With the country in the grip of economic malaise, and worried about her business, Maisie Dobbs is relieved to accept an apparently straightforward assignment from an old friend to investigate certain matters concerning a potential land purchase. Her inquiries take her to a picturesque village in Kent during the hop-picking season, but beneath its pastoral surface she finds evidence that something is amiss. Mysterious fires erupt in the village with...

As England becomes enmeshed in the early days of World War II and the men are away fighting, the women of Chilbury village forge an uncommon bond. They defy the Vicars stuffy edict to close the choir and instead "carry on singing," resurrecting themselves as the Chilbury Ladies Choir. We come to know the home-front struggles of five unforgettable choir members: a timid widow devastated when her only son goes to fight; the older daughter of a local...

Edie Burchill receives a letter that has lain for 50 years in a forgotten postal bag, and begins to suspect that her mother's emotional distance masked an old secret. She sets out to find the answers by tracking the letter back to its source, starting with the return address: Milderhurst Castle, Kent, where her mother had been taken as a child, during the London evacuations of World War II.

It was indisputably love at first sight. But Victoria Lyndon was merely the teenaged daughter of a vicar. . .while Robert Kemble was the dashing young earl of Macclesfield. Surely what their meddlesome fathers insisted must have been true-that he was a reckless seducer determined to destroy her innocence. . . and she was a shameless fortune hunter. So it most certainly was for the best when their plans to elope went hopelessly awry. Even after a seven-year...

Leaving her sales job behind to start a new life aboard a houseboat in Kent, Genevieve finds her dreams shattered by the discovery of a body that's linked to her own secret past as a dancer at a private members' club, forcing her to recall the moment when things started to go horribly wrong.

When Lord Westerfield's Men are stricken by an unexpected disaster during a packed performance on the Kent countryside, Nicholas Bracewell investigates a clown's prediction about the end of the troupe.

Osborne completes his homage to Christie with this third and final adaptation of an original Christie play, following Black Coffee (1998) and The Unexpected Guest (1999). Though the play was written in 1954, the story suffers little from the passage of time, and aside from the static setting, reads well as a novel. Christie's exquisite timing and clever sleight-of-mind tricks are a delight, while Osborne has the good sense not to embroider the tale....

A middle-aged woman named Martha is brutally stabbed to death in the local park. Her husband, who did not report her missing, secretly pays a prostitute to give him an alibi to avoid becoming a suspect. Then the prostitute's body is discovered, strangled, and the police think they might be dealing with a brutal killer who will stop at nothing to cover his tracks. While they are hunting for evidence, another prostitute is murdered. With very little...