Crime and Mystery set in Devon

 ***Signed by the author***

When a man knocks on his door desperate for help, claiming someone is trying to kill him, ex Met detective Eden Driscoll leaps at the chance to solve a mystery. But before he can ask more questions, the stranger disappears.

His cry for help came too late – that same night a house along the coast is burnt to the ground. Fire officers discover a man’s remains among the rubble.

After a monotonous summer caring for his nine-year-old nephew, Eden is itching to investigate. Working with local police, he uncovers a web of deception, jealousy, and corruption.

***Signed by the author - exclusive to Gumshoe Books***

When Juno Browne purchased a car for her lover, Daniel Thorncroft, she was not expecting that the previous owner would lock a dead body in the boot. Who the dead man could be is a persistent question, as is the whereabouts of the seller, Amber Horrell. While Inspector Ford and the Ashburton police are on the case, Juno's insatiable curiosity and concern for the missing Amber lead her to start sleuthing on her own.

It turns out that the Horrells, Amber's family, are notorious in this corner of Devon, with an ancient murder and vanishing red diamond in their past and a shady antiques business very much in their present. With a second murder, Juno's involvement in the investigation becomes more complicated and the line between reality and fiction also become blurred. But the truth, she discovers, is far more complicated than it seems.

On the eve of his wedding to Evelyn Cheyne, who he met and fell in love with during the course of The Unicorn Murders, former spy Kenwood Blake is summoned to Devon by spymaster Sir Henry Merrivale, and asked to take part in an undercover operation. Despite being assured he’ll be back in London in time for the wedding the following morning, Blake is unconvinced. Once in Torquay, he is sent to investigate Paul Hogenauer, a local scientist of German heritage, who has been dabbling in spiritualism and the occult – a man Merrivale and Devon’s Chief Constable Colonel Charters suspect of anti-British espionage.

But, on entering his house, he finds Hogenauer dead in a chair in his sitting room, showing all the signs of strychnine poisoning. When he finds Hogenauer’s friend and confidant Dr Keppel dead in his hotel room in Bristol, also apparently from strychnine poisoning, he has a seemingly impossible mystery to unravel. Can he solve the clues, bring the killer to justice and still get to the church in time to get married in the morning?

Introduced by Tom Adams.

As a favour to an old friend, Hercule Poirot finds himself at a summer fete in Devon, taking part not in a Treasure Hunt, but a Murder Hunt, in this never-before-published novella version of Dead Man’s Folly. Now released for the first time in print in this illustrated collector’s edition. Sir George and Lady Stubbs, the hosts of a village fête, hit upon the novel idea of staging a mock murder mystery.

In good faith, Ariadne Oliver, the well known crime writer, agrees to organise their murder hunt. But at the last minute Ariadne calls her friend Hercule Poirot for his expert assistance. Instinctively, she senses that something sinister is about to happen… In 1954, Agatha Christie wrote this novella with the intention of donating the proceeds to a fund set up to buy stained glass windows for her local church at Churston Ferrers, and she filled the story with references to local places, including her own home of Greenway.

But having completed it, she decided instead to expand the story into a full-length novel, Dead Man’s Folly, which was published two years later, and donated a Miss Marple story (Greenshaw’s Folly) to the church fund instead. Unseen for sixty years, Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly is finally published in this collector’s hardback edition. The book includes a jacket painting, illustrations and exclusive introduction by Tom Adams, Agatha Christie’s most famous cover artist, who is back illustrating Agatha Christie for the first time in more than 30 years.

Murder and mystery lurk in the hills and on the shores of Devon and Cornwall in this new Special Edition Hardback of Agatha Christie’s finest countryside stories. Growing up in Torquay, Agatha Christie’s love of the West Country never left her and many of her finest stories are set on the moors and shores of Devon and Cornwall. This collection celebrates some of her finest countryside stories featuring a cast of Christie’s most iconic characters: Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford and Parker Pyne.

Also included in this story, published in its original form over a century after it first appeared in The Sketch magazine, join Poirot and Hastings as they solve a grizzly murder in The Adventure of the Dartmoor Bungalow. Also included in this collection are:
The Plymouth Express
The Unbreakable Alibi
The Case of the Missing Will
Ingots of Gold
Double Sin
The Hound of Death
The Cornish Mystery
The Regatta Mystery
The Flock of Geryon
The Edge
The Bloodstained Pavement
The Adventure of the Dartmoor Bungalow

The body of Leo Hawkins is found in a Devon holiday cottage, the cause of death carbon monoxide poisoning. Was this a tragic accident or something more sinister? CSI Ally Dymond will follow the evidence wherever it leads.

Leo’s wife gives an account of his final hours, but something isn’t adding up. Graffiti left by an anti-tourist group is discovered nearby. The only consistent thread in the investigation is that no one is telling the truth.

When a second body turns up, Ally and the murder team must examine everything they thought they knew, untangling a web of suspects to get to the truth. But can they catch the killer before they strike again?

December 1929, and young back-room journalist Charlotte Blood is sent to the isolated Ravenswick Abbey in the wilds of Dartmoor to investigate the murder of the heir to the Ravenswick fortune. She faces a locked room mystery like no other, a crime impossible to solve. Almost a year ago, on New Year’s Eve, nine members of the Ravenswick household stepped into a vast, ornate lift installed for the ailing head of the family, Lord Ravenswick.

The power failed. The lift stopped. In the darkness, a single shot was fired.

As the light returned, the occupants were met with the sight of Charles Ravenswick, the heir, dead on the floor, the gun lying in the centre of the lift. No one could have got in. No one could have got out.

All have motives. None have alibis. Charlotte Blood arrives under the pretence of reporting on the family's infamous ravens.

She finds a house haunted by suspicion and secrets. She must unravel the mystery and with it the terrible truth behind the Ravenwicks. Her search will not only lead her down a dangerous path, it will reveal some of the dark secrets that lurk in her own life...

Meet the enigmatic protagonist Charlotte Blood for the first time in this new gothic crime series, The Blood Chronicles...

As bodies continue to fall and the past bleeds into the present, Dr Alan Twist must confront a killer no one can see and a crime that defies logic. Three young ladies are thrown into raging waters, seemingly pushed by an invisible hand. Six years later, when a famous actor is flung from his window, eye witnesses agree: it was as if he was shoved from behind by an unseen murderer, imitating the inexplicable death of a young lady in the same house over fifty years earlier.

Renowned sleuth Dr Alan Twist and his partner Inspector Hurst go to the eerie landscape of Dartmoor to investigate. But invisible killers are hard to bring to justice…