Fiona Griffiths

For rookie detective constable Fiona Griffiths, her first major investigation promises to be a tough initiation. A young woman and her six-year-old daughter have been found brutally murdered in a squalid flat, the single clue a platinum credit card belonging to a millionaire businessman who died in a plane crash six months before. Fiona, however, has secrets of her own. She is still recovering from a crushing psychological breakdown, and the feelings that haunt her are constantly threatening to undermine the mask of normality she has learned to wear.

The second novel featuring recovering psychotic DC Fiona Griffiths opens with as intriguing a pair of murders as you could imagine. Firstly, part of a human leg is discovered in a woman's freezer, bagged up like a joint of pork. Other similarly gruesome discoveries follow throughout a cosy Cardiff suburb, with body parts turning up in kitchens, garages and potting sheds. And while the police are still literally putting the pieces together, concluding that they all belong to a teenage girl killed some ten years earlier, parts of another body suddenly start appearing.

D.C. Fiona Griffiths is facing the prospect of a dull weekend when the call comes in, something about illegal dumping in a Cardiff suburb. But when she arrives on the scene, she finds, in a garage freezer, a severed human leg, complete with a pink suede high-heeled shoe. South Wales police are able to ID the body part as that of a young woman who went missing five years earlier; a young woman who once made a living as an exotic dancer.

A woman starved to death in a remote Welsh cottage. A computer guy left to bleed to death, his hands brutally hacked off at the wrist. When DC Fiona Griffiths and her colleagues realise they're staring at one of the world's most audacious robberies, she's asked to take on the challenge: will she go undercover to penetrate this criminal gang from within? When Fiona says yes, she has to give up her old life entirely. She becomes Fiona Grey, a homeless woman struggling to get her life back together again. When the criminal gang adopt her as one of their own, she's totally alone.

When DC Fiona Griffiths says 'yes' to her policeman boyfriend, it's an affirmation that she wants finally to put her psychological breakdown behind her, and become a resident of 'Planet Normal' like everybody else. But she still can't resist the challenge of an undercover policing course, and finding it remarkably easy to assume a new identity, she comes top of the class. So when an ingenious payroll fraud starts to look like the tip of a huge criminal iceberg, Fiona is selected to infiltrate the fraudsters' operation.

When Fiona Griffiths is tasked to look through a stackload of cold cases, her bosses don't expect her to find anything of interest. But then she finds that an impossible robbery really happened. That a nailed-on suicide was anything but. That the dead security guard was almost certainly murdered. Before long, Fiona is embroiled in what will become the toughest case of her career so far - one that forces her to enter the heart of darkness, and a journey that will test her mental toughness to its very limits.

A marine engineer who tumbles off a cliff path on a windy night. A burglary where everything taken was returned by the thief. The suicide of a man in love with life. An accident, a mystery, an unexplained tragedy. And nothing at all to connect them. Until, that is, Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths, searching for something - anything - to take her mind off the tedious job of evidence cataloguing she's been assigned to, starts to wonder if all three incidents are not quite what they seem.

The dead woman looks totally peaceful and there are no marks of violence. But why is she here, in this remote spot? Why does no one come forward to identify her? And why is she wearing a thin white dress on this howling October night? When young Welsh police sergeant Fiona Griffiths starts to investigate, her enquiries take her to a quiet monastery buried deep in the Welsh hills. And when she finds that a young teenager from the area went missing a few years earlier, her anxieties start to deepen.

When the body of a young woman is found in an old 'dead house' - the annexe where the dead were stored before burial in medieval times - of a tiny Welsh church, it seems that past and present have come together in a bizarre and horrifying way. For DC Fiona Griffiths, the girl - a murder victim whose corpse was laid out with obvious tenderness - represents an irresistibly intriguing puzzle, given Fiona's unusual empathy with the dead.

It's been more than a year since Detective Sergeant Fiona Griffiths had any sort of murder case...when all of a sudden, she gets the call. A local archaeologist has been found bloodily murdered. Her head severed from her body. Her eyes apparently fixed on a fragment of Latin text. The crime seems to summon the ghosts of Dark Age Britain - and the shade of King Arthur. But why are those ancient enmities alive once again? Why are armed burglars raiding remote country churches? And how many more people will die before these clues are unravelled?

DC Fiona Griffiths is bored. It's been months since she had a good corpse, let alone a decent murder to deal with, and it's frankly driving her nuts. And then comes the news, and she has to literally stop herself from jumping with joy: not just a murder but a decapitation, with an antique sword no less, and a murder scene that has been laid out like a particularly gruesome crossword clue.