Her white face stared blankly back at him. He fancied that she had cringed, her slim body pressing further into the wall behind her. There had been only one thing he had ever been able to do to women and, advancing now, smiling, he did it.

Mary Jago had donated bone-marrow to save the life of someone she didn't know. This generous act led to her break-up with Alistair, for whom it was as if her beauty had been plundered. However, the man whose life she had saved would change Mary's life in a way she could never have imagined.

Two young girls disappear then return home unharmed some days later. Chief Inspector Wexford is concerned about a paedophile who has recently been released back into the community but he cannot foresee the series of serious crimes waiting to happen.

When her mother, Eve, tells Liza that she must leave their remote home, the gatehouse of a country mansion, Liza is terrified. She has almost no knowledge of a world described by her mother as evil and destructive. Their strange, enclosed life together is over because Eve has killed a man. And he is not the first.

The winter before he was sixteen, amateur magician Pup made a Faustian pact and sold his soul to the devil. He wasn't quite sure what he was going to get in exchange. Pup's older sister, Dolly, is manically obsessed with her birthmark, believing it is responsible for her status as a social outcast. She becomes pathologically transfixed by Pup's dabbling in magic, desperate to believe he has occult powers that can cure her disfigurement, improve their lives, and kill their stepmother. As Dolly's obsession grows, a young mentally disturbed Irishman lurks just around the corner, inseparable from...

Adam and Eve and Pinch Me went down to the river to bathe. Adam and Eve were drowned. Who was saved? This old nursery rhyme is a favorite of Jerry Leach, a handsome ne'er do well, who sponges off women. Five women, unknown to each other, are his willing victims. But Jerry, almost accidentally, becomes the victim of one of his female prey.

The River Brede had burst its banks, and not a single house in the valley had escaped flooding. The teenagers are fifteen and thirteen, the sitter's in her thirties, they can all swim and the house is miles above the floods. There hadn't been anything like this kind of rain in living memory. The Subaqua Task Force could find no trace of Giles.

A Wexford mystery. Only 18 black people live in Kingsmarkham. One is Wexford's new doctor, whose daughter disappears. Chief Inspector Wexford takes more than a mere professional interest in the case, testing not only his powers of deduction, but his beliefs and prejudices about racial equality.

The first girl had a bite mark on her neck but they traced the DNA to her boyfriend. But the tabloids got hold of the story and called the killer 'The Rottweiler'. The latest murder takes place near Inez Ferry's antique shop. The murderer usually strangles his victims and removes something personal - like a cigarette lighter or a necklace.

From the author of SIMISOLA, a novel featuring Chief Inspector Wexford, whose wife allies herself to a protest movement when a by-pass is planned for Kingsmarkham, but the plot thickens when the lifeless body of a young woman is discovered, and people go missing, including his wife.