"A female Vicar named Sarah Hussein is discovered strangled in her Kingsmarkham Vicarage. The gossipy cleaning woman who discovers her body, Maxine, happens to also be in the employ of retired Chief Inspector Wexford and his wife. When detective inspector Mike Burden calls him, Wexford, intrigued by the unusual circumstances of the murder, leaps at the chance to tag along with the investigators. A single-mother to a teenage girl, Hussein was a woman...

When a man disappears, two wives search for their missing husband, and all the young women in Kingsmarkham seem to have a motive, Chief Inspector Wexford must untangle a complex web of secrets   Chief Inspector Wexford finds nothing unusual in the disappearance of Rodney Williams, a husband and father who likely has run off with another woman. But when the man's car and suitcase are discovered abandoned, can a body be far behind? Confounded by a...

Searching for truffles in a wood, a man and his dog unearth something less savoury-a human hand. The body, as Chief Inspector Wexford is informed later, has lain buried for ten years or so, wrapped in a purple cotton shroud. The post mortem cannot reveal the precise cause of death. The only clue is a crack in one of the dead man's ribs. Although the police database covers a relatively short period of time, it stores a long list of Missing Persons....

A proposed highway through a forest near Kingsmarkham has caused loud cries of protest. One group has taken more drastic measures. It will risk everything-including the lives of five hostages-to halt construction. When Inspector Wexford learns that one of the hostages is his wife Dora, he is caught in a spiral of frustration and fear. The gripping drama of his search takes on added intensity through Davina Porter's crisp narration.

The Veiled One: "Why on earth?" wonders London's chief inspector Reginald Wexford when a sixtyish housewife is found garroted in a shopping mall garage, her body concealed under a velvet shroud. Before he can find the answer, he's nearly killed himself-by a politically motivated car bombing targeting his activist daughter. With the inspector in the hospital, the case falls to his partner, Mike Burden. But when a strange mother and son are suspected,...

Inspector Wexford and his assistant Burden unravel the threads connecting the drowning of an elderly, world-renowned flautist and the murder of a woman whose identity confounds them.

Chief inspector Wexford had almost made up his mind that he would never again set eyes on Eric Targo's short, muscular figure. And yet there he was, back in Kingsmarkham, still with that cocky, strutting walk. Years earlier, Targo stalked and taunted Wexford, daring him to press charges after a woman was found strangled in her bedroom. Over the years there are more unsolved, apparently motiveless murders in the town, and Wexford suspects that the...