When Meredith Mitchell agreed to stay with her actress cousin Eve in the run up to Eve's daughter's wedding she anticipated a degree of drama. But she can hardly have expected it to include murder, blackmail and unrequited love. Or to involve a certain Chief Inspector Markby, a middle aged divorcee. As material witness to the only case of murder the Cotswold village of Westerfield has ever seen, Meredith soon becomes involved in the case and with helping Chief Inspector Markby. Meredith is...

When an ambitious hotelier announces that he will be converting Springwood Hall into a smart country hotel, it is greeted with a chorus of local disapproval led by the fearsome Hope Mapple - head of the Society for the Preservation of Historical Bamford. So the grand opening, to which all are invited, promises to be a lively affair, and particularly since Hope is planning a disruptive protest "streak". However, Hope is to be unwittingly upstaged by the discovery of a recently murdered body...

In separate locations in Staffordshire, three separate tableaux are being played out. DI Joanna Piercy is writing to her lover to try and explain recent events; her sidekick Mike Korpanski is filling in insurance forms after his wife has had a prang in the car; and an unknown person is penning love letters to a local doctor.It seems that no one could lead a more mundane life than Beatrice Pennington. Unexciting; mid-forties; married; a part-time librarian; grown-up kids; her life a...

The two elderly sisters of the Oakley family live in poverty in an ancient mansion, and have decided to sell up to live comfortably from the profits. However, things become more complicated when a young Polish man appears claiming rights to half the fortune. When he dies in circumstances familiar to the Oakley family, the sisters are haunted by the shadow of crime, and Superintendent Markby must look back at the events of a century ago to find the killer...

In the heart of the Cotswolds a body is found. A teenage girl, probably local - somebody's daughter who went out one evening and didn't come back. It is not long before she is identified: fifteen-year-old Lynne Wills, who habitually drank underage in The Silver Bells pub and, on the night of her death, was seen leaving with an unknown man. Chief Inspector Markby's friend Meredith Mitchell has been befriended by another troubled young local girl, Katie Conway. On the surface Lynne and Katie...

When old Monty Bickerstaffe finds a dead body in his drawing room it comes as a nasty surprise. Monty lives alone in a crumbling Cotswold manor house and the last thing he wants is the police sniffing around his property. The identity of the corpse and how and why it was left in Monty's home remain a mystery. The locals swear they've seen nothing unusual and Monty's relatives claim they've never set eyes on the stiff before. But Inspector Jess Campbell is convinced that someone's lying and...

In a land without rain, the people turn to the Archon, the god-on-Earth, to end their suffering and, for their sake, the old man must make a terrible sacrifice. Suddenly Mirany, a young priestess, finds herself thrust unwillingly into a desperate struggle to find the child who will be the new Archon. And the only help that she can find are Oblek, a drunken musician and Seth, a conniving scribe. If she fails, General Argelin and the high priestess Hermia will install a false candidate of th...

In her remarkable new book, Alison Weir recounts one of the greatest and most remarkable love stories of medieval England. It is the extraordinary tale of an exceptional woman, Katherine Swynford, who became first the mistress, and later the wife, of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. But Katherine Swynford was much more than that. She was the mother of the Beauforts, and through them the ancestress of the Yorkist Kings, the Tudors, the Stuarts and every other sovereign since - a prodigious...

Multicast narration featuring David Suchet, Hugh Fraser, Joan Hickson, and more“[We] can’t get enough of Christie’s plush and murderous thrills.” —Entertainment WeeklyFrom the Queen of Mystery—this all-new collection of stories about love gone horribly wrong will get your heart racing.Love can propel us to our greatest heights . . . and darkest depths. In this new compendium of Agatha Christie short stories...

Lottie announces that she is getting married. The youngest daughter of a large and close-knit family, Lottie is nineteen but looks five years younger. Her fiancé is Edgar Lennox, a lecturer at Lottie's university, forty-five years her senior. We follow as Lottie's life unfolds; it is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments.

Sam Hunter had only intended to help his brother fulfill his dream of having children, but now, through an IVF mix-up, a complete stranger is pregnant with his child! To make matters worse, she's utterly gorgeous.... For warmhearted widow Emilia Eastwood, this child was meant to be the final legacy of her husband. The hospital's discovery turns her world upside down. Sam begins to feel fiercely protective of his accidental family, and soon he and Emilia discover that fate can lead to a lov...

From the author of The Elephant Keeper, nominated for the Costa Award for Best Novel, comes a poignant imagining of Thomas Hardy’s relationship with his last museA celebrated author, in the winter of his life, awaits a visit from a beautiful young actress – the leading lady in a staging of his most famous tragedy. But his wife is troubled. An anxious and sickly woman, she watches the growing intimacy between her husband and the young woman, and becomes tormented by the idea that the...