Inspector Peach

A young prostitute is murdered, and Inspector Peach finds himself with a complex, unpleasant case on his hands. He begins to interview local prostitutes and their customers, including a divorced policeman and a Catholic priest at odds with his beliefs. But did one of them kill the girl or was one of the town's more sinister thugs responsible?

Everyone in Brunton is happy to see the decaying, uninhabitable houses demolished. Happy, that is, until the clearance reveals a grisly secret – a corpse of a squatter. Detective Chief Inspector Peach investigates, but finds that the memories of the victim's former companions are not easily stirred about things they would rather forget.

Chief Inspector Percy Peach, Detective Sergeant Lucy Blake and the team, hindered as usual by the direction of Chief Superintendent Thomas Bulstrode Tucker, have one of their most puzzling and compelling mysteries to solve. In an area famous for the Lancashire Witches four centuries earlier, it seems that witchcraft still flourishes. When a body is discovered in a derelict farmhouse, it is partly mummified, a pathetic ruin. Although an identity is quickly established, that is only the first of many problems. No one reported this young woman's disappearance when she went missing four months earlier. Most of those who were closest to her, from her former employer to her newly-acquired boyfriend, had reasons to keep quiet. Her flatmate, a woman of her own age, seems to have been very sure that Annie Clark was never going to return. And it appears she was a member of a modern coven, containing both male and female members...

Foul play's afoot at Bruton Rovers Football Club. - Bruton Rovers FC has been promoted to the Premiership, but Jim Capstick's days as Chairman have made him some enemies in the Lancashire mill town. With the team fighting relegation, the debts are piling high. But when the club is rocked by a murder after Jim makes a surprise announcement, the question's not who had the motive, but who had the balls to actually do it. 'Percy' Peach and DS Lucy Blake have their work cut out for them . . .

A DCI Percy Peach mystery - Adam Cassidy is one of Brunton's most famous residents. He plays the lead role in a successful TV detective show. It is now his time for a crack at Hollywood and he doesn't care who he has to betray in order to fulfill his dream. Meanwhile, DCI Percy Peach is in danger of being drawn into the local anti-terrorism initiative. What he needs is a high-profile murder case to sink his teeth into – and he may be about to get what he wishes for . . .

The new DCI Peach mystery... Alfred Norbury is a learned man. He is never afraid to display his erudition, but he is generous in his encouragement of younger people. The people who assemble around him to form a reading club are also learned. Some of them are simply well-read, whilst others have formal qualifications which rival those of Norbury. But learning is no protection against violence. Murder arrives suddenly, brutally and unexpectedly. The investigation led by Detective Chief Inspector Percy Peach and Detective Sergeant Northcott reveals several people with good reason to hate the victim. They range from the young man who was his latest protégé to the two women forty years older whose lives were radically damaged by him a decade earlier. Peach tackles the case, and the people involved in it, with his normal ebullience. The solution when he arrives at it is both unexpected and moving.

DCI Peach and DS Northcott investigate a murder at an exclusive tennis club Detective Sergeant Clyde Northcott – DCI Peach's tall, black, powerful protégé – has no interest in joining the snooty Birch Lane Tennis Club. So it is unfortunate for him when committee member Olive Crawshaw decides he would be the perfect talisman for the club's new, and controversial, policy to recruit members from a wider ethnic and social background. Clyde soon finds himself thrust into an exclusive community where his rusty tennis skills are the least of his concerns: for 'exclusive' does not mean moral, and while some of the club's members sail very near the law, one or two of them go far beyond it. So when a distinguished club member is murdered, a problem arises: how can he and Peach unveil the killer, when almost everyone seemed to want the victim dead?