Showing results by author "Lesley Thomson" in All Categories

Stella Darnell is a cleaner. But when she isn't tackling dust and dirt and restoring order to chaos, Stella solves murders. Her latest case concerns a man convicted of killing his mistress. His daughter thinks he's innocent, and needs Stella to prove it. As Stella sifts through piles of evidence and interview suspects, she discovers a link between the recent murder and a famous case from forty years ago: the shocking death of six-year-old Sarah Ferris, killed in the shadows of an empty playground. Stella knows that dredging up the past can be dangerous. 

As night falls, 17-year-old Cassie Baker leaves Winchcome and takes her usual shortcut down a moonlit country lane. She never makes it home. With no body and no evidence, she's just another teenage runaway.    

 In January 1987, Helen Honeysett goes on an evening run from her riverside cottage and disappears. Twenty-nine years later, Helen's body has never been found. Her husband has hired a detective to find out what happened all those years ago, but when the five households on that desolate stretch of towpath refuse to give up their secrets, Stella and Jack find themselves hunting a killer whose trail has long gone cold. 

Stella Darnell’s father died a year ago, but she has not moved on. He was Chief Superintendent at Hammersmith police station, and cleaning his house, Stella discovers a folder of photographs in his darkroom. The oldest photograph is dated 1966; to the very day the Moors Murderers were sent to prison for life. As Stella inches closer to the truth, the events of that day begin to haunt her too...

Summer, 1981: The body of Kate Rokesmith is found by the River Thames in London. Her four-year-old son is wandering nearby, traumatised and mute. Detective Inspector Darnell cancels yet another trip he had promised his daughter Stella and heads for the scene of the crime. The murder is never solved. Winter, 2011: It's another busy day at the Clean Slate office. Owner and head cleaner Stella Darnell is annoyed to have her routine interrupted by the news that her father has died of a heart attack.

October 1987: As a hurricane sweeps through Britain, a man's body slowly rots, locked inside an old water tower in west London. He carries no identification and fits no missing person's description. His corpse is never claimed. October 2013: The month of the great storm of St Jude. A man dies beneath a late-night Piccadilly line train. His brother insists he was murdered, but Jack, a train driver, is sure it was suicide.

The summer of 1976 was the hottest in living memory. In the Botanical Gardens at Kew, a lost little girl, dizzied by the heat, thought she saw a woman lying dead on the ground. But when she opened her eyes, the woman had gone. Forty years later, Stella Darnell, the detective's daughter, is investigating a chilling new case. What she uncovers will draw her into the obsessive world of botany and towards an unsolved murder that has lain dormant for decades....

Freddy left her childhood home in Newhaven 22 years ago and swore never to return. But now her parents are dead and she's back in her hometown to help her brothers manage the family fishmonger. Nothing here has changed: the stink of fish coming up from the marshes; the shopping trolleys half-buried by muddy tides; the neighbours sniffing for a new piece of gossip. It's not what Freddy would have chosen, but at least while she's here she'll get to see her childhood best friends, Toni and Pauline. At school, the three of them were inseparable. 

London, 1940. A woman lies dead in a bombed-out house. It looks like she's another tragic casualty of the Blitz, until police pathologist Aleck Northcote proves she was strangled and placed at the scene. But Northcote himself has something to hide. And when his past catches up with him, he, too, is murdered. Tewkesbury, 2020. Beneath the vast stone arches of Tewkesbury Abbey, a man has been fatally stabbed. He is Roddy March, an investigative journalist for a podcast series uncovering miscarriages of justice. 

1941. Rupert and Adelaide Stride are raising their two daughters, Clare and Rosa, in the midst of war. When Rupert is called to fight, he dies on the beaches of Dunkirk, leaving his family to fend for themselves. 2023. Decades later, Clare and Rosa have retreated to the annex, trapped in the place where they were raised: Yew Tree House. When the rooms are put up for rent, Jack Harmon sees the perfect spot for a family holiday with his twins and detective Stella Darnell. But then the children discover a skeleton with a hole in its skull hidden in the brambles of a decommissioned WWII pill box.

In a grand old mansion in the middle of the Sussex countryside, seven people have seen more than they should. James Ritchie was looking forward to a boys' day out with his son, Wilbur—even if he was a little late picking him up from the home of his ex-wife, Anna. Annoyed by his late arrival, and competing for their son's attention, Anna leaves the two of them to their day with the promise of a roast dinner when Wilbur returns. But Anna will never see her family again. That afternoon, James and Wilbur are found dead, the victims of a double stabbing on the beach.