"What happens," Bobby asked, "when a woman with an irresistible attraction for men, and the man with an irresistible attraction for women, meet? When glamour meets glamour . . . ?"

"Lummy," said the superintendent.

A seemingly innocent young woman has disappeared, presumably to elope with an unscrupulous lothario. Despite his wife Olive's urging, Met Commander Bobby Owen is originally reluctant to get involved in a seemingly personal matter. But he soon finds his professional whiskers twitching when he discovers the cad in the case is a former suspect in a...

"It's murder all right; no one could bash his own head in the way this chap's was."

The stranger's body was discovered by businesswoman Mrs Holcombe, the unofficial queen of Pending Dale. As if there wasn't enough gossip rife in the village, now the Queen may be under suspicion of murder.

Talk is cheap, but reputations are valuable - but were they worth buying silence at the cost of a man's life? When Bobby Owen of the Yard arrives in Pending Dale to investigate, amid a panoply of local characters and red herrings he discovers a compelling and unpredictable motive. A...

"You called him a 'wrong 'un'. Why? Birds of a feather know each other? Is that the idea? Or do you really know something about him? Oh, and don't lie."

Commander Bobby Owen of the Yard is on his way to visit Willoughby Wynne, concerning a gang of thieves operating in the immediate rural neighbourhood. But when murder comes, amid the loganberry bushes, it is a suspected blackmailer, not gangster, who is found strangled. Mr Wynne demands to be considered a suspect himself, but the list isn't short. It seems more than one person in the district has been living a double life,...

The stage was set, Bobby thought, the actors in position; but how the drama would develop, that he could not even guess.

The churchyard at Hillings-under-Moor is the final resting place of Janet Merton - buried, so everyone believes, along with celebrated poet Stephen Asprey's unpublished verses and love letters. The potential value of the poems has posed a constant danger of grave-robbing, but the Duke of Blegborough has a new cause for alarm. He has heard that there is an official move to open the grave, and its contents may shed a most unwelcome light on his dead...

"You're the murder man, aren't you?" Mrs. James demanded.

"Well, that's not exactly how I describe myself," Bobby answered.

Bobby Owen and his wife Olive are on holiday, enjoying a motor tour of England, when they visit Bobby's old ancestral home and his cousin Myra. An eerie air hangs over the household, where Teddy Peel, a psychic medium of dubious repute, has become a fixture. Myra's husband himself is a specialist in African folklore, the owner of a genuine witch doctor's bag. What's inside the bag, and how that connects to the promise of riches,...

At that moment the door opened and a deep, harsh, husky voice said:

"Discussing my murder, are you?"

Bobby Owen of Scotland Yard and his wife Olive are busy bargain-hunting in a famous London department store. But a shopping expedition nearly turns into a crime scene when Olive discovers a necklace stuffed in her handbag. The plot thickens when it transpires it was placed there by one Lord Newdagonby - whose stout denial of the act is swiftly followed by a fatal knife blow to a prominent scientist. The meaning of this locked-room murder, and its connection...