Abbot Peter has recently swapped his failing leadership of a remote monastery in the Sinai desert for retirement in the bleak and stormy English seaside town of Stormhaven. When the charismatic local vicar is discovered dead – crucified, naked, to a cross on the vestry wall – Abbot Peter is invited to act as a Special Witness investigator. He is assigned to work alongside Detective Inspector Tamsin Shah – young, pretty, brash, unsentimental and, by a peculiar quirk of fate, a niece that Abbot Peter never knew he had. A cast of suspects to the murder of Rev. Adam Fontaine is quickly revealed from within the church's own community – including the formidable flower-arranger, the egotistical bishop, the compassionate curate, the irascible youth worker and the frustrated treasurer. Nine people were at the meeting that immediately preceded the vicar's shocking death. Could the mystical nine-point Enneagram revered by the father he never knew help Abbot Peter...

Although seven clowns started the evening alive, only six of them still breathed by the evening’s end. And while everyone saw the murderer and knew the murderer, no one knew their name. A masked Halloween party at a haunted Elizabethan mansion for clients and counsellors of a new psychotherapy practice ends in gruesome murder … it could only happen in the bleak seaside town of Stormhaven. Once again, retired monk Abbot Peter and his irascible niece DI Tamsin Shah are called upon to solve the mystery. The answers are to be found in the mystical writings of a 14th-century Persian poet.

The Stormhaven Etiquette Society, a secretive affair, unafraid to name and shame those who transgressModel Services, the town's only brothel, a discreet but busy presence in Church StreetBybuckle Asylum, a desolate shell on the seafront that housed over seven hundred mental patients prior to 'care in the community' What brings these three together is a cold-blooded execution that both shocks and confounds. For lying dead in the empty asylum, tied to an old metal bed frame, is a pillar of the establishment. Or is she? Sleuthing couple DI Tamsin Shah and her remarkable cleric uncle join forces once again to solve a murder mystery that reveals dark secrets from Abbot Peter's tempestuous student years.'Do we ever leave anything behind?' he wonders as the killer swings the gun barrel towards him . . .'To a long list of much-loved detective pairings, which includes Holmes and Watson, Poirot and Hastings, and Morse and Lewis, we must now add...

January 30th 1649. England is not a country that wishes to execute its divinely-appointed king. Yet Charles 1 finds himself shivering on a scaffold in Whitehall, with the axe man by his side . . . In this brilliantly atmospheric novel, Simon Parke explores one of the most gripping tales in English history. He weaves together the four coinciding stories of Charles, including his extraordinary year-long imprisonment on the Isle of Wight . . . Robert Hammond, the poor man who found himself the king's gaoler . . . Charles' remarkable mistress (written out of the records), the super-spy Jane Whorwood . . . and of course, the brilliant and depressed Oliver Cromwell, who is working through his own demons of religion, politics, love and death.