A Cock Robin mystery

On the famous Joycean day of June 16th, Kate Fansler attends the annual Bloomsday celebration, kicking off the start to an idyllic and literary summer. But in the company of an exuberant young nephew and two graduate students, there is not much time for peace and quiet. The idyll is further shattered when an unpleasant next-door neighbour is found murdered. Although the murder appears to have no connection to the day’s celebrations, no one can shake the suspicion that James Joyce is somehow linked, not even unliterary police inspector Stratton. Kate is determined to find the solution to this extraordinary murder, even if she finds the culprit in her own home . . .

Before he could expose a big financial swindle, Clarence Fortinbras was interrupted. He always said that office life would kill him. Exit Fortinbras. Enter John Putnam Thatcher. Clarence Fortinbras is a revered name in the world of accounting; retired professor and author of the standard university textbook on accounts receivable, he is a man passionately in love with his chosen discipline. National Calculating Company is a struggling business-machine firm that has suffered several years in a row of falling profits and dividends. Self-appointed leader of a rogue stockholder’s group, Fortinbras is on a crusade to get to the bottom of any jiggery-pokery and obtains a court order allowing him to conduct a thorough audit of the company books. When he is found strangled with the cord to his own adding machine, National Calculating is plunged into a stock crisis and Sloan Guaranty Trust sends in senior banker John Putnam Thatcher in an attempt to stop a financial hemorrhage. What did Fortinbras find, and which company officer do those findings implicate? The list of suspects includes NCC's ineffectual and ulcer-riddled president, his ambitious nephew, the rival leaders of NCC's two business units, and the coolly cerebral female scientist who has a great deal more clout in the firm than her job title would suggest. The third of Emma Lathen’s witty mysteries featuring elegant, urbane John Putnam Thatcher, senior vice president and head of the trust department at Sloan (third largest bank in the world) and a formidable ferreter-out of financial - and other - secrets. Written in 1964, it reflects a time and an industry on the brink of the computer revolution.

The vast road network of Honce, completed a decade before, had brought great optimism to the people of the land. Commerce could travel more freely and so could armies, and those armies, it was hoped, would rid the land at long last of the vicious, bloody cap dwarfs and goblins. For the first time, the many individual kingdoms, the holdings of Honce, would be brought closer together, perhaps even united. For the last few years, those promises had become a nightmare to the folk, as two powerful lairds fought for supremacy of a hoped-for united kingdom. Bransen Garibond, the Highwayman, held little real interest in that fight. To him the warring lairds were two sides of the same coin. Whichever side won, the outcome for the people of Honce would be the same, Bransen believed. A journey north, however, taught Bransen that his views were simplistic at best, and that some things--like honor and true friendship-- might truly matter. In The Dame, Bransen’s road becomes a quest for the truth, of Honce and of himself, a quest to put right over wrong. That path is fraught with confusion and fraud, and a purposeful blurring of morality by those who would seek to use the Highwayman’s extraordinary battle skills and popularity among the commonfolk for their own nefarious ends.

>The theft of £200 from the family safe might be thought a minor loss to a wealthy jeweller like Karl Morren. Yet when Ludovic Travers of the Broad Street Detective Agency is called in to vet the insurance claim he finds the Morren family gripped by unexplained fear and suspicion. Only six months later diamonds valued at £10,000 are stolen from Morren's office safe, and Travers is convinced that there is more to the situation than meets the eye. >What is the link between these two thefts? What made attractive Cambridge-educated David Wayner turn to crime? How does he come to be involved with the Morren family? And where are the missing diamonds? These are the questions to which Travers and his friend Superintendent Jewle of the Yard have to find the answers, and the trail becomes both suspenseful and occasionally lethal before the case is solved. >Here is a recognised "Old Master" of the detective story at the top of his form.

A book in the Henry Frost series >Who first cast Celia Wainwright in the role of Witch of Upfold, that little village in the Sussex Weald? And how and why did she disappear one night in 1953? What was the connection between her and young Julian Farnham, and why, on the day after she disappeared, did her husband suddenly leave their home at Mulberry Cottage never to return? What, in fact, is the mystery of Mulberry Cottage? Why did it remain empty for nearly ten years? And the rumours - those whispers of witchcraft and murder - are they all true?