More on the the body in the hollow tree mystery. Alex Merrill explores the people who lived and worked near Hagley Woods who could have pinpointed who Bella was and why she was murdered. Offering new revelations; a fresh perspective of all the different theories, thoroughly researched and referenced, and complemented by historical facsimiles, photographs, and bespoke maps and charts, Alex suggests the possibility that the identity of Bella was known to the police long ago and that the case was closed because prosecutors deemed there to be insufficient evidence that the police had solved a mere gypsy murder. It also asks how much of the spy stories told by Wilfred Byford-Jones, Una Mossop, Donald McCormick and others was sheer fantasy, invented for personal gain and to sell newspapers and books and whether the shoes discovered at the scene of the crime pushed Professor Webster and his colleagues into misinterpretations of the evidence setting the police off on the wrong trail from the outset. And surprisingly for some readers, the mystery now focuses more on the town of Halesowen and hardly at all on Hagley.

The unsolved body in the tree mystery from Worcestershire in 1943 - detailed research into all the people involved in the mystery or living in the vicinity at the time.

A baffling unsolved 1943 Worcestershire murder - a woman's body stuffed into a hollow tree and not found for 18 months. Witchcraft or spies or just the vicious murder of a spurned lover? Missing evidence and even the skeletal remains mislaid. Conspiracy or incompetence or even the work of MI5? With contemporary photographs and original case documentation.

"In an alternate 1800’s America, where magic is real and dragons soar through the skies of the American frontier -Topher had a good life, mostly. It wasn't great, but what can a young African girl expect living on the Edge of the World? She had a shack that she shared with her Ma, she knew what vendors she could pocket an apple from, and was better than anyone with a spitshot. What more could a girl in the slums expect? Then that chucklehead Wasco rolled out of the mountains like a toppled boulder. Topher had figured he might be good for a penny or two if she showed him around. Before she knew it he had her trompin’ around the Blacklands, getting shot at, almost eaten and damn near gutted by some bull-headed dandy! Jacob, who was about the handsomest gunfighter a body could imagine, might be some kind of monster. Old Ying turned out to be one of them wizards from the storybooks and Li had a magic sword! All because someone went and took Bella and Wasco aimed to get her back, and Topher had been too stubborn not to follow him.Yeah, it had been a good enough life. She just wasn't sure she was going to make it back to it, or if she even wanted to"--Back cover.

This personal biography reveals the incredible true story of the British secret agent who posed as a Nazi spy during WWII. With Britain braced for a German invasion, MI5 recruited Walter Dicketts, a former officer of the Royal Naval Air Force—and a known con artist—as a double agent. Codenamed Celery, Dicketts was sent to Lisbon with the mission of persuading the Germans he was a traitor and then extracting crucial secrets. Once there, the Nazis brought Dicketts to Germany, where he had to outwit his interrogators in Hamburg and Berlin before returning to Britain as, in the Nazis’ eyes, a German spy. Even before he left for Germany, Celery knew that he had been betrayed by a fellow agent. Yet somehow he not only got back to Lisbon, but persuaded a German Intelligence Officer to defect before spending nine months undercover in Brazil. A mixture of hero and crook, Dicketts was smart, worldly and charismatic. Sometimes rich and sometimes poor, his private life was a complicated web of deception. Using both family and official documents, as well as police records, newspaper articles and personal memories, Carolinda Witt—Dicketts’s granddaughter—unravels the incredible yet true story of Double Agent Celery.

Twenty years after witnessing the violent disappearances of two companions from their small Dublin suburb, detective Rob Ryan investigates a chillingly similar murder that takes place in the same wooded area, a case that forces him to piece together his traumatic memories.