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)

A baby is kidnapped - and the repercussions reach the highest levels of government in this absorbing historical mystery London, April, 1912. The third Irish Home Rule Bill is passing through Parliament and the situation is growing ever more tense. Closely involved in the negotiations, cabinet minister Edmund Latimer finds himself under growing pressure - which only intensifies when his seventh-month-old niece Lucy is snatched away in her pram in Regent's Park. Could there be a connection between Lucy's kidnapping and the Irish talks? With her husband under intolerable strain, Edmund's wife Alice makes it her business to find out. But the more she discovers, the more she realizes how little she really knows the man she married five years before.

Benjamin January investigates the murder of a mysterious Englishman in this absorbing New Orleans-set mystery. When British spymaster Sir John Oldmixton offers Benjamin January a hundred dollars to find the murderer of an Englishman whose body has been found floating in the New Basin Canal, Benjamin turns him down immediately. As a free man of colour in New Orleans in the sweltering July of 1839, he knows this is not something he should get mixed up in. But when clues to the dead man's identity link the death to another murder, in another July in January's past, he is reluctantly drawn into the investigation. Nine years ago in Paris he failed to catch a killer - with tragic consequences. Now in New Orleans he must unravel the earlier murder, the one that took place during the great revolt against the Bourbon kings, to solve the second killing. At stake is not merely a hundred dollars, but hidden treasure, the fate of an innocent woman - and the lives of January's wife, son and unborn child.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022 AND A SUNDAY TIMES HISTORICAL NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2022.

In 1822, a stage is set: Englishman Junius Booth - celebrated Shakespearean actor and man of mesmerising charm and instability - moves to a remote cabin outside Baltimore with his wife, who bears him ten children. Of the six who survive infancy, one is John Wilkes - the hot-tempered but much-loved middle son who, in 1865, fatally shoots Abraham Lincoln in a Washington theatre, changing the course of history.

What makes a murderer? His family or the world? And how can those who love him ever come to terms with his actions?

Strikingly relevant to the world today, Booth is the story of one extraordinary family and the terrible act that shattered their bonds forever.

THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'It's hard to believe that such an accomplished novel could be a debut - The Leviathan is a gloriously dark story that sweeps you along to its harrowing yet satisfying conclusion. Superb' Susan Stokes-Chapman, number one bestselling author of Pandora 'Darkly compelling and dripping with atmosphere... bewitching' Stacey Halls, Sunday Times bestselling author of THE FAMILIARS SHE IS AWAKE... Norfolk, 1643. With civil war tearing England apart, reluctant soldier Thomas Treadwater is summoned home by his sister, who accuses a new servant of improper conduct with their widowed father. By the time Thomas returns home, his father is insensible, felled by a stroke, and their new servant is in prison, facing charges of witchcraft. Thomas prides himself on being a rational, modern man, but as he unravels the mystery of what has happened, he uncovers not a tale of superstition but something dark and ancient, linked to a shipwreck years before. Something has awoken, and now it will not rest. Richly researched, incredibly atmospheric, and deliciously unsettling, The Leviathan is set in England during a time of political and religious turbulence. It is a tale of family and loyalty, superstition and sacrifice, but most of all it is a spellbinding mystery and a story of impossible things... 'Outstanding... a seething, haunting delight' Beth Underdown, award-winning author of THE WITCHFINDER'S SISTER 'Thoroughly gripping and utterly absorbing' Jennifer Saint, author of ARIADNE *ROSIE ANDREWS'S The Puzzle Wood coming in 2024*

Mara, Brehon of the Burren, judge and lawgiver, investigates the death of a man suspected of kin-murder in this compelling medieval Irish mystery. When Mara, Brehon of the Burren, is summoned to the sandy beach of Fanore, on the western fringe of the kingdom of the Burren, she sees a sight that she has never witnessed before during her thirty years as law-enforcer and investigating magistrate: a dead man lying in a boat with no oars. Immediately her scholars jump to the conclusion that the man has been found guilty of kin-murder. The Brehon sentence for this worst of all crimes is that the murderer be towed out to sea and left to the mercy of wind and waves and the ultimate judgement of Almighty God. But Mara notices something odd about the body, something which arouses her suspicions. And something familiar about the boat in which he lies. Soon she has embarked on a full-scale murder investigation. And gradually suspicion dawns that someone near and dear to her is involved in the murder.

Private investigator Jennie Redhead finds her loyalties divided when she investigates the decades-old murder of a college student. Oxford, 1974. In the cellars beneath St Luke's College, a sealed medieval ventilation shaft is opened up to reveal human bones. Two bodies, buried thirty years apart, but is there a connection ... Desperate to protect the College's reputation - and finances - the bursar, Charlie Swift, hires his old friend, private investigator Jennie Redhead, to find out the identities of the two victims. But as Jennie pieces the clues together, it becomes increasingly clear that Charlie knows rather more about the murders than he's admitted. As she uncovers a series of scandals stretching back more than sixty years, Jennie is forced to question how well she really knows her old friend Charlie Swift - and whether she can trust him...

Benjamin January is forced to travel to Haiti to seek his family's lost treasure, in order to save everything he holds dear. When Jefferson Vitrack - the white half-brother of Benjamin January's wife - turns up on January's doorstep in the summer of 1838 claiming he has discovered a clue to the whereabouts of the family's lost treasure, January has no hesitation about refusing to help look for it. For the treasure lies in Haiti, the island that was once France's most profitable colony - until the blood-chilling repression practiced there by the whites upon their slaves triggered a savage rebellion. The world's only Black Republic still looks with murderous mistrust upon any strangers who might set foot there, and January is in no hurry to go. But when Vitrack is murdered, and attempts are made on January's wife and himself, he understands that he has no choice. He must seek the treasure himself, to draw the unknown killers into the open, a bloody trail that leads first to Cuba, then to Haiti, and finally to the secret that lies buried with the accursed gold.

The message consisted of one neatly typewritten line: I am killing you slowly. You are going to die. The Chessman. Isabelle Stanton and Sue Castradon always arranged the flowers in the village church on Fridays. But Sue was glad to escape the church that morning. She had rowed over breakfast with her husband Ned, who bitterly resented her association - however fleeting - with the handsome Simon Vardon. Sue didn't think things could get worse - until she opened the cupboard. When a mutilated corpse is discovered in the sleepy village of Croxton Ferriers, Jack Haldean finds an odd clue at the scene of the crime: a black marble chess knight with crystal eyes. Is murder just a game? It could be - to a killer who calls himself The Chessman.

Herein chronicles the exploits and adventures of Ars ne Lupin, a burglar who blends effortlessly into high society, adapting a gentlemanly persona as a cover for his criminal misdeeds. This classic crime caper established the antihero character of Ars ne Lupin, who is the archetypal gentleman thief. A master of disguise, Lupin demonstrates an effortless ability to transition between high society and his actual profession of burglar. Charming and dapper to a fault, Lupin appears to his contemporaries as the consummate embodiment of a refined gent. Using his wit, cunning and numerous connections in the upper reaches of the social strata, Lupin orchestrates a number of thefts which leave Parisian society stunned and flabbergasted. In this story Lupin steals a number of motor cars - at the time a rare, expensive and cumbersome haul - and a treasured family heirloom pendant. Originally written and published in French, this novel was swiftly translated to English.

Some years ago New York Supreme Court Justice Joseph Crater walked out of his office, turned south along Broadway, and disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.. There were headlines, public clamor and widespread excitement, but the true-life case was never solved. Something of that same breathless mystery is aroused in this story when Stephen P. Wyndham, internationally known sportsman and last in a line of a rich and respected New York family, vanishes into the gloom of a drizzly Havana night. What is behind the grim crime in that fashionable hotel room? Why would a popular young sporting idol drop blankly from existence? Follow in the steps of the ambitious young newspaperman, as he pieces together a set of mocking clues that lead through murder and violence, all the way from a sedate Murray Hill mansion to a lonely tropical waterfront. As he works to solve The Case of the Missing Corpse he encounters a varied cast of characters: an erratic spinster, a beautiful dancer, a prominent judge, a movie director, fisherfolk, and gangsters. To get to the bottom of it all, our newspaper must sift the treacherous characters from the sincere, hoping beyond hope that he will be able to solve the riddle of Stephen Wyndham's disappearance and write the story of a lifetime.

Maggie Slone, fast-talking newspaper reporter, covered a special assignment in Gaston Villiere's renowned cafe Le Coq d'Or on Mardi Gras night. Along with a good meal, she got an earful of a melodramatic conversation at a nearby table. At the table were two couples. One pair, a blond young man and a green-eyed glamour girl, have a row and break-up the party. The next day, Maggie is assigned to cover a suicide-the blond young man of the night before. Odd circumstances shroud his death and, even as the reporter tries to fit the puzzle together, the green-eyed Nita is found garroted in a patio in the French Quarter, just behind the home of the Pacellis, a poor Italian family. Maggie's attempts to solve the murder carry her into strange situations, including a powwow with a group of people which includes one man who seems determined to imprison her. When little Tina Pacelli is kidnapped, Maggie gets down to brass tacks and walks smack into trouble, and more murder. The riotous color of the New Orleans Mardi Gras, the fast-paced excitement of the newspaper office, and Maggie's talent for trouble are all come together in this thrilling novel. Events move with lightning speed, striking into the heart of a man where hate born of hurt has smoldered for years-finally breaking out in a flame of murder.