Poor Ted Gray: Nothing ever seems to go his way, from an unhappy childhood to a loveless marriage to a lackluster career. His luck doesn't improve when he stumbles across the brutally strangled body of a local schoolgirl. Now Ted is a murder suspect, and Charmian Daniels must get to the bottom of a case that grows stranger with every clue---and seems to implicate a surprising number of people. What haunts young Pix, a schoolboy who saw too much? What possesses Una Gray, the missing suspect's sad little wife? What drives the headmaster to desperate measures to save his school? And how much does Charmian's friend Mary, a beautiful socialite with a nose for gossip, really know? The answers are as elusive as they are shocking in this riveting, compelling mystery by one of the genre's most accomplished writers.
A woman awaits release from prison, but before the prison gates have opened, a spate of murders rocks the town, the corpses bearing the same body marks as her previous victims.
Charmian Daniels (last seen in Murder in the Garden), chief metropolitan police superintendent of Central London, interrupts a medical leave when beautiful Vivien Charles, member of a witches' coven, is found fatally stabbed in her home, her corpse surrounded by cult objects. An autopsy reveals that Vivien was pregnant and the fetus deformed. Vivien's fellow witches, still reeling from the shock of her death, are dumbfounded by the finding, but sexy Joshua Fox, the lone male in the coven and laughingly called its warlock, is unsurprised. When Charmian learns that the primary duty of a warlock is to impregnate witches, the hapless man becomes the prime suspect--until he, too, is stabbed in his home. Every clue leads to the coven, but Charmian is unconvinced, and digs into Vivien's past to discover a more pedestrian kind of sorcery that might conjure up a killer. Melville serves up a balanced brew of career politics, the occult, and the psychology of murder.
A complex, riveting mystery from one of the genre's most acclaimed writers. After the hottest English summer in years, the wet autumn that follows brings little relief for Chief Superintendent Charmian Daniels, whose recent successes have earned her not just a promotion but also deep resentment from some of her colleagues. Now she must find the killer of Nella Fisher, a young woman whose unlikely connections extend to two friends of Charmian's, women Nella tried to bribe with information about a man intending to do them harm. The case is loaded with problems for Charmian, from her links to two possible suspects to her growing sense that police corruption may be involved. A lingering scent of cigar smoke, threatening letters, and a brush with death confirm Charmian's fear that she is the killer's real target, but can she unmask her enemy before it's too late?
Windsor may look picturesque and old-fashioned, but policewoman Charmian Daniels knows all too well that the charming village is not immune to the realities of modern life and crime, most recently evidenced by the disappearance of eight-year-old Sarah Holt. Charmian's worst fears are exacerbated by the discovery of a young male corpse, lying next to the skeleton of a baby buried nearly a century before. Could the two deaths and Sarah's disappearance be somehow related? As Charmian races toward the truth, a killer races to stop her -- and to keep an ancient secret dead and buried.
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