The death of a young artist leaves Gently desperately piecing together the portrait of a murderer. When artist Shirley Johnson is murdered and her body dumped outside a provincial police headquarters, Gently is despatched from London to Northshire to take over the investigation. The prime suspect appears to be the woman's husband...

Gently wades through a torrent of suspects when a body is found floating face down in the river. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing - that's if you can call having too many suspects, too many potential murderers, 'a good thing'. What Gently has to work out is which of them had the cold blooded nerve to smash the victim's skull.

When a timber merchant is found stabbed in Norchester, the local police find an obvious suspect in his son, a stunt rider in a circus. But Inspector Gently realises there is more to it than appears on the surface.

Having been invited to spend Christmas in the country, fishing for pike, Gently finds himself hunting a completely different predator when a guest at Merely Hall, a nearby stately home, is found dead at the foot of the grand staircase on Christmas morning.

When a body is found in a hopper of sour flour at an old mill, it turns out to be that of a small-time race-track crook from London. What he'd been doing in so unlikely a place as Lynton is the first question to baffle Chief Inspector George Gently.