Showing results by narrator "Dawn Murphy" in All Categories

Kate returns from a disastrous honeymoon, only to be plunged into a macabre murder investigation. A teenage girl last seen leaving a party at the height of a local scarecrow festival is found strangled and partially stripped in her own barn. The gruesome crime is an exact copy of the 150-year-old murder of peasant girl, Martha Tinney, alleged by superstitious locals to have been committed by a spectral scarecrow, nicknamed Strawfoot.

Missing journalist Ellie Landy is found in the River Parrett by a news crew covering the worst floods the Somerset Levels have suffered in living memory. A paperback is found by the woman’s bed with a mysterious inscription mentioning 'Sandman' and a time of day. Police assume it is an accidental drowning. Kate disobeys orders from the top and probes the death, as she suspects this was no accident. When another woman dies in suspicious circumstances, Kate finds herself drawn ever deeper into a nightmare of murder, treachery and perversion.

Detective Kate believes that her own number is up when she finds herself staring at the wrong end of a double-barrelled shotgun on a sodden stretch of Somerset marshland. She’s on the trail of villain Lenny Stallard, who has just broken out of prison. He was serving time for the murder of the elderly wife of a colonel during a robbery at their country residence near Bridgwater. Revenge appears to be the motive, and for DS Lewis’s superior, it is a cut-and-dried case as the bodies of trial witnesses begins to mount up. But it’s all a bit too convenient.

An eccentric letter arrives at the police station from a man threatening to kill his aunts. Detective Kate and her colleagues don’t take it seriously. But an elderly woman is found strangled in her home. 'RIP Auntie' is written on the floor in red lipstick. Then another older woman is murdered. With a major police manhunt underway, it becomes clear that they are up against a very dangerous serial killer, who is engaged in some kind of personal vendetta. An adversary who will not stop until he has achieved what he set out to do.

Judith Tarr returns to the always fascinating character of Alexander the Great in this fantasy novel that springs from the legend that the Queen of the Amazons came to meet him in Persia, and became his friend.

In this classically simple tale of the disastrous impact of outside life on a secluded community in Dorset, Hardy narrates the rivalry for the hand of Grace Melbury between a simple and loyal woodlander and an exotic and sophisticated outsider. Betrayal, adultery, disillusion, and moral compromise are all worked out in a setting evoked as both beautiful and treacherous.