DI Tremayne

An abandoned church in a village set in time-the ideal setting for murder. Detective Inspector Tremayne and his sergeant, Clare Yarwood, are hard pushed to solve the crime and to stay alive.

The man was not meant to die; the daggers were only theatrical props, plastic and harmless. A summer's night, a production of Julius Caesar among the ruins of an Anglo-Saxon fort. Detective Inspector Tremayne is there with his sergeant, Clare Yarwood. The assassination scene, the man collapses to the ground, Brutus defending his actions, Mark Antony's rebuke.

Someone had once told Detective Inspector Keith Tremayne that some people were lucky and some weren't. Tremayne knew only one thing: the man lying dead in a pool of blood had qualified on the lucky after winning sixty-eight million pounds on a lottery ticket, but now his luck had run out. Tremayne knew the victim, Alan Winters; even knew his family. The man with all his new wealth had not hidden behind closed doors, fending off the scrounging relatives, the newly-found friends. That wasn't Winters's style. He had been out and about, driving expensive cars, living well.

If it hadn't been for the circumstances, Detective Inspector Keith Tremayne would have said the view was outstanding. Up high, overlooking the farmhouse in the valley below, the panoramic vista of Salisbury Plain stretching out beyond. The only problem was that near where he stood with his sergeant, Clare Yarwood, there was a body, and it wasn't a pleasant sight.

A flawed heist of forty gold bars from a security van late at night. One of the perpetrators is killed by his brother as they argue over what they have stolen. Eighteen years later, the murderer, released after serving his sentence for his brother's murder, waits in a church for a man purporting to be the brother he killed. The threads stretch back a long way, and now more people are dying in the search for the missing gold bars.

Nobody liked Gloria Wiggins, a woman who regarded anyone who did not acquiesce to her jaundiced view of the world with disdain. James Baxter, the previous vicar, had been one of those, and her scurrilous outburst in the church one Sunday had hastened his death. And now, years later, the woman was dead, hanging from a beam in her garage. Detective Inspector Tremayne and Sergeant Clare Yarwood had seen the body, interviewed the woman's acquaintances, and those who had hated her.

A Bronze-Age burial mound close to Stonehenge, an archaeological excavation. What they were looking for was an ancient body, historical artifacts. When they found a modern-day body, it was then that the police became interested. It's another case for Detective Inspector Tremayne and Sergeant Yarwood. The more recent of the two bodies, the brother of the mayor of Salisbury. The person responsible keeps leading back to the brother, the upright and serious-minded Clive Grantley. Tremayne's sure that it's him, but Clare Yarwood's not so sure. But is her belief based on evidence or personal hope?

A group of children play. Not far away, in the ditch on the other side of the farmyard, the body of a young woman. The nearby village hides as many secrets as the community at the farm, a disparate group of people looking for an alternative to their previous torturous lives. Their leader, idealistic and benevolent, espouses love and kindness, and somebody's not following his dictate. The second death, an old woman, seems unrelated to the first, but is it? Is it part of the tangled web that connects the farm to the village?

A day at the races for Detective Inspector Tremayne, idyllic at the outset, soon changes. A horse is dead, and then the owner's daughter is found murdered, and Tremayne's there when the body is discovered. The question is, was Tremayne set up, in the wrong place at the right time? He's the cast-iron alibi for one of the suspects, and he knows that one murder leads to two, and more often than not, to three.

Jacob Montfield, regarded by the majority as a homeless eccentric, a nuisance by a few, had pushed a supermarket trolley around the city for years. However, one person regards him as a liability. Eccentric was correct, a nuisance, for sure, mad, plenty thought that, but few knew the truth, that Montfield is a brilliant man, once a research scientist.