Showing results by author "Gwendoline Butler" in All Categories

Scotland Yard's eminent Detective John Coffin was a mere sergeant. Anticipating a promotion, he buys a house that needs repairs and proves a catalyst to dire events. Workmen find the body of an adolescent boy under the floor - and Coffin, though it's not his case, keeps up with an investigation that comes to center on his own neighbors. Attracted to Rose Hilaire, the sergeant learns that her son was a friend of the murder victim and of other missing boys.

British writer Butler has crafted a grim tale that unsuccessfully blends murder with social commentary. In 1946, newly promoted detective-constable John Coffin arrives in Greenwich to take up his post. Soon after, the body of a young woman floats down the Thames to South London. It quickly becomes clear that this is no ordinary murder: the victim has been strangled, stabbed and mutilated.

A new mystery featuring the complex and fascinating London policeman John Coffin finds Coffin investigating the apparently accidental deaths of two of his officers, deaths linked to a strange half-dead tree.

Detective John Coffin must find out who killed the man belonging to the severed human head found in an urn on the church steps.

Student Amy Dean has disappeared with her boyfriend Martin - a year after Martin's former girlfriend Virginia was found beaten to death. The connection between the two incidents seems clear - but John Coffin, Commander of the police, discovers that both girls worked at Star Court House.

Following the brutal stabbing of a young girl, John Coffin, chief commander of the Docklands district, receives a series of notes from "the Paper Man" promising more bodies if the young girl's killer isn't caught. As the case goes unsolved, more bodies turn up, and now Coffin must find two killers.

With his wife, the acclaimed actress Stella Pinero, away on a movie shoot in Scotland, Chief Commander John Coffin is at a bit of a loose end with just the cat and dog for company. But one morning, as he checks through the mail for his wife, he gets a rather unpleasant surprise: Horrific pictures of badly abused children sent anonymously to Stella. Rather than worry his wife, he vows to track down the culprit and calls in a trusted colleague, DCI Phoebe Astley, to assist him in his inquiries.

It is 1978 and senior police John Coffin has been drafted back to South London to oversee the Local Detective branch. Here, he becomes involved in a game so deadly that everyone is a possible victim...

Marriage is proving anything but dull for Commander John Coffin, keeper of the peace in London's Second City. With grande dame of the stage Stella Pinero in his life, Coffin's days lack no drama. When the curtain comes down on opening night in Stella's newly transformed theater, Joe and Josie Macintosh are found stabbed to death in their theater box. A curious note left next to their bodies reveals that Joe and Josie Macintosh have carried out a suicide pact.

Seton was a detective doing undercover work on the sale of illegal pharmaceuticals. No one, including John Coffin, Commander of London's Second City, knows what the note means, but it appears that Seton was secretly investigating internal police corruption.

John Coffin takes on the case of a man who claims his father was a serial killer and that as a boy he helped his father bury a victim. Coffin agrees to try to find the body, but then a woman reporter is found dead after digging into the man's past.

London's Second City is shaken by a terrorist's bomb and a woman's body is found in a damaged building. The face is unrecognizable, the fingertips have been removed, but the handbag by the corpse appears to belong to Stella Pinero, the wife of John Coffin, Chief Commander of the Second City Police.

Inspector Coffin decides to investigate some strange goings-on on Murder Street - the most violent street in town - when a man who thrives on reporting and even predicting murder disappears himself. By the author of Coffin and The Paper Man.

In the court of King George IV, Major Mearns - an old dog of war and veteran of Willington's army - is the guardian of Windsor Castle. Some would call him a spy; he calls himself a "watcher." Working with his close friend, the resourceful Sergeant Denny, the pair maintain a cool facade behind which they go about their duties quietly and unnoticed. Unnoticed, that is, until the day Mearns receives a parcel containing a gruesome surprise: a pair of severed human legs.