Showing titles in Amateur Sleuths

Father Brown is an eccentric priest with his own particular ways of dealing with crime. David Timson, having completed the whole of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon, a remarkable achievement, turns his hand to the genial but certainly not innocent priest! This collection contains a group of stories from the Innocence of Father Brown, told unabridged.

Jason Brazel is an out-of-work journalist who lives in Penrith with his family and mother-in-law, Amita. She knows everyone and everything that’s going on in this corner of the Lakes. So when it’s discovered that Madeline Forbisher, one of Amita’s fellow regulars at the bingo club has died, found by the postman outside her crumbling country home close to Ullswater Lake, she senses immediately this is no accident. The trouble is, no one else seems to take her suspicions seriously. That is, until she enlists the help of her friends at the Penrith Bingo Club.

Ellen Curtis runs her own business helping people who are running out of space. As a declutterer, she is used to encountering all sorts of weird and wonderful objects in the course of her work. What she has never before encountered is a dead body. When Ellen stumbles across the body of a young woman in an over-cluttered flat, suspicion immediately falls on the deceased homeowner's son. No doubt Nate Ogden is guilty of many things - but is he really the killer? Discovering a link between the victim and her own past, Ellen sets out to uncover the truth.

When Arnold Clover is recruited by Lizzie Hawker to help her look into her family inheritance, he cannot begin to guess the journey he is about to embark on. Lizzie's mother, an Italian countess, disappeared thirty years ago, presumed dead. Her father, a famous, some say infamous, music promoter, has just died and now the family home Ca' Scacchi, a leaning palazzo in Dorsoduro, has fallen to her. When her mother vanished so too did a priceless painting, supposedly an erotic portrait of Lucrezia Borgia, which has captivated men for generations.

Al Engel had worked his way up to being Nick Rovito’s right-hand man, near the top of the syndicate. And this was a delicate job that Rovito had given him: retrieving a very important jacket, loaded with heroin, from the fresh grave of the drug mule who was accidentally buried wearing it. There was just one problem (at least - just one to begin with): It turned out the grave was empty. Suddenly Engel was the one finding himself “in deep”.

When auctioneer Felicia Grant’s best friend, Stamford Mayor Cassandra Lane, talked her into helping with the town’s annual Georgian Fair, she expected the worst she’d have to endure was the corset. But when the fair’s headline speaker turns up dead in the hook-a-duck pool, and more murders follow in quick succession, she finds herself investigating a serial killer for the second time in less than a year – and this time the stakes are even higher.

Spring, 1921. Lady Eleanor Swift, explorer extraordinaire and accidental sleuth, hasn’t had a vacation since she arrived in England a year ago. So she books into the Grand Hotel in the fashionable resort of Brighton for some fresh air, fish and chips, and, of course, a dip in the ocean. Eleanor is enjoying her view of the waves and trying to find her bathing suit when calamity strikes: A guest has been found dead at her beautiful hotel. The distraught manager, who can’t afford a scandal, asks Eleanor to solve the case as swiftly as possible.

It isn’t the first time real estate agent Helen Morrisey has found someone naked in bed while showing a house. But this one is different. One glance at the bluish cast around his lips and the vacant, staring eyes, and Helen knows developer Al Capelli is never going to sign another sales agreement. His death is big news for a small Chesapeake water town where a family empire is built around secrets and their brash money style is resented by locals. Within days, his lover, her old friend, begs Helen to find the killer before she’s arrested for murder.

Every Thursday, three retired school teachers have their ‘coffee o’clock’ sessions at the Thirsk Garden Centre café. But one fateful week, as they are catching up with a slice of cake, they bump into their ex-colleague, Topsy. By the next Thursday, Topsy’s dead. The last thing Liz, Thelma and Pat imagined was that they would become involved in a murder. But they know there’s more to Topsy’s death than meets the eye—and it’s down to them to prove it.

Late October 1909, and the season of ghouls and things that go bump in the night has descended on the village of Littleton Cotterell. Lady Hardcastle and her trusted lady’s maid, Florence, find themselves hosting a colorful cast of actors whose spooky moving picture, The Witch’s Downfall, is being shown to mark Halloween. But things take a macabre turn when the first night’s screening ends with a mysterious murder, and the second night with another. One by one the actors turn up dead in ways that eerily echo their film.

It's been years since Zoe last saw them – since they graduated, drifted apart, and lost touch. Years since Zoe ended things with Dan because the memories were too painful to bear. Years since that night – the night an unexpected death shattered their close-knit group of friends. Now, Zoe is invited to Scotland for a wedding – a grand affair at a manor house on a remote island. Apprehensive about the reunion, she hopes the long drive with Lily will help ease her nerves. But things are far from simple.

August 1901: A fundraiser for a new Rhode Island Audubon Society brings Emma to Vinland, the Viking-themed seaside home of her relative, Florence Vanderbilt Twombly, where the guest of honor is Edith Roosevelt, wife of Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. Emma's observation of harmless philanthropy is proven wrong the following morning when one of Mrs. Twombly's houseguests from the luncheon becomes mysteriously and dangerously ill. Accompanying police detective Jesse Whyte, Emma discovers a box of petit fours supposedly sent by Mrs. Roosevelt.

Welcome to Midnight, Texas, a town with many boarded-up windows and few full-time inhabitants, located at the crossing of Witch Light Road and the Davy highway. It’s a pretty standard dried-up western town. There’s a pawnshop with three residents. One is seen only at night. There’s a diner, but people stopping there tend not to linger. There’s a newcomer, Manfred Bernardo, who just wants to work hard and blend in. But Manfred has secrets of his own...

Richard is a middle-aged Englishman who runs a B&B in the Vallée de Follet. Nothing ever happens to Richard, and really, that’s the way he likes it. Until scandal erupts in the nearby town of Saint-Sauver when its famous restaurant is downgraded from three Michelin stars to two. The restaurant is shamed, the town is in shock, and the leading goat cheese supplier drowns himself in one of his own pasteurization tanks. Or does he? Valérie d’Orçay, who staying at the B&B while house-hunting in the area, isn’t convinced that it’s a suicide.

I was dreading the Cunningham family reunion even before the first murder. Before the storm stranded us at the mountain resort. The thing is, us Cunninghams don't really get along. We've only got one thing in common: we've all killed someone. My brother, my step-sister, my wife, my father, my mother, my sister-in-law, my uncle, my step-father, my aunt. Even me. When they find the first body in the snow, it's clear that only a Cunningham could have committed the crime—and it's up to me to prove it. There are plenty of killers in my family. But only one murderer.

A million problems arise when trying to flip a crumbling old Victorian. But Lyda, a newbie seller, and Dani, a TikTok-trained home stager, are fixated on one: the dead landscaper in the bedroom. The notorious lothario was one of many last-minute contractors swarming around, and now every jilted lover and business competitor is a suspect. It’s up to Lyda and Dani to close the case before the open house.

After a heart attack, Mathias Taillefer wakes up in hospital with a stranger at his bedside. The mysterious girl reveals herself to be Louise Collange, a volunteer who has come to play the cello for patients. When she finds out Mathias is a cop, she asks him to take charge of a very special case. Her mother, a former ballerina at the Paris Opera Ballet, died last year after falling from her balcony, and Louise has a hunch she was pushed. Though hesitant at first, Mathias agrees to help her, sending them both headfirst into a deadly chain of events.

Lambert Ramkin aka Imperium Dart, techno trickster and ambient music wizard of the 1990s, has gone walkabout, disappearing from his rather palatial home in Kent. This isn't the first time he's pulled a vanishing act, but he's never been gone so long before and his wife — wives, actually; it's complicated — are worried and hire the Vinyl Detective to find the old rascal. They theorize that wherever the missing man is, he won't be able to resist turning up at a record fair somewhere in search of 12-inch white label acid house singles, which he collects compulsively.

Ex-journalist Violet Brewster is keen to make a good first impression in her new community, having just moved to the small village of Merrywell. When Violet hears about the mystery of Helen Slingsby, who disappeared from the village forty years earlier, she decides to help uncover what happened. But despite Violet’s best efforts, she can find no trace of the missing woman.

After solving a series of murders at Blackpool Tower Ballroom, all Lily Richmond and Susie Cooper want is a peaceful Christmas. The last thing they expect is to find a dead body backstage at the Royal Albert Hall. Even worse, the victim is one of Lily’s students, a trust fund debutante set to be the new star of the ballroom dancing world. Lily and Susie set to investigating, but every clue throws up more questions, and around every corner lurk more suspects. And along the way, familiar faces on the dance scene will make themselves known – some that ought to stay in the past.