Harry Stanford is one of the wealthiest men in the world, and his family one of the most respected in America. When he mysteriously drowns while cruising on his yacht, things begin to change. Is the beautiful young woman who appears at the funeral really who she claims to be, or is she an imposter?
In Stephen Morris we see the eponymous hero leaving Oxford University unable to marry his girl because of a lack of prospects. He starts as a mechanic and a pilot at a friend's aerodrome business. In Pilotage, Peter Dennison is to start as a junior partner at a firm in China. The woman he wishes to marry can't accept his proposal if it means going to live in Hong Kong. Dennison has to find a way to make money and marry.
"The Villa of Mysteries", the second novel in the Italian crime series set in Rome, features Caravaggio-loving Detective Nic Costa. In this title, when a young woman turns up dead in a peat bog, a maverick pathologist thinks she's the victim of an ancient Roman ritual. But she's wrong.
Peter Diamond, the traditionalist dinosaur of Bath CID, finds the low murder rate in the city a touch frustrating, so he decides to check whether a couple of suicides which his colleague is investigating have been accurately classified. On the outskirts of the city a woman is found unconscious in a hospital car park, but when she recovers she can't remember who she is or how she came to be there.
