by Michael Robotham (2011)
In London, ex-cop Vincent Ruiz rescues a young woman from a violent boyfriend but wakes next morning to find that he's been set up and robbed. As he tracks down the thieves, he discovers the boyfriend's tortured body and learns that powerful men are looking for the girl. What did Holly Knight steal that is so important to them.
Lena Kennedy
Her mother's violent death left Marcelle at the mercy of her lecherous stepfather, until Thomas Mayhew, King's Messenger and attendant to the flamboyant court favourite Robert Carr, offers her protection, freedom, and love - but such perfect happiness is vulnerable.
Patricia Wentworth
Miss Silver investigates a disappearance in a village near a top-secret government research facility. Jenny Maxwell is a bright young child. After an automobile accident leaves her barely able to walk, she retreats into a world of fantasy, devouring novel after novel of steamy romance. Now she has begun to write, and for a twelve-year-old she shows great promise. After she sends her work off to a publisher, the house sends a representative to meet the young woman and guide her. But the stories she tells him are hardly fictional. Trapped in her room for hours at a time, Jenny hears all. She knows about the young woman who disappeared from town, and about the strange young man who works at the nearby military research center. What sounds like harmless gossip could actually be a grave threat to national security—one which only private investigator Miss Silver is capable of unearthing.
Jenni Mills
Kit Parry is a woman with a past, albeit one she'd rather forget. Now a successful engineer, she's spent all her adult life trying to erase the memory of what happened over the long, hot summer of her fourteenth year. When she takes a job shoring up the ancient quarries under her hometown of Bath, however, the secrets she tried so desperately to bury threaten to work their way to the surface. For beneath its sleepy facade, the old spa town is as riddled with unwanted memories as it is with Roman ruins ...
(by) Anne Morice
>Why has Pelham Hargrave returned to his childhood home after twenty-five successful years in Canada and the United States, and is his beautiful and neurotic young American wife quite what she claims to be? Why has a celebrated Hollywood director chosen to retire to a remote English country house, and why does one young woman covet the house and another abhor it? Above all, what is the secret of old Nannie's power, which allows her to dominate the household like some implacable Buddha in a rocking chair? >These are some of the questions which confront Tessa Crichton, actress wife of Scotland Yard detective Robin Price, when she arrives to spend a quiet weekend with her godmother in Herefordshire. One by one the puzzles are unravelled, thanks to Tessa's spirited and irrepressible curiosity, plus a little help from her husband, but not before two people have died and Tessa herself has narrowly escaped the same fate. >This is a traditional whodunnit, written with Anne Morice's customary verve and humour with plenty of clues cunningly distributed.