Chief Superintendent Frances Harman
2 total works
One cold, wet evening in an otherwise unusually dry April, a man falls from the fifth floor window of a hotel in Hythe. Did he jump or was he pushed? Detective Chief Superintendent Fran Harman is already struggling to juggle her work and private life: she is having difficulties finding a company willing to restore her and her boyfriend's new home and has to put Mark up in her own cottage whilst the work is completed. And now, why did this man jump from a hotel balcony when he had a perfectly good balcony at home? A glitch with the water system and her boyfriend's troublesome daughter add more problems to Fran's lot. Can she find the time to discover what it is that appears not quite right about Alec Minton's death?
An unidentifiable woman is found on a roadside - beaten into a coma and raped. The man who finds her, troubled by his inability to resuscitate her, spends hours at her hospital bedside, talking to the woman everyone calls Elise. Two years later Elise's condition is downgraded to persistent vegetative state -- if the hospital takes her off life support, Elise's attacker will be guilty of her murder. Now months away from retirement, Chief Superintendent Frances Harman has been assigned to investigate Elise's case. This is stacked on top of Fran's growing obligation to her elderly parents, a duty that takes her from Kent to Devon, and back, every weekend. . Fran verges on overload as she takes on more and more responsibilities -- her parents, Elise, a child abduction, the disappearance of her only witness, and the growing affection that she and her long-time colleague Mark Turner seem to share for one another. In a satisfyingly complex story of deadly crime, kidnapping, disappearance, and identity theft, can this warhorse of a detective beat the odds, the stress, and the danger that may just be too much for one woman to handle?