It is 1932 and John Madden, former Scotland Yard inspector, is now a farmer in the peaceful Surrey countryside. Peaceful, that is, until he discovers the mutilated body of a small girl, Alice Bridger, hidden in a wood. Uneasy at the direction of police enquiries and convinced the killer has struck before, he quietly begins his own investigation.
And it is an investigation that will involve not only Scotland Yard but also the world of secret agents - and the German police. When a second body is found Madden's instinct is proved right - there is a multiple killer at large, and he has been covering his tracks for a number of years. The investigation leads to Germany - where the Nazis are on the brink of power. And the mutilated bodies the killer has left in his wake are just a shocking foretaste of the horrors to come ...

Rennie Airth was born in South Africa and worked for a number of years as a foreign correspondent for Reuters.

Off the island of Crete an illicit diver finds a 30-year-old aircraft wreck on the seabed. From amongst the corpses still strapped inside he recovers a steel case containing four sealed flasks. The rogue diver manages to cut one of them open...but within twelve hours succumbs to a hideous death. Agency trouble-shooter Paul Richter is delegated to investigate the source of the mystery killer, but encounters far more questions than answers. Why has the CIA directed total destruction of the aircraft's remnants? Why is a hit team roaming the island to eliminate anyone with close knowledge of the missing flasks? Who is now picking off members of the hit team itself? And why are retired agents back in America getting professionally eliminated? As Richter gets ever closer to unravelling a decades-old secret, even he is unprepared for the sheer horror of the truth about to be disclosed.

After a Sudanese businessman falls ten stories from his hotel-room balcony, Paz investigates and finds a most unlikely suspect - an otherwordly creature named Emmylou Dideroff who claims to commune with the holy saints. Her "Confessions", scribbled in a series of notebooks, tell a remarkable tale of a woman from the wrong side of the tracks - a thief, a drug dealer, a prostitute - who would be called into the service of God in a most unusual way. Might this "service" include the murder of the Sudanese businessman, whose knowledge of oil reserves may be contributing to African genocide? It is left to police psychologist Lorna Wise to determine whether Emmylou is legally insane. But when people associated with the suspect start turning up dead, both Paz and Lorna begin to suspect that there's something much larger at stake than Emmylou's guilt or innocence - and that the search for justice might bring them up against an even more elemental force...

When an old woman storms into the Rijks Museum demanding the return of her painting, archivist Ruth Braams cannot quell her curiosity. Together with Myles, her gay confidant, Ruth delves into the history of the piece of looted Nazi art and discovers an enigmatic picture with a disturbing wartime provenance. It also appears that the elderly Lydia is not the only claimant and, against strict bureau regulations, Ruth endeavours to help strengthen her case. Days later, Ruth begins to receive sinister anonymous threats, warning her to stay away from Lydia and the painting. When the door of her home, a houseboat on the Bloemgracht canal, is covered in graffiti and her gas supply tampered with, Ruth is convinced these are deterrents from the rival claimant. Our irrepressible and emotionally troubled heroine refuses to take them at face value and continues to strike up a friendship with the lonely old lady. But as the threats escalate, Ruth realises that there must be far more to the painting's popularity, and she enters into a series of increasingly lethal adventures as she investigates the painting's secret symbolism...

The border town of Ludlow has it all: exquisite medieval streets, an imposing ruined castle, a parish church the size of a cathedral, and a weight of history and legend. Wealthy people, famous people, have come to Ludlow to live. A sad teenage boy comes here to die ... dramatically, at sunset, in a fall from the ruins. Accident or suicide? Either way, no great mystery Or is there?
Robbie Walsh was the nephew of former Detective Sergeant Andy Mumford, newly - and reluctantly - retired from West Mercia CID. When Mumford's ailing mother becomes convinced she's still seeing her dead grandson in the old town, the ex- policeman brings in Merrily Watkins, parish priest, and Deliverance Consultant to the Diocese of Hereford. Is it dementia, delusion or something even more disturbing?
Both scepticism and the dark underside of belief threaten Phil Rickman's engagingly open-minded heroine in this atmospheric thriller.

'With the brittle snap of a twig behind her, she knew she should never have come'
Robin Ballantyne is directing a 'missing persons' series for the Corporation. But when she begins enquiring about missing colleague Melanie TYent, Robin is advised by a shadowy superior to leave this case alone.
Fearful for Melanie's safety, Robin continues to unravel her last known movements and is forced to juggle the investigation with the demands of her three-year-old twins, her increasingly eccentric mother, her elusive, criminal father and her own shaky romantic life ...
But soon a shocking new case hits the headlines and, too late, Robin realises she has become embroiled in a conspiratorial world where nothing is as it seems.
Can she stay in control and out of danger?

1884 and in Khartoum, on the banks of the Nile, the Courtneys meet the Ballantynes in this new epic adventure

In the Sudan decades of brutal misgovernment by the ruling Egyptian Khedive in Cairo precipitate a fierce and bloody rebellion and Holy War headed by a charismatic new religious leader, the Madhi or `Expected One'. The British are forced to intervene to protect their national interests and to attempt to rescue the hundreds of British subjects stranded in the country
Along with hundreds of others, British trader and businessman Ryder Courtney is trapped in the capital city of Khartoum. It is here that he meets Captain Penrod Ballantyne of the 10th Hussars, as well as the British Consul, David Benbrook, and his three beautiful daughters. Against the vivid and bloody backdrop of the siege of Khartoum, in which British General Charles George Gordon is killed and the British relief column retreats, these three powerful men fight to survive.

Wilbur Smith was born in Central Africa in 1933. He was educated at Michaelhouse and Rhodes University. He became a full-time writer in 1964 after the successful publication of When the Lion Feeds, and has since written nearly thirty novels.