Detective Chief Inspector Harry Grimm is forced to take leave from Bristol’s Major Investigations Team when his boss, tired of Harry chasing the ghost of his murderous father, sends him north on secondment. Used to city life and high stress, Harry fears his life will now be spent handing out speeding tickets, finding lost sheep, and directing tourists. But when a local teenager runs away, Harry finds himself pulled into an investigation much worse than anyone could have ever expected.

Mr Edgar Finchley, unmarried clerk, aged 45, is told to take a holiday for the first time in his life. He decides to go to the seaside. But Fate has other plans in store...From his abduction by a cheerful crook, to his smuggling escapade off the south coast, the timid but plucky Mr Finchley is plunged into a series of the most astonishing and extraordinary adventures. His rural adventure takes him gradually westward through the English countryside and back, via a smuggling yacht, to London.

Frank Renfield, Baron of Renfield Hall, will stop at nothing to save himself from ruin. Even if that means marrying his daughter off to a rich American. Unfortunately for him, she is already in love with a penniless nobody named Alan Lavender—to the glee of Alan’s greedy uncle Guy. He’s been nosing into the Renfields’ murky past, and he says he’s uncovered a secret. Something so shocking it casts a shadow over Frank’s entire legacy. Tensions run high at the hall, until Guy Lavender turns up dead.

Was the biggest case of his career the worst mistake he ever made? Ten years ago, DCI Jack Logan stopped the serial child-killer dubbed "Mister Whisper", earning himself a commendation, a drinking problem, and a broken marriage in the process...When another child disappears a hundred miles north in the Highlands, Jack is sent to lead the investigation and bring the boy home. But as similarities between the two cases grow, could it be that Jack caught the wrong man all those years ago?

Former detective sergeant Norman Norman’s retirement is boring him to tears. So when he’s asked to assist an upcoming female DI and mentor a new team of misfits in a sleepy Welsh coastal town, he jumps at the opportunity. But the training has barely begun when a woman’s corpse washes up on the sand. With no reports of missing persons, DS Norman is stumped...until the post-mortem reveals a shocking hint to the culprit being local. But with a growing list of suspects who all have alibis, the experienced cop and his fledgling team’s first case could be their last.

Nestled high in the Tuscan hills lies Villa Volpone, home to renowned crime writer Jonah Moore and his creative writing course. It’s also the last place retired DCI Dan Armstrong expected to spend his retirement! Dan’s no writer, but maybe this break will help him to think about the next chapter in his own life story? But only days into the course, Jonah Moore is found stabbed to death with his award-winning silver dagger! And Dan finds himself pulled out of retirement with a killer to catch.

D.I. Duncan McAdam is dispatched home to the Misty Isle. A body has been found buried in a remote location on the Waternish peninsula. Well-preserved in the peat, Isla Matheson—missing for the better part of two decades—is revealed to a shocked island community. A teenage runaway is dead...and no one is talking.

Spring, 1918. The Great War is at a crucial stage, the Germans are making one last push into France, and the Allies are struggling to hold them back. Battle lines are shifting, and men, and their machines, are being sent up and down the front to shore up defenses. Major Heathcliff Lennox, and his batman Greggs, are told to report to their new HQ. They set off on a sunlit day to fly the distance, but the enemy is never far away, and disaster strikes. They're sent crashing to the ground behind enemy lines, where life, death, and love await.

London, 1925. With their band the Dizzy Heights, jazz musicians Ivor ‘Skins’ Maloney and Bartholomew ‘Barty’ Dunn are used to improvising as they play the Charleston for flappers and toffs, but things are about to take a surprising turn.

A body is discovered deep in a cave beneath the Yorkshire Dales. Leading the investigation into the mysterious death are experienced DCI Jim Oldroyd and his partner DS Carter, a newcomer from London. The deceased is Dave Atkins, well known throughout the village but not well liked. While there is no shortage of suspects, the details of the crime leave Oldroyd and Carter stumped.

The young man with the shock of white-blond hair lay spread-eagled on the floor, surrounded by fallen books. His hand reached out to the scattered pages, as though he was trying to tell her something. But who is he? How did he come to be killed in Flora’s ordinary little bookshop? Flora finds out he was staying at the Priory Hotel, and when the gardener suddenly dies in its beautiful grounds only a few days later, she is certain that something untoward is happening in her quiet village by the sea.

William Warwick has always wanted to be a detective, and decides, much to his father’s dismay, that rather than become a lawyer like his father, Sir Julian Warwick QC, and his sister, Grace, he will join London’s Metropolitan Police Force. After graduating from university, William begins a career that will define his life: from his early months on the beat under the watchful eye of his first mentor, Constable Fred Yates, to his first high-stakes case as a fledgling detective in Scotland Yard’s arts and antiquities squad.

In North Devon, where two rivers converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his estranged father’s funeral takes place. On the day Matthew left the strict evangelical community he grew up in, he lost his family, too. Now, as he turns and walks away again, he receives a call from one of his team. A body has been found on the beach nearby: a man with a tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to death. The case calls Matthew back to the people and places of his past, as deadly secrets hidden at their hearts are revealed.

New York Times number-one best-selling author Jeffrey Archer is a master of the short-story form, creating classic tales beloved by his fans. Now the award-winning writer presents 20 of his most popular and fêted short stories in The Short, the Long and the Tall.

As plain-clothes men go, Dangerous Davies looks like a non-starter. The small fry of petty larceny and minor disturbances in the backwaters of north-west London are his daily round. His philosophising Welsh drinking companion Mod, his outsized and unruly dog Kitty, his quarrels with his landlady Mrs Fulljames - none of these bodes well for the efficient solving of crimes and the outwitting of villainy. But Davies is encouraged by his beautiful friend, Jemma, and every so often he stumbles upon something really big.

Why was the redoubtable King Henry, an aborigine from Western Australia, killed during a thunderstorm in New South Wales? What was the feud that led to murder after nineteen long years had passed? And who was the woman who saw the murder and kept silent? This first story of Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte, the half-aborigine detective, takes him to a sheep station in the Darling River bush country where he encounters those problems he understands so well... mixed blood and divided loyalties.

It's a rainy, uneventful evening in the Oddfellows' Arms until a man bursts into the pub, clearly unstable, and ranting about a body in Fennings' Mill. The police investigate and stumble upon a body-the face smeared with theatrical make-up and a false mustache pasted neatly over the lip. Once the national news descends, Inspector Faddiman calls in Inspector Littlejohn to help him uncover the dark, hidden secrets in this quiet, provincial town. Soon it becomes clear that a lot of people can't, and won't tell the truth.

1942: a German spy comes ashore on a desolate stretch of Lincolnshire beach. But he is hunted down by a young detective, Richard Prince. The secret services have need of a man like him.... In occupied Europe, Denmark is a hotbed of problems for British intelligence. Rumours of a war-ending weapon being developed by the Germans are rife. Sent to Copenhagen, Prince is soon caught in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Dodging Gestapo agents, SS muscle and the danger of betrayal, his survival - and the war effort - hangs in the balance.

Samuel Whitehead, landlord of the Rose and Crown, is a stranger in the lonely East Anglian village of High Eldersham. And when the newcomer is stabbed to death in his pub, it seems that the veil dividing High Eldersham from the outside world is about to be lifted. Detective Inspector Young forms a theory about the case so utterly impossible that merely entertaining the suspicion makes him doubt his own sanity. Surrounded by sinister forces beyond his understanding, he calls on a brilliant amateur and 'living encyclopedia', Desmond Merrion.

Northern Ireland, spring 1981. Hunger strikes, riots, power cuts, a homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera, and a young woman’s suicide that may yet turn out to be murder: on the surface, the events are unconnected, but then things—and people—aren’t always what they seem. Detective Sergeant Duffy is the man tasked with trying to get to the bottom of it all. It’s no easy job—especially when it turns out that one of the victims was involved in the IRA but was last seen discussing business with someone from the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force.