Showing results by author "Phillip Strang" in All Categories

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.

A corpse in the fireplace of an old house. It's been there for thirty years, but who is it? The main suspects are all old and dying, or already dead. There's a motive, but what is it? Isaac Cook and his team have their work cut out trying to put the pieces together. Those who know are not talking out of an old-fashioned belief that a family's dirty laundry is not to be aired in public, and certainly not to a policeman—even if that means the murderer is never brought to justice!

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.

There's a secret, that much is certain, but who knows? The missing actress? The executive producer, his eavesdropping assistant? Or the actor who portrayed her fictional brother on the Soap Opera? DCI Isaac Cook of the Murder Investigation Team at Challis Street Police Station in London is searching for the missing woman. Why has he been taken away from more important crimes to search for the woman? It's not the first time she's gone missing, and why does everyone assume she's been murdered?

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.

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?

One murderer, two bodies, two locations, and the murders have been committed within an hour of the other. There's a connection, but what is it? They're separated by a couple of miles, and neither woman has anything in common with the other. Isaac Cook and his team at Challis Street Police Station are baffled as to why. One of the women is young and wealthy, the daughter of a famous man; the other is poor and hardworking and unknown.

A dismembered corpse floats in a canal in London. Isaac Cook is baffled as to why it's there. Is it gang-related, or is it something more? Whatever the reason, it's clearly a warning, and Isaac and his team are sure it's not the last body that they'll have to deal with.

He was thought to be dead, until he returns to exact revenge against those who had blighted his life. His only concern is to protect his wife and daughter. He will stop at nothing to achieve his aim.

Before she left she carved a number in blood on his chest. But why the number 2, if this was her first murder? A woman stalks London. She kills at will. Her targets are men who have wronged her, or have they? What is behind her hatred and why is she keeping count? DCI Cook and his team know who she is, at least after she has killed the first four, but the woman disappears in plain sight. The pressure's on to stop her, but she's always one step ahead.

An early-morning jogger is murdered in Hyde Park. It's the center of London, but no one saw him enter the park, no one saw him die. He carries no identification, only a water-logged phone. As the pieces unravel, it's clear that the dead man had a history of deception. Is the murderer one of those that loved him? Or was it someone with a vengeance? It's proving difficult for DCI Isaac Cook and his team at Challis Street Homicide to find the guilty person—not that they'll cease to search for the truth, not even after one suspect confesses.

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. 

A mass shooting. An amoral Romanian gangster. A Russian oligarch who claims to be an honest businessman, but isn't. No one knows who was the target or why, but there are eight dead. The men seem the most likely, or could have it been one of the two women, the attractive Gillian Dickenson, or even the celebrity-obsessed Sal Maynard?

No one gave much credence to the man when he was alive. In fact, most people never knew who he was, although those who had lived in the area for many years recognized the tired-looking and shabbily dressed man as he shuffled along, regular as clockwork on Thursdays at seven in the evening to the local off-license. Apart from the three-story mansion where he lived, no one would have regarded him as any other than homeless and destitute. Just a harmless eccentric, until the morning when he was found dead in his front garden.

On the bed, the naked bodies of a man and a woman. "Bullet in the head's not the way to go," Larry Hill, Isaac Cook's detective inspector, said. "Do you recognize him?" Detective Chief Inspector Isaac Cook said. "James Holden, from what I can see." "Rent by the hour?" "Not according to her handbag. There's a business card. She worked for the man." "You know this will be all over the media within the hour," Isaac said. "James Holden, a proponent of the sanctity of the marital bed, man and wife. It's bound to be."

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?

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 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.

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.