Fleeing from the castle after her father tries to force her to wed her twin sister's lover, Frederica der Esslingen takes refuge in the herbalist's cottage, where the son of a wealthy Strassburg merchant is studying.
A FAIR MAIDEN Anya of Winterbourne had suffered nothing but humiliation at the hands of men. And yet when she found a fallen knight in a still winter forest, she could not leave him to die. A NOBLE KNIGHT Weary of battle and pursued by assassins, Christian de Moreerx would have liked nothing more than to stay at Winterbourne and champion the elusive and beleaguered Lady Anya. But his past contained a secret he had to decipher if he was to live, and his presence could only bring more disaster to the manor.
When a child’s body is found buried under a Victorian mansion, Ruth is called in to investigate. The police, led by Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson, discover that the house used to be a Catholic children’s home. Nelson finds out that, forty years ago, two children went missing from the home. Is the body one of the missing children or does it go back to the days when the building housed an eccentric but very influential family?
One cold autumn night, a woman is found hanging from a beam in her summer cottage. At first sight it appears to be a straightforward case of suicide; the woman, Maria, had never recovered from the loss of her mother two years earlier and had a history of depression. But when Karen, the friend who found her body, approaches Erlendur and gives him the tape of a séance that Maria had attended, his curiosity is aroused.
'At first glance it could have been anything - a stone, a knotted root - until you looked more closely. Thrusting out of the wet earth, its bones visible through rags of flesh, was a decomposing hand...' It was eight years ago that they found the body buried on the moor. They were certain that this was one of psychotic rapist and multiple murderer Jerome Monk's teenage victims. Which left just two more bodies to find. But the ill-conceived search ended badly. And with Monk safely behind bars, the momentum faltered.
