"Chew on this," says Melrose Plant to Richard Jury, who's in the hospital being driven crazy by Hannibal, a nurse who likes to speculate on his chances for survival. Jury could use a good story, preferably one not ending with his own demise.

Plant tells Jury of something he overheard in The Grave Maurice, a pub near the hospital. A woman told an intriguing story about a girl named Nell Ryder, granddaughter to the owner of the Ryder Stud Farm in

...

"A Bath antiques dealer has disappeared, and detective Peter Diamond has been saddled with the "help" of a hardboiled Philip Marlowe wannabe private investigator in cracking the case. MWA Grand Master Peter Lovesey's 20th installment in the award-winning series will have readers laughing from the first page. If there's one thing detective Bath Peter Diamond has no patience for, it's a dumb git trying to get involved in one of his investigations--for...

Detective Chief Inspector Monika Paniatowski's bitter personal history with Chief Superintendent Tom Kershaw makes her resent the emphasis being put on finding his wife, who has apparently been kidnapped following an automobile accident, and when young prostitute Grace Meade also disappears, Monika sees enough similarities to justify widening her search, even though she has been told to devote her time to the Kershaw case.

"Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers and Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley must confront the past as they try to solve a crime that threatens to tear apart a quiet, medieval English town. Ludlow is stunned when one of its most revered and respected citizens--Ian Druitt, the local deacon--is accused of a serious crime. Then, while in police custody, Ian is found dead. Did he kill himself or was he murdered? When Barbara is sent to Ludlow to investigate...

"The fifth book in the Magic Men series, Now You See Them is a wild mystery with detective Edgar Stephens and the magician Max Mephisto, as they investigate a string of presumed kidnappings in the swinging 1960s"--

OLD SINS CAST LONG SHADOWS Normally dead bodies in a graveyard are buried-but not this one. When a woman is found strangled in a North London cemetery with an old newspaper clipping clutched in her hand, Inspector Witherspoon is surprised to find that he and the victim have crossed paths before. Alice Robinson was a respectable widow who ran a quiet Islington lodging house. None of her lodgers have any apparent motive to murder their landlady. But...

"The dog came back."
"This is a joke, right?"
"No, it isn't…So do you want to hear the rest of it?" Dumbly, Jury nodded.
The rest of it is told by Harry Johnson, who sits down by Richard Jury in the tavern, The Old Wine Shades. Over three successive nights, Harry spins out this story of a good friend of his whose wife and son (and dog) disappeared one day when they were Surrey. No trace, no clue, no lead...