Showing results by narrator "Christopher Ravenscroft" in All Categories

Only eighteen black people live in Kingsmarkham. One of them is Wexford's new Doctor, Raymond Akande. When the doctor's daughter, Melanie, goes missing, the Chief Inspector takes more than just a professional interest in the case. Melanie, just down from university but unable to find a job, disappeared somewhere between the Benefit Office and the bus stop. No one liked to voice the suspicion that something might have happened, that Melanie might be dead...

Searching for truffles in a wood, a man and his dog unearth something less savoury - a human hand. The body, as Chief Inspector Wexford is informed later, has lain buried for ten years or so, wrapped in a purple cotton sheet. The post mortem can not reveal the precise cause of death. The only clue is a crack in one of the dead man's ribs.

'Wexford had almost made up his mind that he would never again set eyes on Eric Targo's short, muscular figure. And yet there he was, back in Kingsmarkham, still with that cocky, strutting walk.Years earlier, when Wexford was a young police officer, a woman called Elsie Carroll had been found strangled in her bedroom. Although many still had their suspicions that her husband was guilty, no one was convicted.

The Subaqua Task Force could find no trace of Giles and Sophie Dade, let alone the woman who was keeping them company, Joanna Troy. But Mrs Dade was still convinced her children were dead. This was an investigation which would call into question many of Wexford's assumptions about the way people behaved, including his own family.

A lump of concrete dropped deliberately from a little stone bridge over a relatively unfrequented road kills the wrong person. The driver behind is spared. But only for a while... It is impossible for Chief Inspector Wexford not to wonder how terrible it would be to discover that one of his daughters had been murdered.

On the day Lizzie came back from the dead, the police and her family and neighbours had already begun to search for her body. She had been missing for three days. A short while later, another young woman disappears, just as a convicted paedophile is released back into the community.