Inspector Lestrade

Book seven in the Inspector Lestrade series. He was in his forty-third year and knee-deep in murder. Well, what was new? Sholto Lestrade wouldn't really have it any other way. The first fatality in a series of killings which was to become the most bizarre in the celebrated Inspector's career, was a captain of the 2nd Life Guards, found battered over the head in the Thames at Shadwell Stair, an Ashanti War medal wedged between his teeth. Lestrade's next summons was to the underground caves of Wookey Hole where the demise of an Egyptologist – a scarab clamped between his molars – prompted the question; can a man dead for a thousand years reach beyond the grave and commit murder? The further death from a cadaveric spasm of an enobled young subaltern whilst on picquet duty (this time a locket is his dying mouthful) forces Lestrade to impersonate 'Lt Lister, Duke of Lancaster's Own Yeomanry' and into becoming a barrack-room lawyer of incisive command. As the body count rapidly rises, Lestrade, constantly and relievedly touching base with his 'family', Harry and Letitia Bandicoot of the Hall, Huish Episcopi, varies a volatile lifestyle with dinner at Blenheim Palace; a disastrous cycle tour ending in a night in gaol; a near-fatal trip in an air balloon; and masterful mediation in East End gang warfare on the Ratcliffe Highway. Eventually, some seven cadavers later, things begin to fit into place and the final conundrum emerges; who or what is Coquette Perameles?

Book ten in the Inspector Lestrade series.Beyond the mountains of the moon …'Right, gentlemen. Recapping by numbers.' Superintendent Lestrade, in martinet mood, was driving his minions.'Murder One. Four victims, Captain Orange, late of the merchant service and his three nieces, when the harness of their trap broke on a downhill gradient near Peter Tavy, Devon.''Clues?''A tall man seen near the Captain's horse shortly before the trap left. He could have cut the harness.''And?''A broken mirror found in the Captain's breast pocket.''Murder Two, sir. Janet Calthrop, fell downstairs at King's College, London, on the way to the boudoir of her lover. Tripwire across the stairs. Broken neck.''Clues?''One broken mirror found in said lover's boudoir.''Murder Three. Juan Thomas de Jesus-Lopez, honorary major in the Sixteenth Lancers; body found in a ruined lighthouse near Beachy Head.'The clues accumulate; so do the mirrors and the murders …And the suspects.'Mirror, mirror on the wall,' mused Sholto Lestrade. 'Who's the guiltiest of them all?'He was to find out …

Book eleven in the Inspector Lestrade series.The Papers call it suicide. The deceased's father doesn't. But when Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard investigates the death by duelling pistol of Anstruther Fitzgibbon, 27, son of the Marquess of Bolsover, his suspicions of foul play are immediately aroused.One of Britain's leading athletes, 'nimbler than a wallaby on heat', Fitzgibbon is the first victim in a series of murders which threatens to extinguish the exhilaration of the Olympic Games held in London that glorious summer of 1908.As the capital plays host to an army of athletes from the Empire, Europe and the United States, international politics rears its ugly head; a respected German journalist is discovered with an ornate paper-knife embedded in his back. When a hurdler of the Ladies' Team falls victim to her own bust improver (dubbed 'the killer corset') fingers are pointed in all directions and not least of Lestrade's worries is that his leading lady's husband is an American detective with a short temper and the physique of a brick privy.