With the country in the grip of economic malaise, Maisie Dobbs is relieved to accept an apparently straightforward assignment to investigate a potential land purchase. Her inquiries take her to a picturesque village in Kent during the hop-picking season, but beneath its pastoral surface she finds evidence of something amiss. Mysteries fires erupt in the village with alarming regularity, and a series of petty crimes suggest a darker criminal element...

Genevieve's hopes of starting a new life aboard a houseboat in Kent are shattered when a body washes up beside the boat, and she recognizes the victim as someone linked to her past--a past she had hoped to keep secret.

After a ferocious early springtime storm, young Norwegian sailor Hans Lyngstrand is shipwrecked in the English Channel near the coastal Kent town of Dengate; he is one of few survivors. Soon after, aspiring journalist Martin Bridges takes a job as the reporter at the local newspaper. A loner by nature, he's a curiosity to the nosy townspeople, the gregarious editor of the paper, and his melodramatic landlady, whose own private life is fraught by the...

Sent from London to stay in the country rectory of the Reverend Rivers and his family, 12-year-old Nora enjoys an idyllic initial stay before discovering tensions in the Rivers' marriage and forging a secret with foster sister Grace that she keeps for more than fifty years.

With her abusive ex-husband in prison, Jane Cowan finally has the confidence to accept a new job: head teacher of the primary school in the Kentish village of Wrayford. But her new life is soon disrupted when a mysterious intruder breaks into her school and then later when a child is badly hurt in the playground - only Jane suspects that her fall was not accidental. Are the two incidents connected?

As war rages in Europe, the citizens of London flee to the country. At Pigeonsford, a group of guests plays cards, drinks tea, and acts polite--but Grace Morland knows the strong emotions that lurk beneath the placid social surface. She's painfully in love with Stephen Pendock, the squire of Pigeonsford, but Pendock's smitten with young beauty Francesca Hart. One afternoon, Fran debuts a new hat, and Grace's jealousy gets the better of her. She exclaims,...

Alice and her brother Orlando lived a quiet life growing up in post WWII Britain... until the arrival of the precocious, manipulative and sexually aware Nicola. On Alice's 12th birthday, Nicola disappears; her body is found days later, battered and bruised. Twenty years go by until Alice becomes determined to dig up the past and solve the mystery of Nicola's death. But will the truth be too much to handle when she starts to suspect her own quiet and...

When Charles Wycombe, the dashing and incorrigible Earl of Billington, toppled out of a tree and landed at Ellie's feet, neither suspected that such asn inauspicious meeting would lead to marriage. But Charles must find a bride before his thirtieth birthday or he'll lose his fortune. And Ellie needs a husband or her father's odious fiancee will choose one for her. And so they agree to wed, even though their match appears to have been made somewhere...

Few were disappointed when Raoul Vernet was found with his head bashed in, dead in a pool of his own blood. On vacation in England, the Belgian seducer comes to visit Matilda, an old flame from a few years before. She agrees despite suspicions that Vernet has been deploying his legendary charm on another member of the family: young Rosie, who has returned from her Swiss boarding school carrying a child. None of the family members were in the house...

"First published in Britain in 1949, Brand's exuberant novel is still regarded as one of the great masterpieces of the classic mystery genre for its fiendishly constructed puzzle, memorable setting, dumbfounding acts of misdirection and thrilling denouement. This edition includes an introduction by award-winning author Martin Edwards. "A very neat version of the 'sealed room' mystery... provides [Miss Brand] with excellent opportunities to indulge...