'Andrew Taylor is a master story-teller' Daily Telegraph From the No.1 bestselling author of The Ashes of London and The Fire Court, this is the final instalment in the acclaimed Lydmouth series As a young police officer in Palestine during the closing months of the Mandate - the cradle of Middle Eastern terrorism - Richard Thornhill saw and did things which still haunt his dreams and make him fear for his sanity. Is he himself a killer? Now, when a retired police officer is found dead in the ruins of Lydmouth Castle, the past has come back to claim Detective Inspector Thornhill, and he is under suspicion of another murder. His wife Edith and former lover Jill Francis join forces in an uneasy alliance to try to help him. But there are many complications - scandalous allegations have been made about Miss Awre's School of Dancing; the Ruispidge Charity's annual dance for young people is under threat; teenagers haunt the newly opened Italian coffee bar and yearn for fumbled intimacies in the sheltering darkness of the Rex Cinema. And the Spring floods are rising higher than they have in living memory, drowning a multitude of secrets . . . 'An excellent writer. He plots with care and intelligence and the solution to the mystery is satisfyingly chilling' The Times 'The most under-rated crime writer in Britain today' Val McDermid 'There is no denying Taylor's talent, his prose exudes a quality uncommon among his contemporaries' Time Out

The Hangman’s Psalm: The Girl at the Gallows By: Carter J. Gregory Public hangings were great sport in 18th century London. Mobs of cursing men and shrieking women would turn out to witness a doomed man being hauled to the scaffold where the hangman, Jack Ketch, awaited him. The spectacle was given an aura of sanctity when choirs and bells pealed out hymns in praise of God, and the doomed man was required to recite the damning words of the biblical Psalm 51: “Behold I was shapen in wickedness and in sin did my mother conceive me”—or be lashed with a Cat o' nine tails if he refused. The Psalm was called The Hangman's Psalm. NOTE: Psalm 51 has been misunderstood for centuries. It is an example of Hebrew poetry, which is alive with dramatic hyperbole and metaphor, and not to be taken literally. It's a pity that neither the Crown nor jack Ketch knew the entire Psalm, which begins with an affirmation of God's mercy and ends with the ecstatic cry: “Thou shalt make me hear of joy and gladness, and the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.” A desperate thief, his dead father, a beautiful young girl, a priest, and a hangman are destined to meet at the foot of the gallows—so claims a gypsy fortune teller whose tarot card predicts that someone will die a fool's death...but who? In 18th century London a thief could be hanged for stealing a kerchief, a hat, a bolt of cloth—and the thief in this story, Daniel Tavard, is guilty of such crimes. A bounty of 250 Guineas is offered by the Crown for his capture. But the bounty-hunters are not the ones who bring the thief to the hangman and collect the Guineas. Daniel's birth and death are shrouded in mystery. Why did his father Joseph flee France? Where is his mother? Only Maggie Quinn knows—Joseph's mistress(whore). When Daniel was little he thought Maggie was his mother—she quickly disabused him of that notion. But Maggie knows who his mother is, and why Joseph fled France, and she swore she would never tell the boy. Daniel goes about searching for answers, but as he does so, two bounty-hunters lay a plot to seize him. A young girl, Catherine, enters Daniel's life, and for the love of her he risks his fate at the hands of the bounty-hunters.

If you had to interview the candidates for a country's new hangman, what questions would you ask them? If your family was on the verge of starvation, and becoming a hangman was the only job available, would you apply? If you were hired, what would you do if the prisoners looked like your loved ones? If you knew that another good man was taking the job out of desperation, would you do anything to prevent him from getting it? What if that man's recruitment would somehow guarantee your own survival, would you encourage his candidacy? All these questions were asked of people who never thought they would find themselves in such a position, until they became mired in the chaos surrounding the hangman's replacement.

An Edinburgh detective suspects a rash of apparent suicides is something more sinister in this Scottish mystery thriller by the author of Book of Souls. The body of a man is found hanging in an empty house. To the Edinburgh police force, this is a simple suicide case. But something about the scene strikes Detective Inspector Tony McLean as being off. Days later another body is found hanging from an identical rope, with a noose tied in the identical way. McLean is convinced that these people are either being murdered or somehow coerced into taking their own lives. Then a third body is found. Under pressure from his superiors to wrap the case up quickly and neatly, McLean must also deal with the fallout of his last big investigation—not to mention the difficult trials of his personal life. But the deeper McLean digs, the more he comes to believe that something evil is stalking Edinburgh’s streets. He just hopes he can stop it before someone else succumbs to the hangman’s song.

Having witnessed a murder with possible supernatural ties when he was an apprentice, the Carpenter works to solve an intricate mystery involving a purported witch coven leader who would avenge the deaths of her sisters.