Mitchell and Markby

Superintendent Alan Markby and Meredith Mitchell are in desperate need of a holiday - and the Cotswold village of Parsloe St John seems the perfect choice. Their neighbour, retired journalist Wynne Carter, is as convivial as the village itself and, over a glass of blackberry wine, indulges in her latest obsession, Olivia Smeaton, a racy old lady whose life - and death - she is convinced are not all they seem. Markby is more interested in buying Olivia's house than the circumstances of her vacating it, but Meredith is intrigued: by the old lady, the death of a cherished horse and a dusty junk shop run by a white witch. When another fatality - of a very grisly nature - is discovered, it seems her suspicion is justified. Clearly Olivia isn't the only enigma in Parsloe St John - and her death might be the first of many unless Meredith Mitchell and Alan Markby can make sense of some very secret lives to reach the truth ...

When Meredith Mitchell picks up a hitchhiker on a lonely road outside Bamford one evening she is left feeling distinctly uneasy. What business can this confident, yet secretive, young woman have at Tudor Lodge, the beautiful old home of Brussels-based lawyer Andrew Penhallow, where she asks to be dropped? Penhallow is constantly toing and froing from the Continent, but that night, unusually, he is at home, and - with his son away and his wife Carla in bed with a migraine - alone. Which is unfortunate, for the next morning he is found murdered in the garden. To the vicarious delight of the locals, who are quick to recall old disputes, Penhallow's death results in some spectacular revelations about his double life - developments which make the murder investigation all the more delicate for Superintendent Markby, who knew the dead man as a young body. Andrew Penhallow certainly had ghosts in his past - has one come back to claim him?

Twelve-year-old Tammy Franklin has learned too much about death, too quickly. Two years ago she lost her mother to a long, lingering illness and now the body of the woman her father married in an attempt to replace his wife has been found on a railway embankment close to the Franklin farm. This time the death is murder. As Superintendent Markby, one of the first on the scene, well knows, Tammy now stands to have her father taken from her, for Hugh Franklin is suspect number one in the mind of the inspector to whom Markby has delegated the case. But, despite his need to distance himself from the murder, Markby begins to realise that the truth is destined to be far more complex than he ever envisaged...