Detective's Daughter

It was the murder that shocked the nation. Thirty years ago Kate Rokesmith went walking by the river with her young son. She never came home. For three decades her case file has lain, unsolved, in the corner of an attic-until Stella Darnell, daughter of Detective Chief Superintendent Darnell, starts to clear out her father's house after his death.

Stella Darnell cannot shake her father's legacy. A year after his death, she has discovered what looks like an unsolved case in his darkroom: a folder of unlabelled photographs of deserted streets. But why did her father - a Detective Chief Superintendent - never file them at the station? The oldest photo dates back to 1966, to a day when ten-year-old Mary Thornton was taking her little brother home from school. That afternoon, as the Moors Murderers were sent to prison for life, Mary witnessed something horrible that would haunt her forever. As Stella inches closer to the truth, the events of that day in 1966 will begin to haunt her too. This is the 2nd story in the Detective's Daughter series.

Jack Harmon craves silence and a bird's eye view. From his new home in Palmyra Tower, he can raise binoculars to watch over west London. If he watches for long enough, he will learn who has secrets. He will learn who plans to kill. But Jack does not see everything. October 2013, the month of the great storm of St. Jude; a man dies beneath a late night Piccadilly line train, verdict suicide. Jack's friend Stella Darnell, the detective's daughter, suspects it could have been murder. Now Jack and Stella are stirring up the past with questions that no one wants answered; questions that lead to an unsolved case nearly 20 years old. This is the 3rd story in the Detective's Daughter series.

The summer of 1976 was the hottest in living memory. Britain sweltered, trees and plants wilted, fire ripped through forests, and rivers ran dry. In London's Kew Gardens, a 10 year old was parted from her friends and, dizzied by scorching heat, wandered into its secluded undergrowth. She thought she saw a woman lying dead on the ground, but when she opened her eyes, the woman had gone. Forty years later, the detective's daughter, Stella Darnell, takes on a chilling new case. Along with her friend, Jack Harmon, she will be drawn to the secret spaces of Kew, into the obsessive world of botany, and towards an unsolved murder that has lain dormant for decades.

In January 1987, Helen Honeysett goes on an evening run from her riverside cottage and disappears. Twenty-nine years later, Helen's body has never been found. Her husband has hired a detective to find out what happened all those years ago, but when the five households on that desolate stretch of towpath refuse to give up their secrets, Stella and Jack find themselves hunting a killer whose trail has long gone cold.

FROM THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER OF THE DETECTIVE'S DAUGHTER. Beneath the beauty lurks something bad... June, 1977: As night falls, seventeen-year-old Cassie Baker leaves Winchcome and takes her usual short-cut down a moonlit country lane. She never makes it home. With no body, and no evidence, she's just another teenage runaway. December, 1999: A manhunt is launched for a missing girl, Bryony Motson. The search leads Cotswold police to an ancient burial site outside Winchcombe. Here, inside a stone chamber, are the remains of Cassie Baker. Bryony is never found. June, 2016: Stella Darnell, cleaner and private detective, moves to Winchcombe to solve the long-cold case. By now, evidence has decayed, gossip become fact, and witnesses forgotten what they saw. And, if there is a killer in their midst, it is someone who has got away with murder for twenty years. Someone who will do anything to keep it that way...

Forty years ago, in the dark of the playground, two children's lives were changed forever. Stella Darnell is a cleaner. But when she isn't tackling dust and dirt and restoring order to chaos, Stella solves murders. Her latest case concerns a man convicted of killing his mistress. His daughter thinks he's innocent, and needs Stella to prove it. As Stella sifts through piles of evidence and interview suspects, she discovers a link between the recent murder and a famous case from forty years ago: the shocking death of six-year-old Sarah Ferris, killed in the shadows of an empty playground. Stella knows that dredging up the past can be dangerous. But as she pieces together the tragedy of what happened to Sarah, she is drawn into a story of jealousy, betrayal and the end of innocence. A story that has not yet reached its end...

Cleaner-turned-detective Stella Darnell connects a murder in Tewkesbury Abbey to a decades-old mystery in wartime London. From the number 1 bestselling author of The Detective's Daughter. London, 1940A woman lies dead in a bombed-out house. It looks like she's another tragic casualty of the Blitz, until police pathologist Aleck Northcote proves she was strangled and placed at the scene. But Northcote himself has something to hide. And when his past catches up with him, he too is murdered. Tewkesbury, 2020Beneath the vast stone arches of Tewkesbury Abbey, a man has been fatally stabbed. He is Roddy March, an investigative journalist for a podcast series uncovering miscarriages of justice. He was looking into the murder of police pathologist Dr. Aleck Northcote — and was certain he had uncovered Northcote's real killer. Stella Darnell used to run a detective agency alongside her cleaning business. She's moved to Tewkesbury to escape from death, not to court it — but Roddy died in her arms and, Stella is someone impelled to root out evil when she finds it. Now she is determined to hunt down Roddy's killer — but then she finds another body...2021 Head of Zeus

Eighty years of secrets. A body that reveals them all. 1941. Rupert and Adelaide Stride are raising their two daughters, Clare and Rosa, in the midst of war. When Rupert is called to fight, he dies on the beaches of Dunkirk, leaving his family to fend for themselves. 2023. Decades later, Clare and Rosa have retreated to the annex, trapped in the place where they were raised: Yew Tree House. When the rooms are put up for rent, Jack Harmon sees the perfect spot for a family holiday with his twins and detective Stella Darnell. But then the children discover a skeleton with a hole in its skull hidden in the brambles of a decommissioned WWII pill box. This home has always been a complicated one, but Stella and Jack will need to confront a history of revenge, desperation, and wartime tragedy to uncover the truth of what happened at Yew Tree House... The must-read psychological procedural in the Detective's Daughter series from critically acclaimed author, Lesley Thomson, for fans of Elly Griffiths, Val McDermid and Mari Hannah. 'Always a treat reading Lesley Thomson.' IAN RANKIN