To be Witch Makers in the moorland village of Hallerton is both a great honour and a heavy burden. But this Witch Maker never lives to witness his moment of triumph and is discovered tied to the Witching Post early one morning with a length of twine wrapped tightly around his neck. Will DCI Charlie Woodend solve this mystery...

On Monika's first day in the new job, a severed female hand is discovered on the riverbank. Only hours into the case, she finds she can no longer trust her colleagues-- or even herself.

When Terry Pugh's headless body is found floating in the canal, DCI Woodend at first believes that Pugh had merely miscalculated the amount of rope he needed to hang himself. But why would Pugh commit suicide when he had a loving wife who was expecting their first baby, and was just about to start an exciting new job? Other disturbing questions soon follow in the first body's wake. Who was the mysterious stranger Pugh was seen with, just before he...

Pamela Rainsford, found on a lonely canal path in the middle of a dark night, has not only been raped and strangled, but her face has been hacked to pieces. At first it seems a random killing, but as the case progresses, Woodend begins to suspect that the death of the mild-mannered, respectable secretary may have been a result of her own secret life.And another secret life is having its consequences, too - as a result of his now-ended affair with...

Politician spills his guts - all over the road! The discovery of Bradley Pine's body off a busy road signals the end of his bid to win a local election. But why would the killer risk dumping the body so publicly? And why should he not only reduce the victim's mouth to pulp, but partly disembowel him? With the election looming, and Woodend's old enemy Marlowe replacing Pine as candidate, Woodend is required to produce a result. Any result!

When a young girl, Jill Harris, is murdered, the case soon becomes personal for Monika Paniatowski. She saw the victim looking distressed only hours before she was killed, and Jill was the same age as her own daughter, Louisa. Driven by guilt and pity, Monika throws herself into the investigation, but both the chief constable, who is away, and Colin Beresford - her right-hand man - think she is too emotionally involved to handle it. What none of them...

"On the day of her official retirement from the Force, DCI Monika Paniatowski looks at the two men and one woman who are no longer her team and thinks: Whatever the future holds, I will always be proud of you. She raises a toast. And just like that, her career as a homicide detective is over. Then, fifteen years later, Monika's former sergeant, Kate Meadows, makes a terrible mistake. Monika doesn't hesitate when Kate turns to her for help. She owes...

"When Mary Corbet walks into private investigator Jennie Redhead's rundown Oxford office one pleasant spring day in 1974, she is a desperate woman. Although sh'e convinced her daughter has been murdered, she can get neither the police nor her husband to agree with her. Jennie is not convinced either, but more out of compassion than conviction agrees to take the case. The only clue she has to go on is a fragment of an obscure 17th century poem she...

The third book in the series featuring DCI Monika Paniatowski - When a recently released prisoner claims in a deathbed confession that he is innocent of the rape and murder of a young girl for which he was convicted twenty-two years earlier, DCI Monika Paniatowski is tasked to lead an unofficial investigation into his claims. At first she is reluctant, but when she learns that her old mentor Charlie Woodend was the lead detective in the case, she...

Before she can even begin to track down the killer of the old woman dumped by the lonely canal, Monika Paniatowski needs to find out who she is, and no one seems to know. Even when her daughter Louisa provides the vital clue, it only makes life more difficult, because the Chief Constable, intent on making Paniatowskis life difficult, refused to let her follow the obvious trail. And it is not until there is a second, even more brutal murder, that Paniatowski...