Purely my own favourites…
Number One
West Wales, 1850. When an old tree root is dug up, the remains of a young woman are found. Harry Probert-Lloyd, a young barrister forced home from London by encroaching blindness, has been dreading this discovery. He knows exactly whose bones they are. Working with his clerk, John Davies, Harry is determined to expose the guilty. But the investigation turns up more questions than answers and raises long-buried secrets.The search for the truth will prove costly. But will Harry and John pay the highest price?
Number Two
1893: A train to the bustling industrial town of Pontypridd crashes, and in the chaos of the disaster a killer covers up a violent murder. Two years later Thomas Chard’s arrival to take up his post as inspector in the burgeoning police force coincides with the grisly discovery of a body in the River Taff. Chard grapples with the demands of his new job – rudimentary Victorian police procedures, an authoritarian superintendent, and finding a murderer. His investigations lead him beyond respectable society, through the dark back streets of Pontypridd to a seamy world of money lenders, pick pockets, prostitutes and gamblers. As the number of suspects grows, each with their own secret to protect, Chard must disentangle the web of lies being spun around him in order to catch a killer.
Number Three
In 1137, the Abbot of Shrewsbury decides to acquire the remains of St Winifred. Brother Cadfael is part of the expedition sent to her final resting place in Wales and they find the villagers passionately divided by the Benedictines’ offer for the saint’s relics.
Number Four
1947. New school teacher Della Arthur gets lost in a snowstorm and stumbles across a grisly double murder. She soon realises that the close-knit community she has moved to hides many secrets and lies beneath the surface of respectability.
Della must decide who she can trust in this remote village. Should she reveal her theories to the minister of the local chapel, the Italian prisoner of war, or even one of her young pupils? It is only when her own life is threatened that Della understands how dangerous her discoveries in the farmhouse really were. English and Welsh language versions.
Number Five
Set mostly in North Wales, ex-child star Posy Starling is finally filming her dream role – Dahlia Lively in The Lady Detective movie. But things take a nightmare turn when a prop weapon is replaced with the real thing – with almost fatal consequences for her fellow Dahlia, Rosalind King. There’s something very wrong on the set of The Lady Detective – which means it’s time to call in Caro Hooper, so the three Dahlias can investigate. In between filming scenes, signing autographs for locals, photoshoots on set and jetting off to France for an impromptu party, the three Dahlias do what they do best – surreptitiously sleuth. And very soon the evidence starts to point towards one particular co-star. But before they can prove it, a murder rocks the production. And this time, with a storm raging, the river flooded and the bridge washed out, there are no police to rely on so it’s up to the three Dahlias to stop a murderer in their tracks… before another victim is claimed.
Number Six
St. David’s, Wales, late spring, 1370. After a pilgrimage to the land of his birth, Owen Archer is anxious to go back to York and his herbalist wife, Lucie, and children. Then death changes his plans: He is called to investigate the strange hanging of a young stone carver, driven to suicide by a broken heart…or deviously murdered. Unknown to Owen, Lucie is in dire trouble, charged with poisoning a client. Alone and distressed, she turns to Harold Galfrey, a mysterious steward who has appointed himself her protector. Now Lucie faces an earthly temptation — and a chilling betrayal. But Owen is caught up in a country at war where a cunning rebel leader plots to have Owen Archer sign up for the ferocious fight…and never return home. Book jacket.
Number Seven
Published in 1952 as “Three Bear Witness”, this is a sinister tale of love and death centred around Joseph Pugh, an Oxford don who leaves “the great university” for a life in a wild and beautiful Welsh farm, and for Bronwen Vaughn, the wife of a neighbouring farmer.
Number Eight
In the Welsh seaside town of Marbolt, while playing an erratic round of golf, Bobby Jones slices his ball over the edge of a cliff. His ball is lost, but on the rocks below he finds the crumpled body of a dying man. With his final breath the man opens his eyes and says, ‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’
Haunted by these words, Bobby and his vivacious companion, Frankie, set out to solve a mystery that will bring them into mortal danger…
Number Nine
Inspector Rumsey Bucke, a still-grieving widower, must find Daniel Guy who has tried and failed to murder his wife. He tracks him through the streets of Swansea’s poorest communities with little help from an incompetent police force. Two fatal stabbings, initially unsolved, put Bucke’s position under threat from a corrupt superior. However, he finds the will and the support to change his life from an unlikely source, the wife of a prime murder suspect. As he begins to calm his own sorrows, he learns that terrible tragedies lurk beneath the surface of the ordinary lives around him. No one can ever escape from the secret burdens they carry with them.
But there are unknown figures lurking in the shadows and the Inspector methodically uncovers a sinister assassination plot. Bucke finds himself drawn into the dangerous world of international conflict, with secret agents playing out a clandestine war on the streets of the town, ready to kill the innocent to ensure their success. Soon Bucke must answer his own questions. Who is the murderer? Is it Daniel Guy? Or is there someone else? How many murderers are there? There is a bigger question for him too. If, as they say, justice is blind are there occasions when the law should be blind too?
And finally, please forgive me for including this one…
Number Ten
Wrexham, 1876. Meet Alfred Neobard Palmer, an unlikely hero. “It was a death which had brought him here. Death by snake venom, of all things.” Palmer – and his more courageous sweetheart, young Ettie Francis. A series of accidental deaths which increasingly seem – well, more than simply accidental. Deaths luring Palmer and Ettie, slowly but surely, towards a terrifying climax through the treacherous waters of the North Wales coast. But can those deaths truly be linked to the huge coverlet on display at Wrexham’s magnificent Art Treasures Exhibition? A patchwork of images both Biblical and bewitching. And is there, literally, blood among the coverlet’s threads?
But now, to add in the suggestions of others…
Sharon Kay Penman’s medieval mysteries, like Dragon’s Lair.
Lucienne Boyce and The Contraband Killings.
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