Rome is in chaos. The empire of a mobster chief is falling apart following his death. Rivals, fearsome relatives and associates are taking up position to vie for the spoils. With hideous murders in the streets of Rome, a lone female traveller arrives with an agenda of her own. But when her corpse is dragged out of the river bearing signs of foul pl...

Ten years after the eruption of Vesuvius, the surrounding countryside lies buried and barren. But the destroyed cities and luxury villas on the Bay of Naples are not utterly lost. Flavia Albia and her husband Tiberius Manlius are tasked with restoring one villa and identifying any surviving remains. What they unearth is beyond disturbing. When the...

Molly. Found wandering injured and dazed after an air raid on London, she remembers nothing of who she is. Except that she has lost something very precious... Jack. His mother disappeared in the bombing. As he waits in the orphanage he knows one day she'll return for him. But when the opportunity of a golden life is dangled before him, and it's cle...

A long time ago Magic faded away, leaving behind only yo-yos, the extremely useful compass-pointing-to-North enchantment and the spell that keeps bicycles from falling over. Things are about to change. Magical power is on the rise and King Snodd IV of Hereford has realised that he who controls Magic controls almost anything. Only one person stands...

In the good old days, magic was powerful, unregulated by government, and even the largest spell could be woven without filling in magic release form B1-7g. Then the magic started fading away.... Fifteen-year-old Jennifer Strange runs Kazam, an employment agency for soothsayers and sorcerers. But work is drying up. Drain cleaner is cheaper than a sp...

Sixteen-year-old Jennifer Strange and her sidekick and fellow orphan Tiger Prawns have been driven to the tip of the UnUnited Kingdoms - Cornwall - by the invasion of the Trolls. Their one defence is a six-foot-wide trench full of buttons, something which the Trolls find unaccountably terrifying (it's their clickiness). Worse than being eaten by Tr...

The Mighty Shandar, the most powerful wizard the world has ever seen, returns to the Ununited Kingdoms. Clearly, he didn't solve the Dragon Problem, and must hand over his fee: Eighteen dray-weights of gold. But the Mighty Shandar doesn't do refunds, and vows to eliminate the dragons once and for all - unless sixteen-year-old Jennifer Strange and h...

In the blazing July heat of imperial Rome, Flavia Albia inspects a decomposing corpse. It has been discovered in lots to be auctioned by her family business, so she's determined to identify the dead man and learn how he met his gruesome end. The investigation will give her a chance to work with the magistrate, Manlius Faustus, the friend she sadly...

Flavia Albia is a private investigator, always drawn to an intriguing puzzle - even if it is put to her by her new husband's hostile ex-wife. On the Quirinal Hill, Clodia Volumnia, a very young girl with stars in her eyes, has died, amid suggestions that she was poisoned by a love potion. It will have been supplied by a local witch, who goes by the...

Mustique is in a state of breathless calm as tropical storm Cristobal edges towards it across the Atlantic. Most villa owners have escaped the island but a few young socialites remain, unwilling to let summer's partying end. American heiress Amanda Fortini is one such thrill-seeker - until she heads out for a morning swim and doesn't return. Detect...

A tragic accident...or was it? Emperor Domitian has been awarded (or rather, has demanded) yet another Triumph to celebrate two so-called victories. Preparations are going smoothly until one of the men overseeing arrangements for the celebration accidentally falls to his death from a cliff on the symbolic Capitoline Hill. But an old woman comes for...

Julius Caesar left his gardens to the citizens of Rome, a peaceful sanctuary across the Tiber. Now the gardens and their sacred grove are dangerous haunts, especially for women alone. 'Don't go to the Grove,' people mutter, but when her husband has to leave Rome, it falls to Albia to supervise his building project in an old grotto. Why has someone...

Rome, the very end of December. The Field of Mars is packed with monuments, none more beautiful than Domitian's new Odeon and Stadium. But the area has been overtaken by ugly events: elaborately staged murders. Someone bears a spectacular grudge against the theatrical community and intends to get revenge in the most spectacular way possible. The ki...

An unpaid bar bill leads Flavia Albia to her most bitter and complex case yet. Decades earlier Appius Tranquillus Surus wrote his will: it freed his slaves and bequeathed his businesses to them. He left an orchard to the Prisci, a family he was friendly with, on the condition that his freedmen could still take its harvest. The convoluted arrangemen...

Saturnalia, the Romans' mid-December feast, nominally to celebrate the sun's rebirth but invariably a drunken riot. Flavia Albia needs a case to investigate, but all work is paused. The Aventine is full of fracturing families. Wives plot to leave their husbands; husbands plot to spend more time with their mistresses. But no one wants to hire an inv...

A spellbinding retelling of the story of Troy drawn from the perspective of the fearless women at the heart of it all. The House of Atreus is cursed. A bloodline tainted by a generational cycle of violence and vengeance. This is the story of three women, their fates inextricably tied to this curse, and the fickle nature of men and gods. Clytemnestr...

DS Caitlin Fitzgerald has a secret—but it's one she's deleted from her memory. In the 1990s when she was at school, she and her friends killed a fellow pupil. Thirty years later, Caitlin is happily married and loves her job as a police officer. One day her husband persuades her to go to a school reunion and another ex-pupil, Garfield Rice, is...

Jane Austen in the hands of queen of crime, Val McDermid. Get ready for a very different Northanger Abbey. Seventeen-year-old Catherine `Cat' Morland has led a sheltered existence in rural Dorset, a life entirely bereft of the romance and excitement for which she yearns. So when Cat's wealthy neighbours, the Allens, invite her to the Edinburgh Fest...

Once a celebrated author of short stories now in his twilight years, Anthony Peardew has spent half his life collecting lost objects, trying to atone for a promise broken many years before. Realising he is running out of time, he leaves his house and all its lost treasures to his assistant Laura, the one person he can trust to fulfil his legacy and...

Masha's life has stopped. Once a spirited, independent woman with a rebellious streak, her life has been forever changed by a tragic event twelve years ago. Unable to let go of her grief, she finds solace in the silent company of the souls of her local Victorian cemetery and at the town's lido, where she seeks refuge underwater - safe from the nois...

In order to stay human, Audrey has built a moat around herself; a moat of books, music and dreams. It makes her different from the echoes: the sophisticated, emotionless machines, built to resemble and work for the humans. Daniel is an echo-but he's not like the others. He has feelings he was never designed to have, and cannot explain. And when Aud...