (to Meredith's relief) but the investigation is on...

When Meredith Mitchell's old friend Toby Smythe turns up on leave, she is delighted to see him. But Toby has a problem - or rather his relative Alison Jenner has - and he wants to enlist the help of Meredith's fiance, Detective Superintendent Alan Markby...

When an ambitious hotelier announces that he will be converting Springwood Hall into a smart country hotel, it is greeted with a chorus of local disapproval led by the fearsome Hope Mapple - head of the Society for the Preservation of Historical Bamford. So the grand opening, to which all are...

When Meredith Mitchell picks up a hitchhiker on a lonely road outside Bamford one evening she is left feeling distinctly uneasy. What business can this confident, yet secretive, young woman have at Tudor Lodge, the beautiful old home of Brussels-based lawyer Andrew Penhallow, where she asks to...

In the heart of the Cotswolds a body is found. A teenage girl, probably local - somebody's daughter who went out one evening and didn't come back. It is not long before she is identified: fifteen-year-old Lynne Wills, who habitually drank underage in The Silver Bells pub and, on the night of her...

Twelve-year-old Tammy Franklin has learned too much about death, too quickly. Two years ago she lost her mother to a long, lingering illness and now the body of the woman her father married in an attempt to replace his wife has been found on a railway embankment close to the Franklin farm. This...

When Sally Caswell persuaded her scientist husband Liam to move from London to the quiet of rural Oxfordshire it was in the hope of a more peaceful existence. But so far the move has led to nothing but discord. Liam's sabbatical book project is not going well so, frustrated and isolated, he...

Death descends on the New Forest.... It is Spring 1871 when Lizzie Ross accompanies her formidable Aunt Parry on a restorative trip to the south coast. Lizzie's husband, Ben, is kept busy at Scotland Yard and urges his wife to stay out of harm's way. But when Lizzie and her aunt are invited to...