For Dorothy Martin, a widowed American who’s moved to the England she so loves, the Christmas service is painful enough. It is her first holiday without Frank. And stumbling over the body of Canon Billings does nothing to improve her mood. Of course, she does get to meet Chief Constable Alan Nesbitt, and a good mystery on a chilly English night does have some appeal . . .

Dorothy Martin, an American widow living in England, is on her way to lunch with Alan Nesbitt – chief constable, and her own chief beau – when she notices movement in the abandoned town hall and can’t resist a snoop. But what she, and cleaning lady Ada Finch, find in there is cause for serious alarm: a dead body. And, what’s worse, when Dorothy leaves the building some time later, she notices the corpse’s arms have been moved and its eyes closed . . .

The new Dorothy Martin mystery When Dorothy Martin and her husband, retired Chief Constable Alan Nesbitt, are invited to a country house weekend, they expect nothing more explosive than the Guy Fawkes fireworks. Having read every Agatha Christie ever written, Dorothy should have known better. Rendered isolated and incommunicado by the storm, Dorothy and Alan nevertheless manage to work out what in the world has been happening at ancient Branston Abbey.

Spending a peaceful vacation on the charming Scottish island of Iona, Dorothy Martin’s enjoyment is marred only by her fellow travelling companions, a bickering American church tour. When one of the group suffers a fatal fall from a cliff, everyone believes it to be an accident. Everyone except Dorothy, that is. With the police about to close the case, Dorothy feels bound to investigate. It’s a decision she may regret.

When Dorothy Martin gets a call from her friend Ada Finch, whose gardener son has been arrested for the attempted theft of an antique dolls’ tea set from the Miniatures Museum at the imposing Brocklesby Hall, she doesn’t hesitate to offer her services to clear his name. But when theft leads to murder, Dorothy discovers there are big secrets hidden in the rooms filled with miniatures.

Dorothy Martin wanted to have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner for her husband, Alan and some of her friends – a real taste of home. Then came the call from the school, asking Dorothy to fill in because teacher Amanda Doyle hadn’t shown up. Three days later, on Thanksgiving, the second call came: John Doyle had been murdered and Amanda was the suspect. Would Dorothy mind caring for their daughter Miriam for the day? Dorothy had already sensed that something was not right in the Doyle household: John was clearly emotionally abusive, and the church they belonged to held some very strange ideas about sin and punishment. Now Amanda and Miriam need her to prove Amanda’s innocence, and Dorothy unravels a nasty knot of family secrets.

She was about twenty, with long blond hair, and her body was found a few days after she fell from the cliffs to her death on the rocks below. No one identified her; no one reported a missing girl. All the police knew was her rough age, that she’d had a child recently, and that she was very underweight. Her death was a mystery that had haunted Alan Nesbitt, Dorothy Martin’s now-retired chief constable husband, since 1968. It didn’t matter that the incident had happened more than thirty years earlier; under the pretence of a ‘vacation’ to Cornwall, Dorothy was going to get to the bottom of the mystery for Alan . . . and uncover a new one while she was at it.