"When Ursula Blanchard's neighbour is murdered, she is once again involved with matters of espionage and affairs of state"
July, 1573. Recently widowed, Ursula Blanchard is living a quiet life on her Surrey estate, caring for her infant son. But her peaceful existence is shattered when Ursula's neighbour Jane Cobbold is found dead in her own flowerbed, stabbed through the heart with a silver dagger - and Ursula's manservant Brockley is arrested for the crime. Determined to prove Brockley's innocence, Ursula seeks help from her old mentor Lord Burghley. But when a second death occurs and the queen's new spymaster, Francis Walsingham, gets involved, once again Ursula is reluctantly drawn into matters of espionage and affairs of state.

Site of a silver mine in late 1900s Town destroyed by fire Today a ghost town

Self-centred, tactless and irresistible, Euthanasia Bondeson makes her debut on the crime novel scene. The setting is London in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition. Together with a Welsh police inspector the successful Swedish authoress goes in search of her beautiful companion, who has disappeared in the narrow streets of London.

A female spymaster will face mortal danger to protect her husband and her queen. . . Mistress Rosamond Jaffrey is recruited by Queen Elizabeth I's spymaster to be lady-in-waiting to Lady Mary, a cousin of the queen who is being courted by Russia's Ivan the Terrible. However, there are some nobles at court who will do anything they can to thwart such an alliance and Rosamond must put herself in mortal peril to protect her ward . . .

Richard Nottingham confronts an old enemy in the latest intriguing historical mystery 1734. When a young country lad requests the Constable's help in finding his sister who has run away to Leeds to seek her fortune, Nottingham is not optimistic. Such girls usually end up as prostitutes - or worse. The following day, the young man is found dead, his throat slit. The evening before his death, the victim had been seen in deep conversation with career criminal Tom Finer in the Bell Inn. Could there be a connection to his murder? Why has Finer returned to Leeds after a seventeen-year absence? And what really happened to the young man's sister? Then a second body is discovered floating in the River Aire - and Nottingham finds himself plunged into a murder investigation where nothing is as it seems.

Benjamin January's search for a missing man takes him into a dark world filled with grave robbers and slave stealers. New Orleans, 1838. When Benjamin January suddenly finds that his services playing piano at extravagant balls held by the city's wealthy are no longer required, he ends up agreeing to accompany sugar planter Henri Viellard and his young wife, Chloe, on a mission to Washington to find a missing friend. Plunged into a murky world, it soon becomes clear that while it is very possible the Viellards' friend is dead, his enemies are very much alive - and ready to kill anyone who gets in their way.

Having been inveigled into standing for the local curia, responsible for the submission of all local tax, Libertus discovers that any shortfall must be made good by the councillors themselves. So when news arrives that a tax-collector from a nearby outpost has committed suicide, having gambled everything away, Libertus is despatched to make enquiries, in the hope of recovering at least some of the missing revenue. He has also been asked to attend a wedding, in place of his patron, who is expecting a visit from an Imperial Legate. But the assignment which should have seen Libertus for once treated as an honoured guest begins to take grisly and unexpected turns. As he pieces together the unlikely truth, Libertus finds himself in mortal danger. Freedom, in all forms, is only relative - but there is a high price for it, sometimes paid in blood .

Marcellus Hightower, the young boy in the novel, THIS IS ADAM, returns to his hometown as a grown man in DEVIL'S ELBOW. He seeks answers, turning for help to Adam Atwell, his surrogate father. Adam, a black man in the segregated South, shares with Marcellus the haunting memory of David Ransom's murder on the mighty Ocmulgee River. The memories interweave with a quarter century of Marcellus Hightower's quest for love and redemption, through his developing character, economic calamity and the turmoil of war. With Adam's sage guidance, he finds a way to "cleanse his heart" and face life anew. "DEVIL'S ELBOW is a powerful novel indeed. The old verities-a man's troubles with women, with himself, with love and guilt-are all treated as freshly as if Cheney had discovered them." Walker Percy (1969)