The Detective's Daughter

Summer, 1981: The body of Kate Rokesmith is found by the River Thames in London. Her four-year-old son is wandering nearby, traumatised and mute. Detective Inspector Darnell cancels yet another trip he had promised his daughter Stella and heads for the scene of the crime. The murder is never solved. Winter, 2011: It's another busy day at the Clean Slate office. Owner and head cleaner Stella Darnell is annoyed to have her routine interrupted by the news that her father has died of a heart attack.

It was the murder that shocked the nation. Thirty years ago, Kate Rokesmith went walking by the river with her young son. She never came home. For three decades her case file has lain, unsolved, in the corner of an attic - until Stella Darnell, daughter of Detective Chief Superintendent Darnell, starts to clear out her father's house after his death.

Stella Darnell cannot shake her father's legacy. A year after his death, she has discovered what looks like an unsolved case in his darkroom: a folder of unlabelled photographs of deserted streets. But why did her father - a Detective Chief Superintendent - never file them at the station? The oldest photo dates back to 1966, to a day when 10-year-old Mary Thornton was taking her little brother home from school. That afternoon, as the Moors Murderers were sent to prison for life, Mary witnessed something horrible.

Stella Darnell’s father died a year ago, but she has not moved on. He was Chief Superintendent at Hammersmith police station, and cleaning his house, Stella discovers a folder of photographs in his darkroom. The oldest photograph is dated 1966; to the very day the Moors Murderers were sent to prison for life. As Stella inches closer to the truth, the events of that day begin to haunt her too...

Jack Harmon craves silence and a bird's-eye view. From his new home in Palmyra Tower, he can raise binoculars to watch over West London. If he watches for long enough, he will learn who has secrets. He will learn who plans to kill. But Jack does not see everything. October 2013, the month of the great storm of St. Jude. A man dies beneath a late-night Piccadilly line train, verdict: suicide. Jack's friend Stella Darnell, the detective's daughter, suspects it could have been murder.

The summer of 1976 was the hottest in living memory. In the Botanical Gardens at Kew, a lost little girl, dizzied by the heat, thought she saw a woman lying dead on the ground. But when she opened her eyes, the woman had gone. Forty years later, Stella Darnell, the detective's daughter, is investigating a chilling new case. What she uncovers will draw her into the obsessive world of botany and towards an unsolved murder that has lain dormant for decades....

The summer of 1976 was the hottest in living memory. Britain sweltered, trees and plants wilted, fire ripped through forests, and rivers ran dry. In London's Kew Gardens, a 10-year-old was parted from her friends and, dizzied by scorching heat, wandered into its secluded undergrowth. She thought she saw a woman lying dead on the ground, but when she opened her eyes, the woman had gone. Forty years later, the detective's daughter, Stella Darnell, takes on a chilling new case.

In January 1987, Helen Honeysett goes on an evening run from her riverside cottage and disappears. Twenty-nine years later, Helen's body has never been found. Her husband has hired a detective to find out what happened all those years ago, but when the five households on that desolate stretch of towpath refuse to give up their secrets, Stella and Jack find themselves hunting a killer whose trail has long gone cold.

As night falls, 17-year-old Cassie Baker leaves Winchcome and takes her usual shortcut down a moonlit country lane. She never makes it home. With no body and no evidence, she's just another teenage runaway.

Stella Darnell is a cleaner. But when she isn't tackling dust and dirt and restoring order to chaos, Stella solves murders. Her latest case concerns a man convicted of killing his mistress. His daughter thinks he's innocent, and needs Stella to prove it. As Stella sifts through piles of evidence and interview suspects, she discovers a link between the recent murder and a famous case from forty years ago: the shocking death of six-year-old Sarah Ferris, killed in the shadows of an empty playground. Stella knows that dredging up the past can be dangerous.

London, 1940. A woman lies dead in a bombed-out house. It looks like she's another tragic casualty of the Blitz, until police pathologist Aleck Northcote proves she was strangled and placed at the scene. But Northcote himself has something to hide. And when his past catches up with him, he, too, is murdered. Tewkesbury, 2020. Beneath the vast stone arches of Tewkesbury Abbey, a man has been fatally stabbed. He is Roddy March, an investigative journalist for a podcast series uncovering miscarriages of justice.

1941. Rupert and Adelaide Stride are raising their two daughters, Clare and Rosa, in the midst of war. When Rupert is called to fight, he dies on the beaches of Dunkirk, leaving his family to fend for themselves. 2023. Decades later, Clare and Rosa have retreated to the annex, trapped in the place where they were raised: Yew Tree House. When the rooms are put up for rent, Jack Harmon sees the perfect spot for a family holiday with his twins and detective Stella Darnell. But then the children discover a skeleton with a hole in its skull hidden in the brambles of a decommissioned WWII pill box.