Spotlights focused on the Abbey buildings. The air held a piece of silver moon. An oboe blew a soft pure note. Clear young voices broke into a madrigal... ...listening, in mellow mood, Max Maunciple drank just one gin too many. And died. An egotist, a blackmailer, no-one mourned for Maunciple. But one person did not believe that alcohol was the only poison that poisonous man had imbibed. And when Penny Wanawake seeks the Truth, the Truth, however elusive, gets dragged kick- ing and screaming into the open. Penny Dreadful is the second in the series of Penny Wanawake Mysteries

Ex-biology teacher turned bridge professional Cassandra Swann makes another bid to solve a baffling case--the death of an Indian doctor who was one of her bridge pupils--while simultaneously trying to unravel the mystery of her own father's death during a bar brawl many years ago.

Lower lngleford seems a typical rural hamlet in the sunlit uplands of northern England, complete with Village Institute, village green, and lord of the manor. But something is seriously amiss: milking equipment explodes; brakes are tampered with; bullets fly - someone is trying to kill the squire. Or so it seems. And the motives are tangled in a morass of shady property deals, art forgeries, and various dubious business practices. When Kendal Sartain, local landowner and apparent target, calls on Penny Wanawake for help, he gets it. And rather more than he'd bargained for. Six feet, 1261bs,...

The news hit the papers ... Dr Bruno Fenlinghetti, esteemed Italian archaeologist and director of Rome's Instituto Ferlinghetti, had disappeared from his home near Naples. A pair of priceless statuettes had also vanished. You didn't have to be Perry Mason to realise that the doctor and the statuettes were thought to be travelling together. Dear forgetful Bruno - disorganised, thoughtless, but never, Penny knew, never dishonest. Bruno, was incorruptible; he didn't mess with drink or drugs or boys, and if he developed a vice he had the Ferlinghetti fortune to indulge it. The exquisitely tuned...

When aristocrat Amazon Penny Wanawake deputizes for her mother at a super de luxe hotel planning conference on Costas Kyriakou's private Aegean island, she expects boredom and backbiting. And perhaps a brief flirtation with her old friend Theo. But not a body ... 'The glorious PennyWanawake' The Times 'She emerges triumphant, having scattered wisecracks along her way like bread crumbs' Financial Times 'A stunning creation' Evening Standard

When one of Cassie Swann's bridge partners, Naomi Harris, dies from an overdose, she is shocked but not suspicious. But things look rather different with the appearance of a young woman claiming to be Naomi's daughter, given up for adoption twenty years earlier, and a secret lover who insists that Naomi was murdered by her husband. Guiltily aware that she was not a good friend to Naomi while she was alive, Cassie decides to try to find the truth - and soon discovers that while Naomi had little reason to kill herself, there are several reasons why someone might have wanted her dead....

The sixth mystery featuring Cassie Swann. When Cassie becomes the victim of a hit-and-run driver, she doesn't expect him to walk later into a police station and confess. Then a young student at Oxford is murdered. Cassie's relentless suitor, Charlie Quartermaine, feels the events are somehow connected.