A clergyman should be above reproach, an example to his flock. But what is Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill to make of the Reverend Robin Ainger, Rector of St Botolph's in the quiet Suffolk town of Breckham Market, when the good-looking, popular parson lies to the police? With the thawing of prolonged winter snow, the skeleton of a recently dead man has been found in a meadow belonging to the Rectory. Whose is the body, and how did it come there? Both Ainger and his wife Gillian are taut with suppressed hysteria at the discovery. As Quantrill – in the face of carefully framed denials from the Rectory, but with hints that Mrs Ainger's elderly father knows more than he's telling – struggles to piece together clues centering on the presence of two Australians, an uncouth backpacker and a clever girl with beautiful flame-red hair, he begins to guess at the depth of suffering hidden beneath the conventional routine of Rectory...

Chief Inspector Quantrill was a very sensible policeman. But Shakespeare was not on his beat and he was not sure who Ophelia was. His ignorance embarrassed him when Mary Gedge, the most brilliant young girl in Ashthorpe, was found dead in the river, apparently drowned in shallow water while gathering flowers on May Day morning. Others were quick to see the resemblance, among them Mrs Bloomfield, head of the school where Mary had been a pupil before gaining admission—one of the first girls to do so—to King's College, Cambridge. Ophelia was a beautiful innocent who fell in love with the wrong man and positively invited him to humiliate and destroy her. But was this true of Mary? And if so, which of her several admirers had caused the tragedy? Quantrill knows the people of Ashthorpe and of Breckham Market—the East Anglian district where he works—almost too well. We, too, get to know the locality as his investigation proceeds and...

Ziggy and Gladys Crackjaw, in their late seventies, living in squalid isolation on the outskirts of Byland, a remote East Anglian village, suddenly disappear. Their pension books on the living room mantelpiece, indicative of an intended return, mystify the local police in the persons of Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill, Head of Breckham Market CID, and his cool and elegant sergeant, Hilary Lloyd. Do the smears of blood on the floor and iron fender in front of the fireplace indicate domestic violence? Janet Thacker, the brisk village sub-postmistress, who spent her youth in Byland but who now pretends to know nothing about the Crackjaws and their eight children, is Hilary Lloyd's first target for interrogation. The extraordinary story of a primitive yet aspiring rural childhood and adolescence emerges from the pages of a 'stolen' manuscript to lead Quantrill and Lloyd to a solution to the mystery of the missing Crackjaws. In this lucidly written, heartfelt, dual...

Clanger Bell, Breckham Market's well-known drunk, is run over and killed as he staggers across the street at closing time. It seems to everyone – to town residents, the police, and to Clanger's only relative, his sister Miss Eunice Bell – that his death was an accident, brought upon himself by his drunken folly. Certainly no one blames the unfortunate driver, a newly rich and newly married man called Jack Goodrum who has recently bought a large house in the town. So when Miss Bell changes her mind, and calls in Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill and his attractive Sergeant, Hilary Lloyd, to announce that she is convinced that the 'accident' was in fact murder, the two detectives are reluctant to take her seriously. Subsequent events, however, prove serious indeed. A nasty robbery and a brutal killing send Quantrill and Hilary probing the lives of local people, and uncovering disturbing depths of hatred and bitterness. Quantrill's own private...

There is no shortage of suspects when Jasmine Woods – an attractive, successful romantic novelist – is found by her anguished young secretary, Alison, savagely murdered. Though men were attracted to her and women liked her company, their feelings were often ambivalent, as Alison's father, Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill, and his clever young assistant, Martin Tait, both observed at a party celebrating Jasmine's latest novel. Her cousin, a failed playwright, resented her riches; her neighbour, intellectual television pundit Jonathan Elliott, despised her kind of fiction; his feminist wife Roz hated its old-fashioned message. Even Quantrill himself resented the fact that his wife was more roused by Jasmine's fictional heroes than by himself . . . So when Jasmine's body is discovered, one morning some months later, Quantrill and Tait set to work to interview those hostile friends; to trace valuable oriental ornaments missing from her...

In Tudor England, in the year 1530, Henry VIII's desire to marry Anne Boleyn is frustrated by the Pope's unwillingness to grant him a divorce from his first Queen. The church is still the strongest power in the land, and the wealthiest. In Norfolk, the town of Castleacre, ancestral home of the Ackland family, is dependent not on them but upon the great Cluniac Priory that overshadows it. When Will Ackland, younger son of an impoverished gentleman, returns home after years abroad he finds his evil-tempered brother Gilbert cursing the Prior's new bailiff for his exactions. Then a corpse is discovered, not only stabbed but mutilated beyond recognition. Is it the Prior's bailiff? If so, Gilbert is the chief suspect and the townspeople, who enjoy a hanging, will not be sorry to see him dangling from the gibbet. But Will discovered that the bailiff had other enemies, some of them in unexpected places. He discovered, too, that frustrated desire can be as...

In the hottest summer for half a century, someone kidnaps Beryl Websdell's garden gnome, leaving a ransom note demanding half a pound of jelly babies for its return. Beryl is upset, and so are her neighbours in the rural Suffolk village where she lives, because the gnome disappeared three days after her daughter also went missing. Beryl doesn't think her daughter has been kidnapped . . . not really . . . but she is worried. And so are the police. Inspector Martin Tait is holidaying in the neighbourhood at the time, visiting his elderly Aunt Con form whom he hopes one day to inherit a lot of money. That, when it happens, will suit his plans to become a very young and very wealthy Chief Constable . . . and perhaps to marry Alison, pretty daughter of Detective Chief Inspector Quantrill, his ex-boss? But two things happen to jolt Martin Tait out of his pleasant holiday day-dreams: he finds a body in an empty cottage of his Aunt's; and Aunt Con later...

A decent and happily married man, Derek Cartwright finds himself dreaming of murdering his resident mother-in-law. And when by chance he meets the repellent Hugh Packer, a stranger who is also lumbered with an elderly dependent, what had merely been a midnight fantasy suddenly seems a practical possibility. Like latter-day 'strangers on a train', they could swap murders. That is Packer's idea, anyway: 'You've got a problem, I've got a problem, and together we've come up with the perfect solution. The sooner we get the jobs done the better.' Derek Cartwright knows he can never bring himself to murder anyone – not even an old man incapacitated by a stroke. But each time he thinks of his mother- in-law and how her presence in their home distresses his wife, he finds Packer's proposition more difficult to resist. After all, he only has to leave the old lady alone one evening – perhaps by taking his wife out to dinner. But then, there is the...

In a copse near a busy Suffolk road, a body has been found neatly parcelled in plastic. And headless. Detective Chief Inspector Douglas Quantrill and his team have been working on the case for two months without a single lead. Sharing Quantrill's office, and replacing cocky young Martin Tait, is a new detective sergeant, who has shoulder-length dark hair and a good deal of cool competence. Hilary Lloyd makes Quantrill feel uncomfortable. Not that he has anything against women detectives, of course . . . but how can he share with her the easy camaraderie that team-working should involve? This new constraint at work combines with the apparently insoluble murder to make Quantrill unusually gloomy. But a thoroughly nasty little incident cheers him slightly: someone has left a decapitated cat and a warning sprayed in blood-red paint on the doorstep of a local house. Might headless cat and headless corpse be linked? Hilary Lloyd, interviewing the owner...