Catrin Walker-Booth

In 1824, Lyme Regis is as tumultuous as the sea that surrounds it. When twenty-four-year-old Ada Winters - poor, peculiar and brilliant - uncovers a set of unusual fossils on the cliffs, she believes she has found the answer to her scientific frustrations and her family's financial struggles.

Meanwhile, Doctor Edwin Moyle has come to Dorset in search of the discovery that will place him amongst the greatest geologists of the age. What he finds instead is a strange young woman who seems to hold the key to everything he desires.

But what is the creature that Ada and Edwin seek to unearth? And will it lead them to greatness, or destruction?

Elizabeth Sorrill is the junior matron at Foxton's élite School for Boys. Blessed with the kind of beauty others only dream about, her attractions prove irresistible to Alexander Belmayne, the seventeen-year-old son of the Lord Chief Justice. But their passionate affair is shortlived as bitter lies and scandal force them apart.

Angry and frustrated at Oxford, Alexander thrives on his reputation as a heartbreaker, until Bohemian beauty Jessica Poynter draws him into a fast life of glittering excess and depravity in London's high society. But when a chance meeting brings Alexander and Elizabeth together again, their passionate reunion leads to a breathtaking crime fired by an overwhelming obsession - a hatred so violent it knows no limits...

Claudine Rafferty is rich, reckless and beautiful. So when she throws herself into an arranged marriage with the eminently eligible but notorious François de Lorvoire, everyone in Paris is amazed. Determined to cope with François's cruelty and indifference, Claudine soon finds herself driven to find love in the arms of Armand St Jacques, one of her husband's vignerons.

But all is not what it seems in the de Lorvoire family. As Claudine learns more of Francois's sinister past, she also inherits some of his most dangerous enemies. And against a background of betrayal and conspiracy, she forced to learn not only whom she can trust, but also whom she really loves...

Marian Deacon has always been overshadowed by her cousin Madeleine, a glamorous, selfish model who will stop at nothing to reach the top. But their ordinary lives suddenly change with the arrival of Paul O'Connell, a handsome, charismatic writer who draws them into the mysterious disappearance of Olivia Hastings and the glamour and danger of her life in Italy and New York.

Stolen Beginnings is a compelling story of what happens when girls become women, and when love - and fate - get in their way