Search Results for: faces

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

Ivor Maddox has his hands more full than ever, with his wife Sue expecting a baby. To add to this, he also faces several of the most complex and frustrating cases of his career: the killing of a thirteen-year-old whose grief-stricken father takes the law into his own hands, and the shooting of a wealthy businessman, which sends Maddox digging into the past.

Most extraordinary of all are the corpses that keep turning up under the floorboards of abandoned houses all over the country. And when the vital clue to the identity of the mass murderer turns up in Maddox’s territory, it’s up to him to solve one of the crimes of the century.

‘My favourite American crime-writer’ New York Herald Tribune

The Wilcox Street precinct is as busy as ever. Sergeant Maddox and his team face three tricky murder cases, with motives that turn out to be as strange and bizarre as the crimes themselves.

But it is not only murder that is occupying Maddox. When policewoman Carstairs, who has vainly adored him for so long, begins to show interest in newcomer Sergeant O’Neill, Maddox discovers to his astonishment that he is jealous and will have to balance his time between romance and murder.

In Lieutenant Luis Mendoza’s first case, he is faced with a three-way mystery involving the senseless killing of Elena Ramirez, a blackmailing involving a below-the-radar adoption, and a young man’s guilt.

And when Mendoza connects Elena’s death with that of another woman, and investigates two further hunches, he draws closer to a solution . . .

‘Quite Outstanding’ Guardian

Private eye Bill Crane is back, in his fifth and final case, working and drinking as usual with his old sidekick, Doc Williams, and a new member of the gang, Ann Fortune, who is posing as his girlfriend – and disapproves of his carousing.

The trio has been sent to a Chicago suburb to investigate a murder and death threats made to the family of an industrial magnate. Alternately impeded and abetted by the many attractive women of the family, Crane cracks the case in his own inimitable way, following a trail of clues including the perfume of gardenias, the lipstick marks on the dead man’s face and the crimson cat.

Did the twelfth member of the jury know something the rest did not…?
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

Circumstantial evidence was as good as proof in the trial of Viola Ross. Everything pointed to the conclusion that this beautiful woman had smothered her wisp of a husband. But the twelfth juror, Richard Arnold, would not agree. Perhaps he knew something which the others didn’t – perhaps he only guessed.

When a retrial is ordered, Arnold sets out to conduct his own investigation. But soon he is faced with three attempts on his life.

A grotesque murder and a mysterious woman lead to the most difficult choice of his life.
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

Andrew Fane is faced with five years in prison for fraud, and a penniless future. When he appeals for help from his uncle his pleas go unanswered, but on visiting him Fane is welcomed by a mysterious and heavily veiled woman.

When he finds his uncle’s body, murdered in horrible and grotesque circumstances, she suddenly disappears leaving Fane faced with the dilemma of telling the police or covering his tracks . . .

In a small English town, family conflict can be murder…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

When spinster Emily Foss, who ran the haberdashery, is found bludgeoned to death, the silver pencil that had surely been in her purse that night is found in brash young Lennie Hunter’s possession, and it is he who is to be hanged for the crime.

To clear his name, Hunter’s fiancée brings in Detective Arthur Crook. Soon Crook discovers Emily was not on good terms with her nephew, his wife, or many others in the small English town where she lived. Faced with a maze of hidden motives, Crook must contrive against the clock to trap the real murderer.

‘No author is more skilled at making a good story seem brilliant’ Sunday Express

It’s often the ordinary people who spot the murderer – whether they know it or not…
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club

‘Few murders would go unhung,’ said plump, cynical Arthur Crook, ‘if people used their eyes more. It’s the man selling violets in the gutter, the woman exercising her Pekinese, the chap reading the midday racing news in the Tube who actually have the chance to spot the murderer. They’re the people he can’t guard against.’

Arthur Crook is a delightful nosey-parker, and here his blustering humour and bulldog tenacity face their toughest test yet.

The case started with a corpse. Nobody knew who he was. Next, a man named John Burke disappeared. But D.A. Doug Selby could not find his body.

Then Mrs Burke swore that the corpse and her missing husband were one and the same man. This should have solved both mysteries. All it did was run the D.A. up two different trees. Sure, the faces of the dead man and John Burke were exactly the same. The only trouble was that their fingerprints were different!

Impossible? That’s what Doug Selby thought too – until the killer struck again …

The little clergyman had died peacefully in bed in the Madison Hotel. But Douglas Selby, recently elected District Attorney, suspected there was more to this death than meets the eye, and soon knew that something was definitely wrong.

So Doug finds himself faced not only with a wily murderer, but with virulence from a hostile press, reluctant witnesses, and a film star unwilling to explain why she was on the spot.

On the face of it, the double homicide of Arnold and Marie Robbins looks like just another brutal Miami Beach murder – except that teenage Cathy Robbins is lying between the bodies, traumatised but unharmed. Is she a silent witness to murder, or is she a killer?

‘An absorbing, cleverly constructed thriller by an ever-popular British writer’ Books Magazine

On trial is young tearaway Ian Tanner, accused of the accidental but reckless hit-and-run killing of his own buddy. What really happened? The answer involves a ruthless gang, a gang that nearly disposes of yet another victim before Detective Constable Patrick Bramley figures it all out.

Meanwhile the judge is facing a personal predicament so closely associated with the case itself that he doubts whether he should proceed …

‘Excellent’ Current Crime

Adam Cape – a young barrister – prosecutes a case of assault at the Old Bailey. On the face of it, it’s a straightforward trial but its aftermath brings him uncomfortably close to death and Adam is unable to free himself from a murder that results.

With the best of motives, and the most unprofessional behavior, he becomes a bane to police; lands in hospital; is on hand when a bank robbery is averted – and, remarkably, bumbles into the truth of the case.

Christie Opara, the only woman on the DA’s Special Investigation Squad, is assigned by her boss to shadow his daughter to a civil rights demonstration. An ugly group of hecklers soon turns the demonstration into a riot and someone gets shot. A cop with a bewildered look on his face stands over the body with a revolver in his hand.

The crowd and the public cry for the cop’s blood in the days to come. Only Christie, who was standing next to the cop, saw another person pull the trigger. Now she must find the real murderer before matters get totally out of hand . . .

‘Detective Opara is going to become one of fiction’s most popular police people’ Sunday Mirror

It was largely chance that took Dougal Macneil to the empty racetrack that morning, but when he inadvertently sees – and photographs – something he shouldn’t he is soon under threat from a seemingly omnipotent force.

Colonel Weber, head of police of the tiny Central American country of Montoro, is sheltering a former Nazi whose name is high on Israel’s most-wanted list. And on the face of it he holds all the cards: control of the police force, the trust of government officials – and Macneil’s wife, whom he is holding in ‘protective custody’. But Macneil is not an adversary to be underestimated . . .

Newly extradited to England from California on charges of fraud, Philip Page faces a long prison sentence. The police are already convinced of his guilt, having been furnished with apparently watertight evidence by an anonymous informant, but Page believes he has been framed.

Released on bail, he sets about unmasking the mystery witness. When maverick investigator John Raven is called by one of the suspects, Page and Raven soon realise they want the same thing. So begins a gripping race against time to expose the source of the evidence and clear Page’s name.

Not much was known about Arthur Kedby in the West End Club that he frequented. ‘He doesn’t look much like a secret agent,’ remarked one member, but in general that was what he was believed to be. But Kedby is a blackmailer, and not even a very successful one; his great success lies in the fact that he has never been caught.

Then he recognises the face of a club guest – a face he has seen before. And all at once Kedby has an opportunity to practise his skills at a level that might just furnish him with a pension …

When Karl Rainer Andor came to Berlin for the last time it was sacrifice, not victory, that was uppermost in his mind. He intended to use the plutonium bomb he had elaborately planted to effect the reunification of Germany, but he didn’t expect to survive.

The ‘allied’ powers are concerned as much with scoring off each other as with finding the bomb – or with seducing or frightening Andor into telling them where it is. And eventually they are faced with the impossible task of evacuating the historic capital of Germany.

It is 1936 – the year of the Abdication Crisis – and gangland capo Sonny Tarrant’s money-laundering operation is being threatened by three small-time thieves thinking big.

Would-be gangsters Sandboy, McGouran and Gillis have carried out a violent raid on the premises of furrier Pelly Pender. But Pender insists to the police that no attack took place, for he knows the trio will face a different justice in which the law plays no part. And Sandboy soon finds himself caught in a nightmare world in which Tarrant manipulates his victims with the deftness of a flick-knife.

His last hope is Yvonne Manders, once the stage-dancer ‘Lady Blue’ . . .

Sergeant Verity’s second adventure sees him sweltering under the Indian sun, as mutiny brings pillage and war to Bengal. Attached to the Intelligence Department in Calcutta, Verity is given the task of tracing English women who have fallen into the hands of the mutineers, and who face death – or an even worse fate in the harem.

But this task is supplanted by a yet more desperate quest when the Kaiser-i-Hind, the great diamond which symbolises sovereignty over all India, disappears, as if by magic, from beneath Verity’s eyes as it is about to be handed over to the British.

Immaculate officers and rough-bearded riflemen, evangelists, card-sharps and dandies face death at attention on the sloping deck of the Birkenhead. But who was the coward hidden among the women in the lifeboat, and who was the girl who lived to report his shame?

Eight years later in the summer of 1860, the coward’s legacy unfolds, and Verity must piece together a mystery that leads him to uncover an ingenious plot: a madman’s revenge for the loss of the Birkenhead. And with this knowledge, only Verity can avert a tragedy unparalleled in English history since the loss of Prince William in the White Ship 700 years before.

The only clue that could lead to the arrest of a homicidal killer is a golf ball button, torn from the jacket the killer was wearing, and found next to the horrifyingly mutilated body of a young hooker.

There are four owners of jackets with golf ball buttons living in the city. When Detective Tom Lepski of the Paradise City Police checks out these jackets, suspicion falls on Ken Brandon, an insurance agent.

But just when Lepski is sure he has his man, two more horrifying killings occur, and he is faced with the trickiest case he’s ever had to solve.

Mark Girland, good-for-nothing secret agent with a distinct weakness for money and women, finds himself in Prague for his latest adventure. But events in the Communist country prove all too much for Girland as he comes face-to-face with a sinister world of deception, fraud and corruption.

‘The same compulsive readability and sheer hard story-telling as in every other’ Sheffield Telegraph

Sudden death lurks along the canals of Venice …

That’s what Don Micklem, millionaire American playboy on the trail of a disappearing one-time British agent, discovers the hard way. Has his quarry been murdered or has he committed treason?

Against the backdrop of Venice’s sinister waterways, Micklem must fight a ruthless political organization while facing the prospect of a violent death at every turn.