He's a barbaric killer, guilty of the most terrible crime. He abducted and tortured an innocent 17-year-old girl, brutally raped her, then left her to die. Yet when James Martin O'Donnell stood trial at Exeter Crown Court he was acquitted.
Twenty years later a chance DNA test makes it tragically clear that there has been a shocking miscarriage of justice. But the law of double jeopardy means O'Donnell cannot be tried again - with haunting consequences for all those determined that this evil monster will pay for his depravity.
And when Joanna Bartlett, the once brilliant but now jaded crime correspondent who covered the case two decades ago, starts to delve into the past, she is forced to revisit not only the crime she can't bear to remember but also the maverick police detective she has forced herself to forget...

Hilary Bonner is a former showbusiness editor of the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mirror. She now lives in Somerset, and continues to work as a freelance journalist, covering film, television and theatre. She is the author of five previous novels: The Cruelty of Morning, A Fancy to Kill For, A Passion So Deadly, For Death Comes Softly and A Deep Deceit.

An innocent man was hanged forty years ago.

His wife and children campaign tirelessly to clear his name. They make no headway until in the new climate of the 1990s they hire Dave Cunane.
It doesn't take Dave long to find that there were several holes in the police case. Another man had as good an opportunity as the hanged man to have committed the crime. He is now the head of a powerful family of professional villains in Manchester.
When Dave's partner, Janine, releases a story to the press, tempers begin to reach boiling point, and Dave finds that his main priority is not to discover information buried in the memories of elderly witnesses, but to stay alive.

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Inner-city Bristol: a van load of A-grade heroin, worth a cool few million pounds, has gone missing on the city's streets. And the man who many thought had taken it has been brutally murdered.
Opal MacAlpine is in trouble. She's a suspect in the murder, and the Bristol underworld believe she knows where the heroin is. It's providence for her and bad luck for him, when she gets involved with DC John Cromer. His partner, DS Vic Hallam, is furious, but she swears she doesn't know where the dead man's slaughter is.
But even with Cromer and Hallam's protection, it looks like the underworld will stop at nothing to get hold of her...

'Up there with the likes of Minette Waiters and Ruth Rendell' Mike Ripley

Surrounded by dense, dark woodland, The Hermitage is an exclusive girls' school on the shores of Menai Strait. On a balmy summer night, someone lures Sukie Melville into those woods. The following day her body is pulled from the hungry water of the Strait.
Superintendent Michael McKenna and his team, struggling to find the killer, are caught in the turbulent undercurrents of school life, all the while deceived by the silent conspiracies fostered by the headmistress, charismatic Freya Scott. The Hermitage girls appear to have everything, but the aura of beauty, wealth and privilege they wear hides shattered dreams and bitter memories, especially amongst Sukie's old friends in the elite sixth form.
Did someone hate her so much she had to die, or love her too much to let her live? And what, or who, wrecked her life-long friendship with Imogen Oliver, destroying Imogen's will to live in the process? As McKenna scratches the glossy surface, he unearths drug-addiction, intolerable pressure, nervous breakdowns and the vicious hidden agenda underpinning the school's ethos. Nothing in that dangerous hot bed of passionate, brooding resentments is what it seems, and no one can be trusted,least of all Freya Scott, to whom McKenna is recklessly attracted.