When the body of a mysterious foreigner is found in the river, a police investigation uncover a chilling link between the death and another killing that could be tied to the shadowy pasts and dark secrets of Lady Isabelle Delmayne and Eugenie, Vicountess Crowthorne, in a mystery set in Edwardian England.
Supt. Yeadings of Thames Valley investigates the murder of a customs officer. The investigation soon leads to Fraylings Court, a faltering family estate, and a possible counterfeiting ring.
Impetuous as ever, Lucy Sedgwick plunges into a second marriage and the unfamiliar medical world of London in 1921. New concepts of clinical psychology and genetics are being probed in university circles and in some quarters resisted. The aftermath of World War I has left a wake of damaged minds as well as maimed and sightless bodies."--Jacket.
Two strangers, a research microbiologist and a commuter-line driver, both once fired by ambition but now disillusioned, encounter each other at a major crossroads in their lives. In a vicious and mistaken attack, one becomes a hapless victim of the other's desperation. As the Thames Valley Serious Crimes Squad, headed by Mike Yeadings, investigates the disappearance of one of the men, grim secrets of national importance emerge. Involvement spreads beyond the men's families to a mysterious immigrant couple with a tragic past. Suspicion falls on Detective Superintendent Zyczynski's journalist lover as he is drawn in to counter the threat to a young child's life. Clare Curzon has written a stunning police procedural with strong psychological depth and mesmerizing characters.
A young woman wakes in an unfamiliar house with no memory of who she is or what she is doing there, in a blood-stained dress, while a dead man lies in the room next door.
The first novel by bestselling crime-writer Clare Curzon, originally published only under the pseudonym of Marie Buchanan and the title Greenshards. Greenshards had been Olive Minton's family home for years, but now it was owned by the Blanchards - the fey, introvert Fenella and her charismatic husband Giles. From the moment they moved in, Olive found herself strongly held under Giles's spell. What weird power drew the crippled Olive and the enigmatic Giles together? And why did his wife die so mysteriously? Only Greenshards itself could reveal the secret...
This latest from genre veteran Clare Curzon makes a thrilling addition to this entertaining series. Sandy Craddock witnesses his detested half brother deliberately mown down by a hit-and-run driver outside his place of work, and he guiltily assumes that he himself was the intended victim. Convinced the killers will strike again once they discover they’ve targeted the wrong man, Sandy goes on the run, leaving his boss to wrongly identify the heavily bandaged and comatose Warren Laing as his missing employee. In a daze, Sandy takes refuge in Warren’s luxurious apartment. However, it isn’t long before a mysterious woman turns up at Warren’s home and takes charge of Sandy’s complex situation, enrolling them both in an arts course in an isolated castle. When one of the students is murdered, Sandy realizes he’s in too deep. But how can he distance himself from the enchanting Fiona, who has her own secrets to hide, or explain to the police why he’s impersonating his critically injured brother? Caught in a web of his own making, Sandy realizes he is opening himself up to more danger than he could ever have imagined. Superintendent Mike Yeadings of the Thames Valley team must unravel the web of deceit in the present, while also under pressure to solve a cold case resurrected from the past.
Superintendent Mike Yeadings investigates the beating death of a woman found naked in a stable, a probe that leads to the discovery of the bodies of the woman's husband, little girl, and a neighbor child in the nearby farmhouse.
The mysterious fall of a bed-ridden elderly woman from the seventh floor of an apartment building triggers an investigation, led by Superintendent Mike Yeadings and Sergeant Rosemary Zycynski.
May Matsukawa, a half-English, half-Japanese girl, runs away from her boarding school. Her parents are close to estrangement, and when she turns up at her mother's house, her father, a multi-millionaire, sends a business associate to escort her back to school, she becomes increasingly distraut. When this man is found murdered in a nearby hotel the first question asked by Mike Yeadings and his colleagues in the Thames Valley police is - could May be a killer? Or is it more likely to have been May's mother? Or was it some other party who'd mistaken him for Matsukawa himself?
Clare Curzon sets her crimes in the leafy Thames Valley, a lovely enough part of old England where one of the old villages seem right out of a nineteenth-century painting. But people are the same mix of good and bad whatever scenery surrounds them, and Superintendent Mike Yeadings has as much human dissolution to deal with as if he policed the London streets. Searching for a killer in The Body of a Woman, the superintendent and his sergeants, Beaumont and Rosemary Zyczynski, encounter as diverse a group of involved citizens as could be found anywhere. The victim herself is a puzzle. The corpse, clad in carnival dress and with a huge bird's-head mask hiding her face, is revealed to be a respectable, conservatively behaved woman of the town, a woman whom no one would ever have imagined made up and dressed so bizarrely. How did she come, not only to be brutally murdered, but done up so garishly? Yeadings and his team must look in every direction, starting with the dead woman's womanizing professor husband and her distressed teenage stepdaughter. How is the star-crossed mathematician (who studies chaos theory at the roulette table) connected to the dead woman? Through his drug-damaged son? Could she have been close to---have even known the successful bookie, his family, his bodyguards? The police have good reasons for looking at all the people in this psychological merry-go-round, and another attempted murder only complicates their work, spreading the suspicion to touch even more of the town's kaleidoscope of citizens. As always, at the center of Curzon's suspenseful and puzzling story is the likeable, reliable Yeadings, as genuine a police officer as any you might find in the English countryside. He goes after his villains armed with a mix of experience and common sense---and real-life personal problems that only add to his believability. Readers can be certain that Inspector Yeadings and his sergeants will get their prey---if only after overcoming highly suspenseful odds.
Superintendent Mike Yeadings must reopen the unsolved case of Caroline Winterton, who disappeared eight years earlier, when her daughter vanishes under mysterious circumstances.
Superintendent Mike Yeadings' sergeant, Rosemary Zyczynski, (call her "Z") had a psychic itch about her landlady's celebration dinner. "Did you get a feeling," she asks her lover, Max, "that there's more going on under this roof than readily meets the eye?" Rosemary couldn't have been righter. The dinner was in honor of the new house - a large, once private mansion that had been through numerous changes of face throughout the years. Now Z's landlady had bought it to replace her original dingy building, and Rosemary had moved with her from the old to the new. The partry was to welcome the tenants of the several new apartments that had been made in the new house. Z's uneasiness about her fellow tenants was quickly forgotten; she had more pressing problems of her own. Yeadings was about to choose either Rosemary or Beaumont, his other sergeant, to promote to inspector, and the unavoidable subsurface rivalry between the two very different police detectives had raised a barrier that hindered them in their work. The work they did have came close to Rosemary herself and startled her into remembering her words to Max. The body of one of the tenants, a single woman who had moved in with her mother, was found brutally murdered, and the case naturally was Yeadings' responsibility and thus that of Rosemary and Beaumont. Curzon uncannily keeps on bringing her readers believable characters, both the stalwart Yeadings and his Woman Friday, Z, as well as whole groups of once-a-book individuals who set a reader right smack in the middle of the little English town and the puzzling and intriguing crime that can be found there.
Superintendent Mike Yeadings and his team of officers from the Thames River Valley Police Force are called in to investigate a savage murder. When a woman's body is found along the river - strangled, her body mutilated, her blond hair hacked from her scalp - the sleepy village of Markham finds itself rudely awakened. The murdered woman had no apparent ties to the village. But when a student barely escapes from a similar attack, the village must confront the frightening reality that a murderer has come to inhabit their quaint village home. Mike Yeadings and his Thames Valley team come to fear they are faced with a possible serial killer -- one with a penchant for blondes. As the team races to track down the unknown woman's murderer before he strikes again, the village finds itself stirred to crimes of its own -- spiteful mischief, flaunted adultery, and the puzzling death of a respected country doctor. The unsettled reaction of the village is echoed within Yeadings's team, where the detectives fume over the return of their own unwelcome outsider, D. I. Jenner.
On a cold November morning, Detective Superintendent Mike Yeadings and his team are called to a pub car park in Henley-on-Thames where the body of a woman has been found. As they examine the body, Detective Sergeant Rosemary Zycynski is horrified to realise that the dead woman is her next door neighbour, Sheila Winter." "Sheila was a business woman, the owner of a local garden centre and dedicated to her work. Quiet, professional and unassuming, she lived with her ageing mother and didn't appear to have much in her life outside her work. So, the discovery of her body naked wrapped only in a black fur coat is a shock to all who knew her." "Could one of Zycynski's new neighbours at Ashbourne House hold the key to the mystery? There's the security conscious and secretive Paul Wormsley; Martin Chisholm who doesn't seem to be telling the truth about his work; his 'companion', the emotionally unstable Neil Raynes. And what about Dr Gabriel Fenner, Sheila's estranged father of her mother, Vanessa, a retired actress rapidly declining into dementia." "There's also the garden centre manager, Barry Childe; Sheila's body was found in his car and he had only recently been released on parole after serving time for a particularly brutal attack on a young woman. The newly appointed Detective Inspector Walter Salmon is keen to get Childe back behind bars as soon as possible."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
On Friday evening, Annette Briers is flattered to share a cab to Marylebone Station with her elegant and standoffish boss, Miranda Gregory. At the station, as they sit over coffee waiting for their train, Miranda becomes inexplicably shaken and insists that she return to the office. On Monday morning, Annette returns to work to find a very dead stranger seated at her boss's desk. As Detective-Superintendent Mike Yeadings and his team from the Thames Valley Police Force begin to investigate, it becomes clear that Miranda never reached her office on Friday. An unconscious hit-and-run victim in a suburban hospital is soon identified as the missing woman. The London force is brought in to work with Yeadings and his team as they search for the elusive link between the murder and the traffic accident. While Miranda, an orphan with no apparent leads to her past, hovers near death, a shadowy pattern of past evil and frustrated love emerges, confounding investigators. Was Miranda a martyr or a murderess?
When Ramon witnesses someone plunging to their death from seven storeys up, instead of phoning the emergency services, he heads straight for the apartment from which the woman has fallen. Superintendent Mike Yeadings and his Thames Valley team investigate the death, and the complexity of their enquiries deepens when they discover further mysteries behind the glass wall of the luxury penthouse. Meanwhile, Dr Keith Stanford gazes up from the street below, the glass wall framing the woman he must love in silence whilst his sick wife plays her suicidal games to keep him beside her.
When a local woman is found floating in Shotters Wood, mysteriously masked and shaven, Thames Valley Detective Superintendent Mike Yeadings gets involved in a maze of motive, madness and clues that are as bizarre as the crime scene itself.
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