Edward Peel

A chance encounter with an old university friend leads newly qualified priest, James Brittain, to accept an invitation to participate in the CND Aldermaston march in April 1963, where he unwittingly learns of a plot to assassinate President Kennedy during his forthcoming visit to the UK.

When a young magician’s apprentice secretly summons an irascible 5,000 year old djinni to do his bidding, neither are prepared for the peril that ensues.

Nathaniel is plotting the downfall of his nemesis – a ruthless magician by the name of Simon Lovelace – and tasks Bartimaeus to steal the powerful Amulet of Samarkand from him, in order to exact his revenge.

But before long, Nathaniel and Bartimaeus are caught up in a terrifying adventure much bigger than either of them anticipated, involving intrigue, rebellion and murder…

A stolen painting becomes a potential weapon of mass destruction.
A gangster is so desperate to own a portrait of an unknown person by a forgotten artist that he kills three men. In this fast-moving crime thriller ex-cop John Kite follows the trail of blood to a gallery full of looted Middle Eastern archaeology then discovers that a renegade spy is planning revolution.
Art detective Kite is a sexy tough guy - an ex-firearms specialist who "looks like a young Bryan Ferry" and runs elite Marathon times. His perky sense of humour brings sparky dialogue but his dead parents are a no-go area and his hidden past makes him a marked man.
Can Kite stop the impending cataclysm before he falls victim to the killer himself?
‘I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed it. A treat. I’m a fan. A hugely entertaining story. Characterisation is superb. A “switch off the phone, park interruptions, sit back and enjoy the ride” type of novel.’ Crime writer E V Seymour

Gilbert de Rideford, Knight of the Temple of Solomon, claims to have come into possession of a secret that could shake Christendom to its foundations. He asks for Crowner John's help to escape from the secretive order of warrior monks. Swept into a world of religious intrigue and dangerous politics, Crowner John finds himself undertaking a mission to the Island of Lundy - inhabited by notorious pirates - until finally the awful secret itself is revealed.

Ten-year-old Tom and his family have just moved to a small town on the crest of the moors, next to the town's neglected churchyard. Is he the only one who sees the strange, solitary child playing there? And what is she trying to tell him? What terrible secret is this town hiding?

After the death of his wife, Peter Byerly, a young antiquarian bookseller, opens an eighteenth-century study on Shakespeare forgeries. He is shocked to find a Victorian portrait strikingly similar to his wife tumble out of its pages, and becomes obsessed with tracking down its origins. As he follows the trail back to the nineteenth century, Peter unearths a book that might prove that Shakespeare was indeed the author of all his plays.

Jack and his mother move to an old house after the death of his father. There Jack encounters the ghosts of four children and the powerful Ghost Mother who is set on having him for herself. Not for the faint-hearted!

When the Potts buy a new car and come back with a wreck, nobody is surprised. The car has a name.. and she tells them what it is.... Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! Then they find that she can fly... And swim! Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a car on a mission to stop a criminal gang in its tracks -- and she is taking the Potts with her!

Colditz was the last stop for prisoners of war during WWII. Once within the walls of the castle, the Germans reasoned, escape was impossible. And yet many prisoners attempted to break free and many succeeded. Pat Reid was one of those men, and his escape, in 1942, was both one of the most simple and the most daring.

In this classic novel, read from "The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston", George Sherston struggles to overcome shell shock in a military hospital during World War I. He eventually returns to the army and is sent to Palestine and Ireland and finally the Western Front in France.

December, 1142. A brother of Shrewsbury Abbey suffers a fall that almost kills him. He makes a shocking deathbed confession to Brother Cadfael. When the man recovers Cadfael accompanies him on an arduous journey to redeem his past sins.

The perfect quirky nostalgic crime read - a tale of steam trains, giant squid, missing screenplays, missing mothers and a quest for the truth, from the inimitable Malcolm Pryce It's the winter of 1948. The four great railway companies have just been nationalised and Jack Wenlock - the last of a fabled cadre of railway detectives - is thrown out onto the street. Penniless, with new bride Jenny to support, and hiding from a murderous organisation called Room 42, Jack's prospects look bleak. But then a letter arrives from a mysterious Cornish Countess revealing that Jack's mother - long believed to be dead - may have survived a shipwreck off the coast of Java. Seizing the opportunity to track down his only remaining family member, Jack and Jenny board a boat heading East. The trail takes them to a run-down Siamese hotel where a motley assortment of drifters has washed up. Here a spy, an assassin, a deserter, an old soldier and a fading Hollywood movie star all await the arrival of a missing part for a flying boat and a journey that will take them into the realm of myth. But if Jack is ever to see his mother again, he has to stop them...

Nick Breakspear thinks he's opted for the easy life. But acting as nursemaid for the idle rich aboard the luxury yacht Wavebreaker in the Bahamas does have its downside. Especially when you come across a bullet-ridden boat not far from the infamous drug baron's hideaway island of Murder Cay. Most people would turn a blind eye. But Nick Breakspear isn't most people...  Book 3 of series.

It is Midsummer, 1631. While Alexander Seaton and his fellow masters enjoy the holiday with their students, Robert Sim, librarian of Marischal College, Aberdeen, is murdered in a dark alleyway in town. While the university and town authorities investigate the murder, Seaton is asked by the college principal to look into Sim's private life.

Dark Encounters is a collection of classic and elegantly unsettling ghost stories first published in 1963. A spine-tingling collection, these tales are set in the brooding landscape of Scotland, with an air of historic authenticity - often referring to real events, objects and people. From a demonic text that leaves its readers strangled to the murderous spectre of a feudal baron, this is a crucial addition to the long and distinguished cannon of Scottish ghost stories.

For those who seek out the unnerving, the unknown and the unexplainable, Dark Encounters is guaranteed to raise the hair on the back of your neck.

It was meant to be a harmless stag-night prank. But with only three days to the wedding, Michael Harrison has disappeared and his friends are dead. Detective Superintendent Roy Grace discovers that the one man who ought to know Michael's whereabouts is saying nothing - for one man's disaster is another man's fortune.. Book 1 of series.

D.I. Marjory Fleming uncovers some unexpected truths about her late father when she is called in to reopen a case which he had formerly failed to solve during his time in the force.

You step inside your house after a long, hard day at work and the phone rings. Your fourteen-year-old daughter has been taken and her kidnappers demand half a million pounds in cash. They give you 48 hours to raise the money and they warn you that if you call the police, she'll die. What's more, your husband is missing.

A Bill Slider Mystery 

It looks as though Inspector Bill Slider has a serial killer on his hands: 'the Park Killer', as the media so innovatively label him, attacks his victims in London's public parks, and when Chattie Cornfield is murdered while out jogging, the pattern fits.

But as Slider and Atherton investigate, it is Chattie's life rather than the killer's that poses questions. There's a startling anomaly between her ritzy lifestyle and her modest income. There are friends who loved her, a sister who hated her, men who thought they knew her, and a mysterious package that poses more questions than it answers.

Who was the real Chattie? Where was she on the last day of her life? And was it love, hate or avarice that drove the hooded figure to kill her?  Book 10 of series.

Max Gordon, a sporty 15-year-old boy, is a pupil at a private school in Dartmoor. Jogging across the moors, he is attacked by an assassin with a pistol. After escaping him, Max discovers that his explorer father has gone missing. Max is determined to find him whatever dangers he may face.

Lincolnshire is England's second-largest county-and one of the least well-known. Yet its understated chronicles, unfashionable towns and undervalued countryside conceal fascinating stories, and unique landscapes: its Wolds are lonely and beautiful, its towns characterful; its marshlands and dynamic coast are metaphors of constant change. From plesiosaurs to Puritans, medieval ghosts to eighteenth-century explorers, poets to politicians, and Vikings to Brexit, this marginal county is central to England's identity. Canute, Henry IV, John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford all called Lincolnshire home. So did saints, world-famed churchmen and reformers-Etheldreda, Gilbert, Guthlac and Hugh, Robert Grosseteste, John Wycliffe, John Cotton, John Foxe and John Wesley-as well as Isaac Newton, Joseph Banks, John Harrison and George Boole. Lincolnshire explorers went everywhere: John Smith to Jamestown, George Bass and Matthew Flinders to Australia, and John Franklin to a bitter death in the Arctic. Artists and writers have been inspired-including Byrd, Taverner, Stukeley, Stubbs, Eliot and Tennyson-while Thatcher wrought neo-liberalism. Extraordinary architecture testifies to centuries of both settlement and unrest, from Saxon towers to sky-piercing spires; evocative ruined abbeys to the wonder of the Cathedral. And in between is always the little-known land itself-an epitome of England, awaiting discovery.

She disappeared fifteen years ago. Frank Elder never stopped looking.

Long after Susan Blacklock's disappearance, Detective Inspector Frank Elder has taken early retirement, but the case still plagues his mind - one failure he can never fix.

The prime suspects were jailed for another murder. Now, one of them is on parole - until he vanishes too.

And then the postcards start arriving. Postcards from the killer. Postcards of Elder's daughter...

It’s 1968. James Brittain, undercover MI6 agent, has a mission to meet up with a Czech scientist in Prague and report back on what he has to say. What could be simpler? However James finds himself in the right place at the wrong time. Will he manage to complete his mission? Only time will tell. Sequel to 'The 63 Steppes' (11444)

In the Yorkshire Dales, Chief Inspector Alan Banks, helped by psychologist Jenny Fuller, uncovers startling secrets in the town of Eastvale. A peeping Tom is frightening the women, glue-sniffing thugs are breaking into homes and an old woman may or may not have been murdered. As the tension mounts, both Jenny and Banks are drawn deeper into events.  Book 1 of series.

Good music, fine dining and comfortable surroundings - that's how the Hotel Continental is advertised. Fraud, blackmail, torture and murder - that's what it becomes famous for.

The popular hotel on the English coast built its reputation on its Viennese cuisine and Austrian style but when one of the guests is found dead at the bottom of the nearby cliffs bearing the wounds of a man who has been systematically tortured, Gently brushes aside the hotel's facade of respectability.

International intrigue and a dark secret that stretches from Nazi-occupied Austria across the Atlantic to the back streets of New York leave Gently juggling with a deadly conundrum.

Gently wades through a torrent of suspects when a body is found floating face down in the river. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing - that's if you can call having too many potential murderers, 'a good thing'. What Gently has to work out is which of them had the cold blooded nerve to smash the victim's skull and dump him in the river.

Bath Abbey, 1199. The monks' peaceful existence is turned upside down when the Abbey's unpopular prior is found dead on Solsbury Hill. Sir Symon Cole and his wife, Gwenllian, arrive to investigate, and determined to get to the bottom of the suspicious circumstances surrounding the prior's death, Gwenllian launches a daring investigation that puts her in great danger, and Sir Symon accepts a challenge to visit the hill at night.

Bernard Samson needs to stay out of trouble, to get to know his wife Fiona again and to put his relationship with his lover, Gloria behind him. But the arrival of a wounded man in the middle of the night indicates that trouble won't be easy to avoid... Book 2 of the trilogy

Book 11 of the Hornblower series. 1815, the Napoleonic Wars are over. Yet Horatio Hornblower, Commander-in-chief of His Majesty's ships still needs his courage and leadership to ensure that the lasting peace in Europe reaches the turbulent seas of the West West Indies.  Book 11 of series.

When Harald eventually ascends the throne of Norway, his liegeman Thorgils is despatched on a secret mission to Duke William of Normandy with a plan to coordinate the twin invasions of England.  Book 3 of series.

1565. Henry Lyte is absorbed in the translation he is making of a Dutch Herbal and by the intricate Knot garden that he is planting. Beneath the surface, however, he is uneasy as old family troubles start to re-emerge.

Sean Egan has infiltrated a dangerous criminal gang who want him to abduct a serial killer, the Night Creeper, from police custody.

When super-rich Margaret Walker is found dead after a wild party, people assume it was an overdose - until a knife wound, almost invisible, is discovered on her body. But who would have wanted to murder her? As the investigation progresses, it is discovered that some of the party guests may have had a motive to kill Margaret...but were those motives enough to make someone a murderer - or was it a case of mistaken identity?

Charles Thoroughgood has left the army to be trained by MI6 in the arts of the Cold War. Nothing could prepare him, however, for the unexpected inheritance left him by his late father, which leads him into the murky world of Soviet espionage at the height of the nuclear threat to the West.

Brothers Will and Marty have to spend their holidays confined to the library where Mrs Murphy, the librarian, controls everything by shooting at mischief-makers with a gas-powered spud gun. But has she met her match in Will and Marty?

In August 1912, Tom, Jimmy and Itzhak set out on an adventure. Only two of them come home. Inspired by real events, this is the story of three friends, and a tragedy that will change them for ever. It is also a song of south London, of working class families with hidden histories, of a bright and complex world long neglected.