Wendy

This year, the heat wave in Florence is fiercer than usual. The city's inhabitants have fled to the cool of the hills of the surrounding countryside. So it is no surprise that a corpse lies unnoticed, bloating in the humid air. Sandro Cellini, former policeman turned private detective has a case: a man who seems to have vanished into thin air - leaving his pregnant young fiancée alone in the city.

Singapore, 1910 - Desperate for a fresh start, Harriet Gordon finds herself living with her brother, a reverend and headmaster of a school for boys, in Singapore at the height of colonial rule. Hoping to gain some financial independence, she advertises her services as a personal secretary. It is unfortunate that she should discover her first client, Sir Oswald Newbold - explorer, mine magnate, and president of the exclusive Explorers and Geographers Club - dead with a knife in his throat.

India, 1922: In the kingdom of Satapur, a curse seems to have fallen upon the royal family, whose maharaja died of a sudden illness shortly before his teenage son was struck down in a tragic accident. The kingdom is now ruled by an agent of the British Raj on behalf of Satapur's two maharanis, the dowager queen and the maharaja's widow. The royal ladies are in dispute over the education of the young crown prince, and a lawyer's council is required. Just one person can help them: Perveen Mistry, India's only female lawyer.

Detective Nikki Galena's friend and neighbor meets a tragic end, but there's more to his death than meets the eye. And someone terrible from DS Joseph Easter's past is back.

The first cremation the homeless people held in Golden Gate Park was for a dog; their second pyre held a much larger body. To find the one responsible for these deaths, Martinelli sets out on a quest for Brother Erasmus. An enigmatic creature who has befriended the homeless, he speaks only in quotations. When public fear of the peculiar band of park-dwellers threatens to grow out of control, Martinelli must unravel the guilt that lies at the bottom of Erasmus' refusal to give direct answers to her questions.

A string of shocking murders has occurred in a small community outside of San Francisco, each victim an innocent child. For Detective Kate Martinelli, just promoted to Homicide, and her partner Alonzo Hawkin it's going to be a difficult case.

One wet November in Florence a young widow of an eminent Jewish architect comes to visit Sandro Cellini, a disgraced ex-policeman and budding private detective, to ask him to investigate her husband's suicide. But the case abruptly turns into something grimmer and more urgent than he could have imagined.

Thirty-four-year-old Sophia, a film editor living in Soho, has (she thinks) only one living relation, her Connecticut-based grandmother Felicity. Sophia is torn between her delight in her freedom and a desire for the family ties which everyone else grumbles about. Her current bedmate seems to be in love with a glamorous film star; her mad mother is dead. All she has is Felicity.

The year is 1946, and all over the world, young women are crossing the seas in the thousands en route to the men they married in wartime. In Australia, four women join 650 other brides on a voyage to England, aboard the HMS Victoria, which also carries 1,000 naval officers and men. Rules of honour, duty, and separation are strictly enforced, from the captain down to the lowliest young stoker. But the men and the brides will find their lives intertwined in ways the Navy could never have imagined.

Understandably, Lord Burford had some misgivings about hosting another house party at Alderley, his beautiful country mansion. After all, the previous two could at best be described as disastrous, since a couple of their guests were bumped off during their stay on each occasion. But with family members travelling down for the funeral of an elderly relative, the Earl really had no choice but to offer them accommodation.