Black Dagger Crime S.
10 total works
Alice Robertson was now too old and frail to cope with the stairs. But when Charles Robertson returned from an evening stroll he found something had made her tackle them once more - with tragic results.
There were few people with a motive for the old lady's death. But then a rumour spread that in the house, forgotten for generations, were objects that had belonged to the first James Robertson. Someone had rediscovered them, recognised their value - and killed for them.
Professor Alistair Dirke thought himself a reasonable man - he could scarcely acknowledge the suspicion that was beginning to grow in his mind every time he saw his wife Rose with Paul Eckleston . . . Paul seemed to be there very often these days.
Yet soon a more terrible suspicion was to grow and spread through the little community of Rollway, where the Dirkes had lived in peace with their neighbours. A valuable collection of coins goes missing and then a man is murdered.
When Caroline leaves hospital her sister Fenella insists that she must convalesce in her house in the West Country. But, in the event, Caroline's visit is far from restful.
Fenella's husband is moody, excitable, reckless and inexplicably affluent, and soon the brooding atmosphere explodes into violence and murder . . .
'Her great virtue, exceeding even her meatily logical plotting and gift of hitting often on really intriguing situations, is her portrayal of people' The Times
Helena Sebright is given a three-month job in the newly independent African state of Uyowa. She is to escort a seven-year-old girl to stay with her grandparents there, and to bring her back to her parents, in England, at the end.
It seems a lucky break. But Helena is not to know she will become involved in a dangerous criminal enterprise. Against the background of a disintegrating state and imminent bloody revolution, Helena finds herself caught up in a series of mysteries, catastrophes - and gruesome deaths . . .
Alex Summerill was the confidante of thousands of readers of the daily newspaper to which she contributed a weekly advice column. Her warm-hearted counsel went out all over England to distracted lovers, women with faithless husbands, men with faithless wives.
Occasionally she even received letters confessing to serious crimes. Realising what a goldmine her correspondence could be for anyone with the slightest penchant for blackmail, she took exceptional care of the letters sent to her. But it is one letter that doesn't reach her that precipitates murder . . .
Roberta Ellison lives in Madeira where she had settled with her late husband after being crippled in a motor accident. Domestic help was easy to come by and the climate was ideal.
Then her sister Camilla comes to the island to help her to find a companion, bringing problems of her own with her, problems that at first seem trivial, but that soon involve the sisters in a violent and mystifying spiral of events. As more newcomers appear, so Camilla's history begins to unfold and it emerges that all is not as it seems . . . and then murder strikes.
Burnham Priors was a quaint English village, not a place where one would expect to find a murder. But murder was exactly what confronted Robina Mellanby when she moved there.
Robina was a young widow with two children when she married Sam Mellanby. She had no idea that the tiny village where Sam had lived, and where his one-time love Martha Birch still lived with her husband, was filled with terrible events that would now threaten Robina's own life . . .