Thames Valley Mystery

With her customary understated style and her keen ability to delve into the human psyche, Clare Curzon returns readers to Thames Valley and Superintendent Mike Yeadings. This time a case that at first glance looks to be open and shut proves more difficult and Yeadings will have to use his entire team to help solve the mystery. Off to an early morning meeting in Scotland Yard, Superintendent Mike Yeadings boards a commuter train and prepares for the trip. The train, however, doesn't get too far before coming to a screeching halt: there is a body on the tracks. What at first looks like a suicide is soon revealed to be a vicious crime-the victim has been garroted and his hands mutilated. His pockets are also empty which makes them wonder if robbery was the motive or if the killer was trying to hide the identity of the victim to protect himself. Yeadings soon discovers that the victim was a customs officer and that he had been investigating a possible counterfeit operation at Fraylings Court-a family estate that has recently started hosting theme holidays and offering many classes in order to pay off their mounting debt. Along with the guests requiring art lessons, dance classes, and a dog-training course, some shady characters have emerged and started their own nightly poker school. Among those regularly dealt, a hand is Detective Sergeant Rosemary Zyczynski of the Thames Valley Police who is working undercover to solve the murder. Will she be able to reveal the killer and the counterfeit operation while maintaining a poker face?

When Daniel Winterton's ambitious wife, Caroline, went missing from their country home, leaving a little daughter in the charge of her nanny, Mike Yeadings was involved as a sergeant in the investigation. He had hopes that the case would advance his career, however Caroline and her current lover were traced to the Canary Islands, where the trail abruptly ended. Eight years later the case is brought back to Detective Superintendent Yeadings' attention. This time Winterton's daughter Julie, now eleven years old, has vanished. The circumstances of her disappearance are immediately suspicious and Winterton is distraught. Yeadings' Thames Valley team-DI Mott, Sergeant Beaumont and Rosemary Zyczynski-work to uncover the lonely child's secrets and probe the movements of eccentrics on the periphery of the Winterton's circle. Has Caroline at last returned to claim her abandoned child? Or has Julie been snatched for some far more sinister purpose?

Clare Curzon sets her crimes in the leafy Thames Valley, a lovely enough part of old England where one of the old villages seem right out of a nineteenth-century painting. But, people are the same mix of good and bad whatever scenery surrounds them, and Superintendent Mike Yeadings has as much human dissolution to deal with as if he policed the London streets. Searching for a killer in The Body of a Woman, the superintendent and his sergeants, Beaumont and Rosemary Zyczynski, encounter as diverse a group of involved citizens as could be found anywhere. The victim herself is a puzzle. The corpse, clad in carnival dress and with a huge bird's-head mask hiding her face, is revealed to be a respectable, conservatively behaved woman of the town, a woman whom no one would ever have imagined made up and dressed so bizarrely. How did she come, not only to be brutally murdered, but done up so garishly? Yeadings and his team must look in every direction, starting with the dead woman's womanizing professor husband and her distressed teenage stepdaughter. How is the star-crossed mathematician (who studies chaos theory at the roulette table) connected to the dead woman? Through his drug-damaged son? Could she have been close to--have even known the successful bookie, his family, his bodyguards? The police have good reasons for looking at all the people in this psychological merry-go-round, and another attempted murder only complicates their work, spreading the suspicion to touch even more of the town's kaleidoscope of citizens. As always, at the center of Curzon's suspenseful and puzzling story is the likeable, reliable Yeadings, as genuine a police officer as any you might find in the English countryside. He goes after his villains armed with a mix of experience and common sense and real-life personal problems that only add to his believability. Readers can be certain that Inspector Yeadings and his sergeants will get their prey, if only after overcoming highly suspenseful odds.

Carlton Dellar, the esteemed poet, couldn't have hoped for a more eventful eightieth birthday. His extended family has gathered under the reproachful eye of his wife to celebrate what is silently suspected to be his last year. Hours later, the guests gather on the lawns in confusion as Larchmoor Place burns to the ground. Worse, Carlton's niece is unaccounted for and her twin brother is brutally assaulted and now lies unconscious in the hospital. Superintendent Mike Yeadings of the Thames Valley CID strongly suspects arson, a feeling intensified when he learns that the guest list included the aging poet's brother Matthew, one of the country's most powerful and successful senior prosecutors. But, as the family is questioned, it becomes clear to Yeadings and his team that perhaps Matthew Dellar is not the only member to be at risk from secret enmity and undercurrents of jealousy and frustration. And, when a search of the wreckage uncovers a charred corpse, the enquiry steps up another level as they attempt to find a murderer.

One freezing February evening, a Filipino barman named Ramon witnesses someone plunging from the seventh story of a luxury penthouse. Instead of calling the police, he heads straight for the apartment from which the body has fallen. It belongs to an old woman with a mysterious past, who could not get out of bed by herself. Superintendent Mike Yeadings and Sergeant Rosemary Zycynski lead the investigation. Searching for a link between a teenage drug victim, a missing care assistant, and an unidentified corpse, they discover further mysteries behind the glass wall of the penthouse. Other lives are threatened and the circle of menace widens to involve the dead woman's unhappily married doctor and estranged granddaughter. Clare Curzon's latest mystery masterfully unpicks the events and motives that lead toward the apparent murder of a woman already mortally frail. Her brilliantly fast-paced style keeps the pages turning as the chilling truth is gradually revealed.

Awoken in the middle of the night by a banging barn door, farm manager Ned Barton braves the storm to investigate. Inside, he finds the mutilated body of a woman displayed like a sacrificial trophy on bales of straw. Superintendent Mike Yeadings of the Thames Valley police is faced with multiple murder as three related bodies are discovered in the manor house: an entire family massacred, except for a missing boy. The hunt for him, whether as prime suspect or threatened survivor, unearths deeper layers of mystery. Clare Curzon's latest masterpiece presents a thrilling journey of intrigue and red herrings as Yeadings unpicks, link by link, the intricate chain of events that has led to these appalling murders.

This latest from genre veteran Clare Curzon makes a thrilling addition to this entertaining series. Sandy Craddock witnesses his detested half-brother deliberately mown down by a hit-and-run driver outside his place of work, and he guiltily assumes that he himself was the intended victim. Convinced the killers will strike again once they discover they've targeted the wrong man, Sandy goes on the run, leaving his boss to wrongly identify the heavily bandaged and comatose Warren Laing as his missing employee. In a daze, Sandy takes refuge in Warren's luxurious apartment. However, it isn't long before a mysterious woman turns up at Warren's home and takes charge of Sandy's complex situation, enrolling them both in an arts course in an isolated castle. When one of the students is murdered, Sandy realizes he's in too deep. But, how can he distance himself from the enchanting Fiona, who has her own secrets to hide, or explain to the police why he's impersonating his critically injured brother? Caught in a web of his own making, Sandy realizes he is opening himself up to more danger than he could ever have imagined. Superintendent Mike Yeadings of the Thames Valley team must unravel the web of deceit in the present, while also under pressure to solve a cold case resurrected from the past.