The crime scene awaiting Acting Detective Superintendent Alan Banks is among the worst he has ever encountered. The assailant, Terence Payne, hovers close to death himself. And Payne's brutalized wife, Lucy - whose overheard screams prompted the original call - has already been moved to a local hospital for treatment. But these sins and tragedies pale before what else has transpired in a dank basement the press will soon dub the "House of Payne."...

The story of a complicated friendship between two very different women: shy and socially constrained Caroline, the poor niece of a tyrannical clergyman; and the independent heiress Shirley, who has both the resources and the spirit to defy convention. The romantic entanglements of the two women with a local mill owner and his penniless brother pit the claims of passion against the boundaries of class and society.

From New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-winning author Peter Robinson comes a suspenseful and frightening tale of the connection between a missing child and the murder of a young man in the sixth book of the critically acclaimed Inspector Banks Mystery Series.
A well-dressed couple claim to be social workers responding to abuse allegations and pressure Brenda Scupham into allowing them to take her seven-year-old daughter,...

Maverick police inspector Alan Banks finds himself drawn into London's underworld when he aids his archrival Chief Constable Riddle, after the chief's missing daughter turns up on a pornographic website.

When the body of a man is discovered hanging from a tree in the woods near Eastvale, all signs point toward suicide. Inspector Banks finds himself plunged into a case where nothing is as it seems.

Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks must face his most challenging and personal case yet. A distraught woman arrives at the Eastvale police station desperate to speak to Banks. Since he's away on holiday, his partner, Annie Cabbot, steps in. The woman tells Annie that she's found a loaded gun hidden in the bedroom of her daughter, Erin--a punishable offense under English law. When an armed response team breaks into the house to retrieve the weapon,...

"Nearly 10 years after 16-year-old Joan Wilson was set on fire by three other schoolgirls, journalist Alec Z. Carelli has written the definitive account of the crime, drawn from interviews with witnesses and family members, historical research and correspondence with the killers themselves, but wonders how much of the story is true"-- Provided by publisher.

When country milkman Martin Snell makes his usual delivery to fifteenth-century Celandine Cottage one fine spring morning in Kent, he expects to be greeted by the cottage's seductive tenant, Gabriella Patten, not the ugly remains of a fire pointing to murder. A burnt-out chair, a peculiar pattern of soot on the walls, an asphyxiated corpse, two footprints, and a collection of discarded cigarette butts bring Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his...

The body of disgraced college lecturer Gavin Miller is found on an abandoned railway line. In the four years since his dismissal for sexual misconduct, hed been living like a hermit. So where did he get the 5,000 pounds found in his pocket? Leading the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks begins to suspect that the victim's past may be connected to his death. Forty years earlier the dead man attended a university that was a hotbed of...

"With the stroke of a pen, twenty-three-year-old Ivy Radcliffe becomes Lady Hayworth, owner of a sprawling estate on the Yorkshire moors. Ivy has never heard of Blackwood Abbey, or of the ancient bloodline from which she's descended. With nothing to keep her in London since losing her brother in the Great War, she warily makes her way to her new home. The abbey is foreboding, the servants reserved and suspicious. But there is a treasure waiting behind...