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One October night in the middle of the twentieth century Detective Inspector John Cheviot got into a taxi, bound for New Scotland Yard. When he stepped out it was from a horse-drawn cab, the year was 1829, and a beautiful woman was beckoning him in front of Old Scotland Yard.

There were things Cheviot remembered but couldn’t use – like how to analyse fingerprints; and things he didn’t know that he could have used – like how advanced his romance with Lady Flora really was. And there wasn’t even time to learn, because in the midst of helping Robert Peel establish the respectability and competence of his new police force, Cheviot suddenly finds himself and his lady accused of cruel murder.

Dick Darwent brooded in a dark cell of Newgate Prison – waiting to be hanged. Lady Caroline Ross, rich, cold and beautiful, prepared a champagne breakfast to celebrate her marriage. How were the fates of these two people intertwined? And how were their lives changed by a shot through a bathroom window, a riot at the opera, a pistol duel at dawn, and a mysterious coachman whose cloak was stained with graveyard mold?

‘Donald MacKenzie is a born storyteller’ Guardian

Every thief dreams of committing the perfect crime. Cameron, Thorne and Gun are convinced that the jewel robbery they have planned cannot possibly go wrong, but jealousy mistrust and fear doom the enterprise from the start.

One of them dies a slow, hideous death; the other two find they have walked into hell. Soon, a beautiful woman and two desperate men find themselves trapped by their own actions. And when the thread of tension snaps they learn that death can indeed be a friend.

Deepwood Grange is no longer what it was in the thirties: the beautiful old house has been converted into luxury apartments, and the original family is long gone. But on a rare visit to her godmother, solicitor Rosa Epton finds herself quite entertained by the eccentric residents of the other flats. Until, that is, one of them turns up dead in the chimney of an empty apartment, and her godmother becomes a prime suspect.

Then her godmother disappears, and Rosa’s involvement becomes even more personal …

Sergeant Verity’s adversaries in the underworld are as busy as ever, this time taking advantage of the Brighton Races to dupe the populace, and, more seriously, to steal the beautiful Shah Jehan clasp. Everyone knows that the glistening jewel is priceless, but only the likes of Sealskin Kite and Old Mole know its true worth.

Down from Paddington Green with his family and his old accomplice Miss Jolly, Verity thinks he has crime at bay in Brighton. But the easy time he had anticipated soon turns into a nightmare of false alarms, public disgrace and, worst of all, personal disaster.

When Detective Tom Lepski shot down the runaway killer on his beat in Paradise City, he unleashed a chain of events that would involve two sets of criminals and a honeymoon couple in one of the most exciting nights any of them had seen for a long time.

Wilbur Warrenton and his beautiful, grasping wife Maria are on their honeymoon in the luxurious Spanish Bay Hotel when their penthouse suite is the scene of a collision between a gang of jewel thieves intent on stealing the famous Warrenton diamonds and a gang of ransom-hungry Cubans – all determined to get exactly what they want – at any cost …

Private detective Bart Anderson is hired by Russ Hamel, a millionaire author, to shadow his beautiful wife, Nancy. For Hamel has been receiving poison pen letters claiming that his wife has been having an affair.

But as Bart’s investigation progresses, he discovers that he has opened up a can of worms – for Nancy is not the faithful wife her husband assumes …

‘The thriller maestro of the generation’ Manchester Evening News

Kidnapping has become a national pastime in Italy – but is there another reason why billionaire Carlo Grandi has put his beautiful daughter behind an electric fence, guarded by killer dogs and two fast-shooting guards?

Mike Frost, always on the look-out for big money and beautiful women, gets the job as second gun – and soon realises he is guarding a hell cat. When kidnappers sold him the idea of being the inside man, Frost hadn’t known which he wanted most – that beautiful body or the $5,000,000 it could bring him.

Helga Rolfe is blonde, beautiful, and bright enough to control her own multi-million pound empire. But not to control her secret weakness: sex. Former lover, Archer, knows it. He has an old score to settle with her and he needs cash. When handsome gigolo Christopher Greenville crosses his path, he’s found the way to both.

With Archer’s coaching, Chris cons Helga into wanting him badly enough to propose marriage, and when Archer fakes Chris’s kidnapping, she is ready to pay the huge ransom. But events take a frightening twist when the local Mafia join the action …

Clay Burden married his wife Rhonda because he was tired of being on his own. Val had walked out on him – and if he couldn’t have Val, maybe marriage might make him forget her. Six years later, working in Paradise City, Clay meets Val again. Married to the sinister Henry Vidal, she’s changed: still beautiful and passionate, still compelling, but tense and nervous and driven by odd fears and anxieties.

When Clay leaves his job and joins the Vidal empire, what begins as a sneaking feeling of unease hardens into stone cold certainty. Val must be released from the hypnotic influence exerted over her by her husband – even if Clay has to murder to set her free …

Steve Manson’s magazine dealt in corruption: he attacked the rich, the powerful and the famous – and he made enemies. In a job like that, you couldn’t afford to have dirty secrets of your own. With the whole town itching for you to make a slip, it was like living in a goldfish bowl.

But Steve had lived clean – until his beautiful, extravagant wife was caught shoplifting, and suddenly he was up to his neck in the dirtiest secrets of all – blackmail and murder.

A brilliant but sadistic safe-breaker; a beautiful seductress; an expert young hunter and an ace pilot with a shady past – this is the team that undercover operator Armo Shalik assembles to steal the priceless Borgia ring from millionaire Max Kahlenberg’s closely guarded fortress in the remote and deadly African bush.

But when Kahlenberg finds out they are coming, the gang’s expedition turns into a strictly one-way safari – to slaughter …

‘Insanely readable’ Observer

The Esmaldi necklace was worth about $350,000: one hundred matched diamonds the size of garden peas, set in platinum. The sort of necklace people would murder for …

And Al Barney, beachcomber and layabout, knew its history – a tale of hate, jealousy and violence; of beautiful, wanton women and the most cunningly devised jewel robbery ever.

The Russians will pay $4,000,000 for the top secret formula to a revolutionary new metal … and the CIA will do anything to stop them.

American inventor Dr Paul Forrester is the man that both sides want. He alone can decipher the vital code but, for two years, Forrester has been in a mental asylum – ever since that bloody day when he walked in on his beautiful wife and her lover.

So it’s Nona Jacey, Forrester’s former lab assistant, who becomes a helpless pawn in the power struggle to possess the scientist. Because she is the only person that holds the key to unlocking Forrester’s mind …

Mark Girland’s problems begin when a beautiful blonde is found lying on a dark deserted quai in Paris – the initials of the top Chinese atomic scientist tattooed on her upper thigh.

The girl is suffering from acute amnesia. Girland, desperate for money, is ordered by the CIA to get any information he can – by posing as her husband.

But the appeal of the mission begins to wear thin when Girland discovers he has involved himself in a life and death race to extract vital atomic secrets from the scientist’s beautiful mistress.

When a small-time clerk insures his life for $50,000 and then suddenly dies ten days later, it doesn’t take a genius to work out something suspicious is going on. So when Maddox, the top man in the insurance business, finds out, he is determined to get to the bottom of it. And this means trouble for someone. In fact, it means trouble for the beautiful, auburn-haired Meg Barlowe, a woman with a serious past.

‘The thriller maestro of the generation’ Manchester Evening News

A man will do almost anything when a rich and beautiful woman offers him fifty thousand dollars just to make a telephone call. But when that telephone call is part of a fake kidnap plan to extract five hundred thousand dollars from one of the richest men in the world, only a sucker would gamble on the deal paying off in his favour.

Harry Barber is a sucker. After three and a half years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit, with no job and no money, he is the perfect target of a brilliant plan to frame him for the brutal murder of a young girl.

George Fraser, a lonely, timid fellow, lives in a dream world of gangsters, gunfights and beautiful women. He begins to imagine himself as the toughest gangster of them all to bolster up his feeling of inferiority. But George boasts once too often – and to the wrong person.

From that moment on, harmless George is caught up in a deadly net of intrigue, and finds himself committing the deadliest act of all …

‘An intelligent and harshly revealing piece of work with not a little serious penetration and power’ The Times

Eve: mysterious, tantalizing, alluring, wanton. Deep within this desirable but strange girl burns the violent fire that could destroy a man.

Clive Thurston had swindled his way to fame. He thought he knew the ropes and women. Maybe he did. But he didn’t know Eve, otherwise he’d have realized that he was just another fly stumbling into the deadly web of a woman who was beautiful to look at, but lethal to love.

When Dave Fenner is hired to solve the Blandish kidnapping, he knows the odds on finding the girl are against him – the cops are still looking for her three months after the ransom was paid. And the kidnappers, Riley and his gang, have disappeared into thin air.

But what none of them knows is that Riley himself has been wiped out by a rival gang – and the heiress is now in the hands of Ma Grisson and her son Slim, a vicious killer who can’t stay away from women, especially his beautiful new captive. By the time Fenner begins to close in on them, some terrible things have happened to Miss Blandish …

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

When Sergeant Devery is allotted a female police office to assist him on a plain-clothes prowl he is concerned it will cramp his style. He soon changes his tune when the woman in question turns out to be ‘unusually beautiful’.

The Devil Was Handsome is a fascinating portrait of drug-dealing, assault and murder against the backdrop of mid-twentieth-century CID methods, written by a serving police officer.

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 …

US Federal agent John Dennison arrives in the UK to meet Chief Inspector Philip Hunter of Scotland Yard, and to find $300,000, smuggled ashore via Liverpool. According to Dennison, the smugglers are intent on buying diamonds, to ship back to the US.

Two suspects are followed to a London hotel and the diamonds are found. Shockingly, they are discovered to be real . . . but synthetic.

The diamond deal, involving an eccentric middleman, exposes a much bigger racket. Hunter and Dennison have a complex plot to unravel, some dangerous men to deal with – and Dennison the beautiful, red-headed Martine to keep an eye on . . .