Yorkshire Detective Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe has tried repeatedly to put ex-convict Franny Roote away again without success, and starts his pursuit once more when Roote, working a new scam as an academic, begins sending menacing letters to Pascoe connected to the Elizabethan revenge tragedy Roote purports to be studying.

With his partner away on a honeymoon, Yorkshire detective Andrew Dalziel tries to beat the blues by taking a vacation of his own. But after getting caught in a torrential rain and running into a funeral procession, he winds up accompanying a crowd of upper-class mourners to a crumbling country house. Dalziel isn't known for his elegant manners, but he has bigger problems than not fitting in: The owner of the house has died under unusual circumstances,...

The first story explores the chilling start of the Dalziel and Pascoe partnership. In another, they investigate the fate of a woman no one has seen for a year-except her brother, who claims he is being haunted by her ghost. Then the detectives keep vigil at an isolated farmhouse, waiting to see what is making things go bump in the night. Finally, we take a jump in time to the twenty-first century and the partners' last case: the first man murdered...

In England, a skeleton from Roman times goes missing from the site of an archaeological dig-as does the man overseeing the project. In Baghdad, a diplomat dies suddenly. And in California, a scientist commits suicide. These three events are in fact linked-and one tough, determined woman may be about to unravel a shocking conspiracy that lies behind them all, in this lively mystery.

Lem Stanhope-Swift, the sixth Viscount Bessacarr, has been living in Venezuela, keeping his distance from the British authorities ever since an embezzlement charge landed him in a spot of bother back home. Over the years he's been enjoying the tropical weather and an abundance of liquor and women. But he's just learned that he has cancer, and desperately wants to see the daughter he long ago abandoned. Landing on his home country's soil under a...

A motorist dies after plunging off a bridge.... A motorcyclist is found dead after a fatal encounter with a tree. Two apparently innocuous tragedies ... until two Dialogues are submitted to a local literary competition, claiming responsibility for the deaths. But has anybody heard the Word? When a beautiful, unscrupulous journalist meets her Maker in fact, and then in fiction, as victim of The Third Dialogue, Dalziel and Pascoe take note and find...