Inspector Lamb

German bombers are arriving daily, seeking to decimate England. But in a rural Hampshire village, things have remained fairly quiet-until an elderly loner, Will Blackwell, is brutally murdered. The method of his killing bears the hallmarks of the traditional vanquishing of a witch, and indeed, local legend claims that as a boy, Blackwell encountered a ghostly black dog sent from the devil, who struck a bargain for Blackwell's soul. Not long after the murder, a young woman who is carrying the illegitimate child of a fighter pilot also is violently killed; then a local drunkard ends up in an abandoned mill with the back of his head bashed in. As the Germans continue their relentless attack, Detective Inspector Thomas Lamb rushes to solve the crimes. Do the killer's motivations lie in the murky regions of the occult?

In the late summer of 1941, as the war in Europe drags on, long-buried secrets begin to surface in the Hampshire village of Winstead, when the body of a young woman-a former conscientious objector-is found shot to death in the church cemetery. The woman's only connection to Winstead seems to be that she lately had joined a group of conscripted workers who are building a prisoner of war camp on an abandoned farm near the village. But Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Lamb, who is called in to solve the case, has his doubts. The mystery deepens when workers at the farm find the remains of a child in the foundation of the old farmhouse, and a tramp who had been squatting in the wood near the church turns up dead. Lamb soon begins to suspect that the crimes might be related to a tragic event that occurred in Winstead more than twenty years earlier-the suicide of a village woman who took her life in despair after her husband abandoned her and took their young twin sons with him. As Lamb pieces together the connections between the crimes, he draws closer to the source of evil in Winstead's past and present and, in the end, must risk his own life to uncover the truth.

In the spring of 1942, with the war in Europe raging, a gruesome murder shocks the rural community of Marbury, where a once-grand estate called Ellicott House has been transformed into a hospital for "shell-shocked" officers sent back from the front lines. When Detective Chief Inspector Lamb arrives to solve the case, he quickly learns that the victim, Ellicott House's gardener Joseph Lee, had plenty of enemies in Marbury-and so he and his team have plenty of suspects. Along with his team of investigators, which includes his daughter Vera, Lamb begins to untangle the threads of rivalry and deceit that lie beneath the surface of the seemingly-peaceful countryside village. It soon becomes clear that Lee's mysterious past is intertwined with the history of Ellicott House itself, which fell into disrepair a generation earlier after a shockingly similar murder, and the mystery deepens further when Lamb discovers that one of the prime suspects has seemingly committed suicide. As Lamb pieces together the connections between the crimes of the present and those of the past, he must dive into the darkest, most secret corners of Ellicott House to discover who is committing murder, and why.