Rainaldi was a violin-maker and when he was discovered slumped over his workbench, murdered with one of his own chisels, both the police and his friends are at a loss to discover a motive. Then it comes to light that Rainaldi had believed he was on the track of an infamous Stradivari - twin to the one housed in the Asmolean Museum and subject to two hundred years of myth and rumour. With nothing else to go on his two close friends pick up the search from where he left off, and plunge headlong into a world where great musical instruments change hands for millions, where forgery is an art form and where murder is often a dealer's chosen method of negotiation.

After a lull of four years, the 'silk stocking rapist' is back at work on the Upper East side, but this time Assistant DA Alexandra Cooper and Detective Mike Chapman have perfect DNA evidence to work with. They also have a much older case to work on - a skeleton has been found entombed in the wall of a house Edgar Allan Poe once lived in, but it turns out to be a relatively modern murder - from 1978. On the day the discovery of this body is leaked to the press, Alex gets a call that the silk stocking rapist has struck again, this time fatally. Or has he? The m.o. isn't precisely the same as the others, and it transpires that the victim worked in Poe's old house in 1978. Are the cases linked or is someone trying to silence possible witness to a thirty-five-year-old murder?

Raymond Thorne is wanted for murder - in Mexico, in Chicago and, most of all, in Los Angeles. He's got the elite 5-2 Squad of the LAPD on his tail, but still eludes them, until John Barron collars him. Then he escapes again - by dying. Barron, injured himself and off the case, is obsessed by the true identity of the man, by the tantalising clues to his motives - the keys to an anonymous safety deposit box, two London addresses in a notebook alongside a date marked 'in Moscow'. But Barron is carving a new life for himself and his sister in Europe and he pushes the enigma to the back of his mind, until one of Thorne's contacts in LA is found murdered in Paris, and only one man could have killed him - Thorne. Is it possible he pulled off the greatest escape? How? Why? Determined to learn the truth, Barron sets on a dangerous trail which will lead him across Europe to the icy streets of St Petersburg where Thorne's true persona and devastating political ambition threatens the world order.

England in 1912 still bears itself with Edwardian confidence, but strikes, protests and public violence reveal the fault lines as society evolves under the spur of new ideas and technology. Among the many branches of the Morland family, Jessie and Violet, childhood friends, learn to cope with the surprises of marriage and motherhood and their different strata of society. Jack, disappointed in love, loses himself in designing aircraft and training airmen for the newly formed flying corps. And Anne exhausted by the Suffragette struggle, seeks comfort in her friendship with an unconventional young woman. The Titanic tragedy shakes the confidence of a people used to conquering nature with engineering; and all the while, the troubled nations of Europe edge closer to a war no-one wants, but which seems inevitable.

Cynthia Harrod-Eagles is the author of the contemporary Bill Slider Mystery series as well as the Morland Dynasty novels. Her passions are music, wine, horses, architecture and the English countryside.