Carlton Dellar, the esteemed poet, couldn't have hoped for a more eventful eightieth birthday. His extended family has gathered under the reproachful eye of his wife to celebrate what is silently suspected to be his last year. Hours later, the guests gather on the lawns in confusion as Larchmoor Place burns to the ground. Worse, Carlton's niece is unaccounted for and her twin brother is brutally assaulted and now lies unconscious in the hospital. Superintendent Mike Yeadings of the Thames Valley CID strongly suspects arson, a feeling intensified when he learns that the guest list included the aging poet's brother Matthew, one of the country's most powerful and successful senior prosecutors. But as the family is questioned, it becomes clear to Yeadings and his team that perhaps Matthew Dellar is not the only member to be at risk from secret enmity and undercurrents of jealousy and frustration. And when a search of the wreckage uncovers a charred corpse, the enquiry...

Superintendent Mike Yeadings' sergeant, Rosemary Zyczynski, (call her "Z") had a psychic itch about her landlady's celebration dinner. "Did you get a feeling," she asks her lover, Max, "that there's more going on under this roof than readily meets the eye?" Rosemary couldn't have been righter. The dinner was in honor of the new house - a large, once private mansion that had been through numerous changes of face throughout the years. Now Z's landlady had bought it to replace her original dingy building, and Rosemary had moved with her from the old to the new. The partry was to welcome the tenants of the several new apartments that had been made in the new house. Z's uneasiness about her fellow tenants was quickly forgotten; she had more pressing problems of her own. Yeadings was about to choose either Rosemary or Beaumont, his other sergeant, to promote to inspector, and the unavoidable subsurface rivalry between the two very different police...

Clare Curzon sets her crimes in the leafy Thames Valley, a lovely enough part of old England where one of the old villages seem right out of a nineteenth-century painting. But people are the same mix of good and bad whatever scenery surrounds them, and Superintendent Mike Yeadings has as much human dissolution to deal with as if he policed the London streets. Searching for a killer in The Body of a Woman, the superintendent and his sergeants, Beaumont and Rosemary Zyczynski, encounter as diverse a group of involved citizens as could be found anywhere.  The victim herself is a puzzle. The corpse, clad in carnival dress and with a huge bird’s-head mask hiding her face, is revealed to be a respectable, conservatively behaved woman of the town, a woman whom no one would ever have imagined made up and dressed so bizarrely. How did she come, not only to be brutally murdered, but done up so garishly? Yeadings and his team must look in every direction, starting with the...

One freezing February evening, a Filipino barman named Ramon witnesses someone plunging from the seventh story of a luxury penthouse. Instead of calling the police, he heads straight for the apartment from which the body has fallen. It belongs to an old woman with a mysterious past, who could not get out of bed by herself. Superintendent Mike Yeadings and Sergeant Rosemary Zycynski lead the investigation. Searching for a link between a teenage drug victim, a missing care assistant, and an unidentified corpse, they discover further mysteries behind the glass wall of the penthouse. Other lives are threatened and the circle of menace widens to involve the dead woman's unhappily married doctor and estranged granddaughter. Clare Curzon's latest mystery masterfully unpicks the events and motives that lead toward the apparent murder of a woman already mortally frail. Her brilliantly fast-paced style keeps the pages turning as the chilling truth is...

Awoken in the middle of the night by a banging barn door, farm manager Ned Barton braves the storm to investigate. Inside, he finds the mutilated body of a woman displayed like a sacrificial trophy on bales of straw.Superintendent Mike Yeadings of the Thames Valley police is faced with multiple murder as three related bodies are discovered in the manor house: an entire family massacred, except for a missing boy. The hunt for him, whether as prime suspect or threatened survivor, unearths deeper layers of mystery.Clare Curzon's latest masterpiece presents a thrilling journey of intrigue and red herrings as Yeadings unpicks, link by link, the intricate chain of events that has led to these appalling murders.