On a rainy, miserable night, down-on-his-luck author George Mandsell ducks into a public telephone box, intending to call his publisher and ask for an advance. As soon as he is inside, the phone begins to ring. Answering it, he discovers that the...
Depending on how one looks at it, Mr. Theddeus E. Lawrence manages to incur either terrible misfortune or celebrated windfalls. Relatives and family members have a habit of dying, but Lawrence is often compensated for his loss. His father (who...
Margaret and Kenneth Clifton pass their childhood summers with their two sets of aunts and uncles in the sleepy village of Hill. They spend their days playing in the town's sheepwash, avoiding Sunday school, investigating the old hermit's shack,...
Here Lies Gloria Mundy. When Anthony Wotton and his wife, Celia, hold a weekend gathering of friends and relatives at their home in the Cotswolds, they little suspect that Gloria Mundy will show up. Unheralded and uninvited, Gloria Mundy is a...
Jonathan and Deborah Bradley come to the rescue when relations wish to enjoy a cruise: not only does the couple agree to tend to a handsome country house, they also temporarily inherit two young charges, Rosamund and Edmund. Knowing that they can...
Mrs Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, psychologist and detective, has become the warden of a house in a girls' training college in order to investigate the disappearance of a previous warden. Only her intelligence and perspicacity can coax the...
Hamish Gavin has accepted a teaching position at a unique institution, Joynings, where almost all of the students--and most of the faculty--have dark deeds and secrets in their past that led them there. Equal parts safe house, college, and...
Dame Beatrice receives a letter from her grandnephew, Denis Bradley, and relates its contents thusly to Laura over breakfast: "Denis has joined a friend named Tom Richardson for a fortnight's holiday. He was late getting to the hotel and the...
Comrie and Hera are planning to marry but, before taking the risk of setting up as legal life-partners, they decide on an unusual test of compatibility: they embark on a long, sometimes arduous pilgrimage along part of Scotland's West Highland...
Dame Beatrice is summoned to Galliard Hall by a heretofore unknown relative, one Romilly Lestrange, who asks his guest for her psychiatric opinion of his troubled wife. It turns out that the patient in question--a young woman called Trilby but...