Breen and Tozer

London, 1968: The body of a teenage girl is found just steps away from the Beatles' Abbey Road recording studio. The police are called to a residential street in St John's Wood where an unidentified young woman has been strangled. Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen believes she may be one of the many Beatles fans who regularly camp outside Abbey Road Studios. With his reputation tarnished by an inexplicable act of cowardice, this is Breen's last chance to prove he's up to the job. Breen is of the generation for whom reaching adulthood meant turning into one's parents and accepting one's place in the world. But the world around him is changing beyond recognition. Nothing illustrates the shift more than Helen Tozer, a brazen and rambunctious young policewoman assisting him with the case. Together they navigate a world on edge, where conservative tradition gives way to frightening new freedoms--and troubling new crimes.

In Breen and Tozer's London, a battle for the soul of the city is being fought between cops and criminals, the corrupt and the corruptible. London, November 1968. Detective Sergeant Breen has a death threat in his inbox and a mutilated body on his hands. The dead man was the wayward son of a rising politician and everywhere Breen turns to investigate, he finds himself obstructed and increasingly alienated. Breen begins to see that the abuse of power is at every level of society. And when his actions endanger those at the top, he becomes their target. Out in the cold, banished from a corrupt and fracturing system, Breen is finally forced to fight fire with fire. William Shaw paints the real portrait of London's swinging sixties. Authentic, powerful and poignant, The Kings of London reveals the shadow beyond the spotlight and the crimes committed in the name of liberation.

The earthshaking decade of the 1960s comes to a sweeping and dangerous close, as William Shaw's detective duo battle the most powerful members of London society. After being wounded in the line of duty, Detective Sergeant Breen recuperates on the family farm of his former partner, Helen Tozer. To fill the long and empty hours, he reviews the open case file for a murder that has haunted Helen for years: that of her younger sister. Breen discovers that the teenage victim had been having a secret affair with James Fletchet, the son of an affluent local landowner, celebrated for his service in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising. Breen and Tozer return to London's Criminal Investigation Division, where their questions about Fletchet's past are met with resistance and suspicion. The deeper they probe, the more people they implicate in their investigation. New Scotland Yard doesn't look kindly upon breaking rank, and it's only a matter of time before Breen and Tozer make themselves a target. Shaw's stirring, heartfelt and diabolically plotted mystery series is everything a reader looks for: enveloping, invigorating, and wonderfully entertaining.

In hedonistic 1960s London, a police detective investigates the unexpected connections between two suspicious deaths: a call girl and a rock star. It's the summer of '69, and the hard-living rock stars of the British Invasion still rule London. When former Rolling Stone Brian Jones turns up dead, floating in the pool of his palatial home while the party continues around him, Detective Sargeant Cathal Breen is called away from his former partner, now girlfriend--who quit the force when she became pregnant with his child--to take the case. Breen's investigation soon uncovers another body spat out by the hedonistic '60s party scene: a young woman, a call-girl for the rich and famous, a girl they called Julie Teenager. Her client list is thick and full of suspects--all rich, powerful, and protected. When Breen gets too close to fingering a financier with ties to Russia--and gets a phone call from MI6 warning him to watch his back--the investigation seems almost insurmountable. But Breen has the keenly intuitive, deeply moral Helen Tozer at his side, who, despite her pregnancy, can't help but be drawn into the case of a girl used and cast aside by London's elite. Tense, dramatic, and with a blistering pace, Sympathy for the Devil is a gripping police thriller set in the darkly technicolor world of the 1960s.