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A Christmas novella for fans of the hit drama series LONGMIRE now on Netflix and the New York Times-bestselling series.

On December 24, Sheriff Walt Longmire is reading A Christmas Carol when he’s interrupted by a young woman with a fine scar across her forehead and questions about Walt’s predecessor, Lucian Connally. Walt doesn’t recognize the mystery woman, but she knows him, and claims to have something she must return to Connally. Walt, at loose ends, agrees to help.

Lucian Connally swears he’s never seen the woman before. Disappointed, she begins a story that takes them back to Christmas Eve 1988, a terrible, fatal crash and a young girl who had the slimmest chance of survival.
Back to a whiskey-soaked World War II vet ready to fly a decommissioned plane and risk it all to save a life . . .

‘The characters talk straight from the hip and the Wyoming landscape is its own kind of eloquence’ New York Times

The fifth book in the New York Times bestselling Longmire series, featuring Sheriff Walt Longmire

Wade Barsad locked his wife Mary’s horses in their barn and then burned it down. In return she shot him in the head six times – or so the story goes. Sheriff Walt Longmire doesn’t believe Mary’s confession, and he’s determined to dig deeper.

Posing as an insurance claims investigator, Walt goes undercover and soon discovers that the population of an entire town might have wanted Wade dead, including a beautiful Guatemalan bartender and a rancher with a taste for liquor but not so much for honesty . . .

‘A winning mystery with characters coming off the page’ Portland Oregonian

Lydia Grey, an American returning to London after many years, is woken by footsteps in the night. There is someone in her room – of that she is sure. But that is also impossible. There is only one door and it is bolted shut. The windows are eight floors up, and are locked against the winter night.

As the noise recedes she switches on her bedside lamp. No one is there. Was it a dream? An illusion of a half-awakened state? Or is someone out to get her?

After 15 years of living elsewhere under an assumed name – one he has made famous by becoming a successful writer – Frank Bly, aka Stephen Longworth, returns to the town where an attempt was made on his life, and from which he escaped leaving no clues behind.

He confronts several people who have thought him dead. He thinks one of them is the person who tried to kill him. Before he finds the truth, there is more murder, attempted murder and a suicide …

When Dr Basil Willing rents a small shack for a vacation on Long Island he becomes embroiled with his landlady, Claudia Bethune. Claudia wants to learn the secrets of her relatives and friends, so she steals a truth serum and holds a dinner party for her nearest and dearest.

In the early morning hours, as Dr Willing returns to his cottage, he sees what he thinks is a fire and investigates. He finds Claudia near death at the table and hears footsteps fading up the stairs. Someone didn’t want Claudia to learn the truth about them, and soon Dr Willing finds himself a suspect in murder.

Alice Robertson was now too old and frail to cope with the stairs. But when Charles Robertson returned from an evening stroll he found something had made her tackle them once more – with tragic results.

There were few people with a motive for the old lady’s death. But then a rumour spread that in the house, forgotten for generations, were objects that had belonged to the first James Robertson. Someone had rediscovered them, recognised their value – and killed for them.

What has happened to Aunt Violet? Helen Gamlen isn’t sure anything has, but when Martin Andras turns up unannounced on her doorstep one night, implying that her aunt has disappeared, she feels she should try to clear things up once and for all.
Martin’s interest in Violet’s fate is purely selfish: her house in Burnstone had belonged to his grandfather, who left it to his faithful housekeeper for her lifetime. When she dies it will return to Martin’s mother, and later, of course, to him.
But when Helen arrives on her aunt’s doorstep, she finds she isn’t the only person looking for a missing lady . . .

Retired Andrew Basnett returns to Knotlington, where he once worked as an assistant lecturer, to an old friend who needs some advice. Two years earlier a member of the Fine Arts Department was murdered. Yet the killer had been caught and sentenced, so why should Andrew’s friend need help?
Many believed Stephen Sharland, who is serving a life sentence for the murder, was innocent. But before Andrew even begins making enquiries, there is another murder, and Andrew finds him in a complex web of emotion, struggling to sift truth from lies.

When Holly Dunthorne returns home to the village of Roydon Saint Agnes she finds that a friend, Marcus Meriden, has been accused of beating up an old man. There are witnesses who say they saw it happen, and the only one who might possibly clear him stays stubbornly silent.

But when murder happens and a newcomer to the village seems to attract everyone’s attention, Holly finds everything has changed, not least her old friends, the Meridens, among whom she feels herself a stranger – and afraid.

Beware of the Genial Stranger.

Confidence tricksters are operating throughout Europe! Be on your guard against the man wanting to reward you for returning his dropped wallet. Before parting with money to strangers on any pretext check with your banker or with the local police

Thus read the warning posters…

On his return to Geneva, Brian Innes must meet Audrey Page and find a way to prevent her from joining the strangely temperamental group of people gathered around film star Eve Eden at the Villa Rosalind. With characteristic stubbornness, if not trusting naivety, she refuses to be detained and is immediately encircled by terror, while the jaws of a murder trap swing closed.

Fortunately, Dr Gideon Fell is on hand, and when the murderer strikes with an invisible weapon, Fell accepts the challenge with brilliance and wit.

No one knew what finally prompted a shy young schoolboy to walk out of Warren Hall School never to return. The discovery of some of Stephen Willett’s bloodstained clothing in an overgrown ditch throws suspicion on Wally Price, a local odd-job man, and his suicide is seen as an admission of guilt.

Over fifty years later another tragedy strikes Warren Hall when the body of a stranger is discovered in the school grounds. The local postmaster is charged with murder and solicitor Rosa Epton is summoned from London to advise him on his defence.

Then a second murder at the school – and the discovery of some damning evidence against her client – makes Rosa determined to investigate leads that the police have overlooked. So she embarks on the most challenging assignment of her career: one that involves long-held secrets and dangerous confrontations. For a killer stands between Rosa and the truth.

A chance sighting in a café in Amsterdam gives solicitor Rosa Epton an unwelcome shock. At a nearby table sits an ex-client who should be behind bars, having recently been sentenced to five years in prison. So what is Eddie Ruding doing in Amsterdam a few weeks later?

On her return to England, Rosa makes a few discreet enquiries, only to draw a blank. But just as she has decided to try to put the matter out of her mind, a newspaper report shocks her into action. Eddie Ruding has been found dead, his crumpled body lying at the foot of the walls of Wandsworth Prison.

Rosa, however, is not the only person on the dead man’s trail. Everyone from inquisitive journalists to MI5 appears to be taking an interest – and none so much as the dead man’s mother, a cockney matriarch with a score to settle.

In his sixth adventure, Sergeant Verity returns to London’s 1860s underworld of alleys and brothels, peopled with sneak thieves, dancing girls, thugs, murderers and pimps.

From Newgate Gaol come sinister rumours of a man to be hanged for a murder he did not commit. ‘Handsome’ Jack Rann, safebreaker extraordinary, has been snared by the rival Swell Mob, and a corrupt policeman, ‘Flash’ Charley Fowler. To reach America and be lost for ever, Jack must escape the death-cell and pull off the robbery planned by his dead accomplice, Pandy Quinn.

From Newgate prison to the stage of the Penny Gaff, from bank vaults under Cornhill to rotting sewers below Wapping and Shadwell, Rann flees – while Sergeant Verity closes on the forces of evil with awesome tenacity.

At ten, David Shaw, a silent and observant little boy already fluent in half a dozen languages, was being dragged through the capitals of Europe by a diplomat father and a beautiful scatterbrained mother. At twenty, in the midst of the troubled 1960s, David abruptly disappeared from his Ivy League college – to be reborn as Jan Van Zee, amiable Dutch drifter, making his way around Europe and working as an occasional courier for a syndicate of smugglers.

At thirty he is cruelly betrayed and left for dead by the syndicate, and now lives only for revenge against an apparently all-powerful and invulnerable foe. Reverting to his true identity, David returns to America to claim his vast inheritance, and sets out to execute a consummate vengeance against each of the syndicate’s three bosses

Thirteen-year-old Mandy Walsh has been gunned down in the street, caught in the crossfire between rival drug gangs. For Chief Constable Lane there is only one option – infiltrate the drug syndicates and rid his patch of this menace.

Unfortunately, Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles has a better idea: let the gangland police itself in return for a few ‘favours’.

As his superiors battle it out, Detective Chief Superintendent takes a closer look at Mandy’s death. He learns the bullets that killed her were not fired by the warring gang. There was, it seems, a third gunman targeting Mandy…

‘Comes off the page like electricity’ Sunday Times

Janey Elliott fails to return home one evening from a friend’s, and her husband John goes out looking for her car. He and the friend’s husband find Janey, brutally murdered.

The gruesome killing of beautiful but wayward Janey Elliott calls for the special services of the Metropolitan Police. Does the element of sexual violence point to a frenzied killer, or is it a cover for a more straightforward motive? Scotland Yard soon find the answer to that question, but the murderer remains elusive.

Someone is caught in the tangle of relationships that goes along with the wealth and social prestige the Elliotts and their circle enjoy …

Mike Hurst, tormented by events that happened five years ago, returns to the cottage he still owns and the location of past revelations.

The place hasn’t changed, but the people have, and he finds himself involved in a fresh net of personal discoveries, all rooted in the past and bedevilled by it, but all making it more difficult for him to find the solution he has come back to seek …

‘This is a haunting novel for the thoughtful reader by one of Britain’s most gifted storytellers’ Chicago Tribune

By the time Jim Gilruth returns to Pakistan, twenty years after he served as a law officer in a small village near Lahore, colonial rule has given way to Pakistani officialdom. His strange and enigmatic mission is painfully involved in the brutal clash of the old and the new – but why has he been chosen as the instrument of coercion?

Then the details of a half-forgotten murder that he had long ago adjudicated begin to come back in all their bewildering nuances, and Gilruth, in an eerie repetition of the circumstances of a generation ago, is powerless to save the life of a good man, or bring a murderer to justice.

‘Geoffrey Household’s prose is as clean and spare and unwaveringly efficient as are his plots’ Sunday Times

On the death of his father, artist and mystic Alfgif Hollaston returns to his Somerset house. There, he befriends Paddy Gadsden, a saddler and horse psychiatrist, and inherits Paddy’s polecat, Meg, after Paddy’s violent and inexplicable death. But innocent and playful Meg isn’t quite what she seems.

Soon Alfgif’s life and sanity are threatened by a relentless terror, resembling the sixth sense of an animal, which warns when danger is imminent …

By the author of Rogue Male, one of the classic thrillers of the twentieth century: a bestseller that redefined its genre Guardian

Geoffrey Household returns to the rural England of Rogue Male and Watcher in the Shadows, with the savage hunting of his two heroes from the estuaries of South Devon to the empty Marlborough Downs.

The novel reveals at last the fate of Alwyn Rory, the security officer who was believed to have taken a bribe to allow a naval spy to escape and to have defected to Russia rather than face trial. Both Rory and his new ally, Adrian Gurney, by whom the story is told, are on the run and may be killed with impunity, as they do not exist …

After a meteor explosion, Rikardon wakes in a new body-and in a strange desert land named Gandalara, where a sacred gem known as the Ra’ira grants its owner the power to rule-or to destroy…

Victory is sweet-but for Rikardon and Tarani, it is all too brief. Although they have retrieved the sword of the Kings from the lost city of Kä, a savage battle with the vineh mars their journey back to Raithskar. These ape-like creatures were once controlled through the power of the Ra’ira. Now they pose a threat both to the cat-like sha’um and humanoid Gandalarans.

To restore order, Rikardon and Tarani must travel to Eddarta, where Tarani can use the Ra’ira against the increasingly vicious vineh. First she must face her treacherous brother, Indomel, and convince the Council to name her High Lord in his place. Indomel will not take such betrayal lightly, but another danger is about to reveal itself-a sinister and ambitious traitor who has been hiding in plain sight all along.

In 1993, a character took the fantasy world by storm. He was known by countless names and terrifying deeds-thief, magic wielder, swordsman, assassin, adventurer. But chief among those names and the most dangerous of his personae was Nightfall, a man-or perhaps the legendary demon himself-gifted with a power any sorcerer would kill to possess.

Now, Nightfall makes his triumphant return in a spellbinding new adventure that sweeps readers from the high courts to the darkest dungeons, from piracy and derring-do at sea to sorcerous encounters and cutthroat attacks in enemy territory.

Bound by sorcery and oath to guard and guide Prince Edward on his quest, Nightfall is forced to reveal his true name, Sudian, and to use every trick at his command to keep himself and his idealistic young charge alive. And when Edward suddenly becomes a king, he makes Sudian his advisor. But advisor or not, Sudian cannot dissuade King Edward from a journey to repay a debt of honor to Duke Varsah, an expedition that ends in disaster when all of Edward’s guards are slain and the king himself vanishes without a trace.

Now Sudian must turn to Duke Varsah for aid. But is he putting himself into the clutches of the very man responsible for Edward’s disappearance, a man whose greatest desire is vengeance against Sudian himself?

When Benton Collins returned from Barakhai-where magic had turned all but the royal family into inadvertent shapeshifters-he thought his adventures were at an end. But the friends he’d left behind still needed his aid, and Ben had to return to join in their desperate quest…