Mystery England

Before Jack the Ripper terrorised London, Police Inspector Samuel Ravenscroft patrolled the streets of Whitechapel. Clever and hard-working, Ravenscroft nonetheless has the worst record in the force. He lets a murderer escape during a chase and is banished to the spa town of Malvern for a water treatment to cure his asthma. Ravenscroft accepts a dinner invitation from a new acquaintance, Jabez Pitzer. Before dinner, the maid finds Pitzer slumped over his desk - dead. Ravenscroft immediately recognises the signs - Pitzer has been poisoned.

The Peculiar Crimes Unit has solved many extraordinary cases over the years, but some were hushed up and hidden away. Until now. Arthur Bryant remembers these lost cases as if they were yesterday. Here, then, is the truth about the Covent Garden opera diva and the 17th reindeer, the body that falls from the Tate Gallery, the ordinary London street corner where strange accidents keep occurring, the consul’s son discovered buried in the unit’s basement, the corpse pulled from a swamp of Chinese dinners....

While on a visit to London, American genealogist Jefferson Tayte’s old friend and colleague dies in his arms. Before long, Tayte and a truth-seeking historian, Professor Jean Summer, find themselves following a corpse-ridden trail that takes them to the Royal Society of London, circa 1708.

Beautiful and brilliant, Kendra Donovan is a rising star at the FBI. Yet her path to professional success hits a speed bump during a disastrous raid where half her team is murdered, a mole in the FBI is uncovered and she herself is severely wounded. As soon as she recovers, she goes rogue and travels to England to assassinate the man responsible for the deaths of her teammates.

Ruby is the most violently disturbed patient ever admitted to Drummersgate Asylum, high on the bleak moors of northern England. With no improvement after two years, Dr. Jack McGowan finally decides to take a risk and hypnotizes her - with terrifying consequences. A horrific dark force is now unleashed on the entire medical team, as each in turn attempts to unlock Ruby's shocking and sinister past. Who is this girl? And how did she manage to survive such unimaginable evil?

Retired from the force, Detective Superintendent Jeffrey Brandt goes native. He stabs a woman but holds back from killing her. Frustrated that no one takes any notice, he ups his game. Next time, he'll kill. Brandt fully knows how the police work. He'll use this knowledge to win a sick game; after all, he's chosen the rules. The crime scenes are spotless, Brandt's covered his tracks. There is no forensic evidence. Yet each killing has his unmistakable print. Faced with the challenge of discovering his identity is DCI Stella Johnson. She rises to Brandt's macabre challenge.

Attorney Cameron Thorne is thrust into a bloody tug-of-war involving secret societies, treasure hunters, and keepers of the secrets of the Jesus bloodline. Joined by Amanda, an enchanting British researcher with secrets of her own, Cam races around New England with only two choices - unravel the 600-year-old mysteries encoded in the ancient artifacts, or die trying.

The ghostly little monk of Foulridge and the giant apparition from Heaton Norris are just two of the denizens of the North-West you might not care to meet on a dark, stormy evening. But for those intrepid souls whose hearts quicken at the thought of eerie footsteps and muffled groans Peter Underwood has assembled an impressive collection of traditional legends.

Abby Kimball has just moved to New England with her boyfriend and is trying to settle in, but the experience is proving to be quite unsettling, to say the least. While on a tour of local historic homes, Abby witnesses a family scene that leaves her gasping for breath - because the family has been dead for nearly a century. Another haunting episode follows, and another, until it seems to Abby that everything she touches is drawing her in, calling to her from the past.

Many Christians mistakenly believe that their only choice is either to reconcile themselves to a fundamentalist reading of scripture (a "literal-factual" approach) or to simply reject the Bible as something that could bring meaning and value into their lives. In Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, Marcus Borg shows how instead we can freshly appreciate all the essential elements of the Old and New Testaments - from Genesis to Revelation - in a way that can open up a new world of intelligent faith.

After twenty years apart, Matthew and Helena have rekindled their college romance and are away in Iceland on their first holiday together. Swept up in the romance on a mountain hike, one moment they are taking the perfect photo, the next Helena is hanging from the cliff edge…

The invitation to her school reunion couldn’t have come at a better time for Chloe Flynn. Divorced, broke and bored at work, she’s living a life her teenage self would hate. Turning the clock back fifteen years might be just what she needs to wipe the slate clean and start again. And then there’s the chance she’ll bump into Nathan Blake, the one she still regrets letting get away…

When reporter Rebecca Connolly is told of Roddie Drummond's return to the island of Stoirm she senses a story. Fifteen years before he was charged with the murder of his lover, Mhairi. When he was found Not Proven, Roddie left the island. Now he has returned for his mother's funeral - and it will spark an explosion of violence. Rebecca joins forces with local photographer Chaz Wymark to dig into the secrets surrounding Mhairi's death, and her mysterious last words of Thunder Bay, where, according to local lore, the souls of the dead set off into the afterlife.

Facing the threat of King Philip's Enterprise of England - Spanish invasion and annexation of the country - Sir Francis Walsingham's secret service spreads a network of agents across Europe. After caring for hundreds of maimed and wounded soldiers returning from the fall of Sluys, young physician and code-breaker Christoval Alvarez is sent on two dangerous missions to Amsterdam, where, amongst the friendly Hollanders, treason and treachery lurks.

DI Louise Blackwell is still reeling from her brother Paul's murder when she is brought back from enforced leave and tasked with solving a strange new case - the slaughter of wild sheep at Cheddar Gorge, a place shrouded in mystery and folklore. When a man is brutally attacked with a machete on the clifftop and a young girl disappears, Louise realises that the horror is just beginning. Rumours of a mythical presence near the gorge are spreading fast, and why is a local environmental cult resisting all attempts to solve the case?

Around 6000 BC, a revolution took place on Orkney and the Western Isles of Scotland. An outstanding collection of stone circles, standing stones, round towers, and passage mounds appeared seemingly out of nowhere. And yet many such monuments were not indigenous to Britain, but to regions of the Caspian Sea and the Mediterranean. Their creators were equally mysterious. Traditions tell of the Papae and Peti, "strangers from afar" who were physically different, dressed in white tunics, and lived aside from the regular population.

Steeped in a history of award-winning Yorkshire ale, the town of Markham boasts not one but two breweries. Richard Foster runs one; his sister, Emily, along with her partner, Janice, runs the other. And not without some resentment. The unwelcome return of the town’s former bad boy, Brendan Scholes, threatens to ignite the sibling rivalry further. Scholes claims to have found the long-lost secret recipe to the beer that made Richard and Emily’s father famous, and he wants money.

Hollows Bend is a picture-perfect New England town where tourists flock to see fall leaves and eat breakfast at the Stairway Diner. The crime rate – zero – is a point of pride for Sheriff Ellie Pritchett. The day the stranger shows up is when the trouble starts. The sheriff and her deputy investigate the mysterious teenage girl. None of the locals can place her. She can’t – or won’t – answer any questions. She won’t even tell them her name. While the girl is in protective custody, the officers are called to multiple crime scenes leading them closer and closer to a lake outside of town.

Strange Tales of Scotland all deal with a particular aspect of Scottish mysteries. You'll learn of the ghost that appeared at the wedding of King Alexander II, and of monsters such as the Shellycoat and Water-horse that were thought to inhabit Scotland’s lochs...Finally, we have a look at the legend of the phantom armies of Scotland; soldiers who refuse to fade away even centuries after their wars have been fought, and their causes faded in history. Welcome to the Strange Tales of Scotland.

Frannie is delighted when a chance meeting with a handsome man and his son leads to a romance. The fact that the relationship is marred by gruesome tragedies, she dismisses as an unsettling coincidence. But eventually she can no longer ignore the fact that she is the only thing linking these horrible events. Is it a murderous practical joke? Or worse?