Jury is yet to finish his first pint in the village of Long Piddleton when he finds a corpse inside a beautiful rosewood desk recently acquired by the local antiques dealer, Marshall trueblood. The body belongs to Simon Lean, a notorious philanderer. An endless list of suspects leads Jury and his aristocratic sidekick, Melrose Plant, to the nearby country estate where Lean's long-suffering wife resides. But Jury's best clue comes in London at a pub called the Five Bells and Bladebone. There he learns about Lean's liaison with a disreputable woman named Sadie, who could have helped solve the case.........if she wasn't already dead.

Taking a winter break in the Yorkshire Moors, and staying at The Old Silent Inn, Superintendent Richard Jury witnesses a most perplexing murder. Fascinated by the lovely widow of the victim, and puzzled by the dangerous cloak of silence that surrounds her, Jury is sufficiently intrigued to undertake his own unofficial - and very unpopular - investigation and becomes convinced that there are clues to be found in a kidnapping some eight years earlier.

All roads don't lead to the village of Ashdown Dean. The one that did led writer Polly Praed right to the police station....to be questioned about a corpse. Poor Polly admitted to opening the phone booth door, but the dead woman had fallen out quite on her own. Now Polly needed to phone again - to call Melrose Plant and Scotland Yard's Richard Jury for help. For something was rotten in Ashdown Dean. Pets were missing. Some were found dead.

The murder is in America, yet the call goes out to English police superintendent Richard Jury. This is only the first unique aspect of a case that would try the keen talent of Scotland Yard's sleuth. Accompanied by his aristocratic friend, Melrose Plant and by Sergeant Wiggins, Jury arrives in Baltimore, Maryland, home of zealous Orioles fans, mouth-watering crabs, and Edgar Allan Poe.

They were two young women, strikingly similar in life.....strikingly similar in death. Both were strangled with their own scarves - one in Devon, one outside a fashionable Mayfair pub called I Am The Only Running Footman. Richard Jury teams up with Devon's irascible local divisional commander, Brian Macalvie, to solve the murders

The vagaries of memory, the legacy of war. The last thing in the world Richard Jury wants to think about is the war that killed his mother, his father, his childhood, and made orphans of so many of the gaunt and sad-eyed children pictured in this handful of snapshots his old friend Mickey Haggerty shoves towards him on his desk.

The Lincolnshire fens are the setting for Superintendent Richard Jury's latest case. This landscape is one that can easily deceive, volunteering nothing - much like the locals of the only pub for miles around, the Case Has Altered. There's been a double murder. The body of one woman is found on the Wash; another woman lies floating in a canal in Windy Fen. Both are connected with the same manor house.

After a luminous blonde leaves, reboards, then leaves the double-decker bus Richard Jury is on, he follows her up to the gates of Fulham palace.....and goes no further. Days later, when he hears of the death in the Palace's walled garden, Jury will wonder if he could have averted it. But is the victim the same woman Jury saw?

As Melrose Plant sits in a Cornish tearoom, he is served by remarkable young Johnny Wells - waiter, cab driver and amateur magician. Melrose is attempting to escape his Long Piddleton lethargy by renting Seabourne house, positioned high on a promontory overlooking the sea. It looks like the set of a 40s or 50s romantic film, but Melrose is unprepared for the onslaught of memories it triggers. And in examining his own past, he is caught up in the tragic past of its owners, the Bletchley family.

When three women die of 'natural causes' in London and the West Country, there appears to be no connection - or reason to suspect foul play. But Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury has other ideas, and before long he's following his keen police instincts all the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico