Never get into an argument with your wife, especially after the pair of you have eaten too much tripe and onions. If you do, you might end up, like Sir Abercrombie Lewker, on a mountaineering trip in Snowdonia with a group of fellow members of the Foothills Club that you barely know. Betrand Awdrey, the ..read more

Genius or lunatic? Friar Roger Bacon possibly made some of the most ground-breaking scientific discoveries and wrote them down in an unbreakable code. Edward I of England and Philip IV of France are both determined to be the first to these secrets, but to crack the code, they each need to know what the other knows. As the scholars of England and France meet at Corfe Castle, danger lurks at every turn. Flemish pirates are massing along the coast, young girls are being killed by crossbow bolts and, one by one, the French scholars are dying in mysterious circumstances. Trapped in the castle with ..read more

Nero Wolfe, for once, has left his home in New York City to visit a flower show. Along with his assistant, Archie Goodwin, he wants to inspect – and get hold of – some rare black orchids. But to the reader’s lack of surprise, his floral investigations are interrupted by a real one, when a murder takes place right in front of him. But who pulled the trigger? And after that’s all sorted out, there’s some stuff about poisoned pen letters and a menagerie. Because this is a collection of two novellas. Oh, that’s not a good sign, I got bored writing the blurb… Rex Stout is an author that I’ve had l ..read more

Victoria Jones, an unsettled young woman, is bouncing from job to job in London. After getting fired for making fun of her boss, she meets Edward Goring, who chats to her about his upcoming trip to Baghdad. After he has left, Victoria promptly decides she has fallen in love with him and decides to follow him to Baghdad. But how? Eventually finding a way to get there, Victoria is determined to track Edward down, In the meantime, however, she discovers a dying British secret agent in her hotel room, who, as they do, leaves her a dying message – “Lucifer, Basra, Lefarge”. Victoria finds herself ..read more

1901, the Inner Temple, London, a strange enclave where tradition holds sway over all and oddly dressed individuals stalk the hallways – not a religious gathering, but the secretive heart of London’s legal system. Barrister Gabriel Ward has lived in his rooms there all of his life, but he has never encountered a dead body there before – until he finds that of the Lord Chief Justice of England, stabbed through the heart… and missing his shoes and socks… Gabriel is soon given the task of finding the murderer, but by the nature of the Temple, there are far more secrets being kept than just murde ..read more

Mount Judd is a somewhat over-dramatic name for a landfill site near Nuneaton, but that is the least thing to concern DCS Kat Franks when she is called there. It is to be the first non-cold case for the Future Policing Unit, but this is far from a straightforward case. The body in question has been stripped naked and crucified, with the victim being left to die from exposure and dehydration. As a media circus begins to form – not just from the gruesome murder scene but also the investigation being helped by AIDE Lock, an AI persona with a hologram form – the team comes under pressure to get r ..read more

Former Detective Inspector – now PC – Lucy Halliday is a dog handler in the New Forest. Her specialist search dog Moss is the most important thing in her life – apart from discovering what happened to her husband, a journalist who disappeared two years previously. Most people think he just ran off, but Lucy is convinced that something much more serious happened to him. When a hand found in Gallows Wood leads to a body, Lucy becomes convinced that her husband’s body must be there too. And when Moss leads her to another corpse in the wood, with the same signs on it, she is convinced she is on t ..read more

Blackpool, the Sands Hotel. Two men lie dead in adjacent rooms, both seemingly executed by a single shot to the head. One of them has ties to local organised crime – the other is just an accountant. It seems impossible for there to be a reason to for there to be a hit called out on both of them. It seems that there was no reason for the two victims to be in adjacent rooms. It’s a puzzle to perplex the finest of police detectives. And Blackpool doesn’t have that. What it does have is DS Declan Miller. A detective with an amazing skill at annoying his colleagues. A man who is still grieving his ..read more

Tall Pines, a holiday cottage in Wales, has been abandoned. A family of five was staying there, but when the cleaner arrives, the house is abandoned. It is like an echo of the Marie Celeste – no one is there, but it seems that they just disappeared into thin air. The cleaner calls in her friend, ex-detective Mallory Dawson, but people just assume the family left in an emergency. Pant Meinog, a cottage in Wales in 2003. A family of five lived there, but the daughters, in particular Gwenllian, were haunted by a spirit. There were signs of poltergeist activity, bruises on the girls and the final ..read more

End of the month time – I won’t lie, it’s been a bit of a crappy one – so the start of a new one is always a good thing. Hopefully July the 4th in the UK will be the start of something better – it certainly should be the end of something terrible. Fingers crossed. OK, still got loads going on, so let’s get the review of the month. Nine books – oops, fallen behind in the ten books a month challenge – and they were as follows: Holmes On The Range by Steve Hockensmith – one of the blog inspirations and even better than I remembered it being. The D.A. Holds A Candle by Erle Stanley Gardner – a fir ..read more