Showing results by author "M-J Trow" in All Categories

Recovering from a broken leg after his ignominious fall from the Titanic, Lestrade should have had a peaceful time convalescing. But an attempt on the life of his future father-in-law makes him realise that a policeman is never really off duty. What is particularly puzzling is the arrival of a letter which simply reads, "Four for the Gospel Makers", and it isn’t the first Lestrade has been sent. So begins one of Sholto Lestrade’s most mystifying cases, encompassing both the present and the past.

There is a new broom at Scotland Yard: Nimrod Frost. His first “little job” for Lestrade is to investigate the reported appearance of a lion in Cornwall. This is hardly a task for an Inspector. Yet even as Lestrade questions a witness, a man is reported dead - horrifically mauled. Having solved that case to his own satisfaction, Lestrade returns to London and to more suspicious deaths - all old men who should have died quietly in their sleep. Is there a connection? Lestrade's superiors discount his speculations....

Having had his retirement snatched from him by malfunctioning technology, Peter “Mad Max” Maxwell finds himself facing yet another year at Leighford High School. His wife, Jacquie, is further annoyed when a family holiday quickly becomes an impromptu Year Seven trip to the Isle of Wight. The situation takes another turn for the worse when the wife of Tom Medlicott, the new Head of Art, goes missing.

Maxwell’s Millennium is not quite like other people’s - for a start, it is a year later. After much quibbling with the maths department, everyone calls it an honourable draw and he celebrates as only he can: with his cat, his model soldiers and his Southern Comfort. A knock on the door could be Jacquie Carpenter, released from night shift earlier than expected, but instead of a warm girl Maxwell opens his door to find a very cold old lady, dead and naked.

The derelict house on the edge of the sleepy seaside town was a haven for courting couples, down-and-outs - and someone with altogether more sinister intentions. It was there that they found the corpse of 17-year-old Jenny Hyde. She'd been strangled.

The position of Assistant Headteacher has become available at Leighford High, but Peter "Mad Max" Maxwell won't be applying. He has his hands full juggling his beloved Sixth Form, fatherhood and impending marriage. When a member of staff dies after a special lunch for the prospective Assistant Headteachers, Maxwell's hopes for a quiet term, followed by a quiet wedding, are swiftly shattered, as he finds himself embroiled in yet another sinister murder case.

History teacher Peter 'Mad Max' Maxwell, a bit of a maverick, is sent on a short-term swap with another teacher at a nearby private school, Grimonds.

When Peter Maxwell attends a school reunion of the class of '65, all is not as it seems among his old chums. They are career men, family men - but the years have taken their toll, and the seething tensions of the school years surface in unlikely ways. At the end of the reunion weekend, a man is dead, hanging from the bell rope of the old school. When a second death occurs, Maxwell finds himself in the midst of a murder investigation. What is the secret that has been lurking under Maxwell's nose all these years - and could he be on the murderer's list for killing number three?

The school outing to the Museum of the Moving Image is not an unqualified success. For in the darkened cinema complex of MOMI, two members of the party disappear without trace....

There comes a time in every teacher's life when he must face his nemesis - the Ofsted Inspection. On the third day, with the atmosphere at Leighford High decidedly fraught, one of the Inspectors is found stabbed to death. Events move quickly, and the Head is arrested on suspicion of the murder. But Peter Maxwell, Head of Sixth Form, cannot help but notice that Sally Meninger, the Ofsted Humanities expert, is not as distraught at her colleague's death as one might expect....

While riding the Wild Water, a man is killed in the float ahead, and Max and the girls become witnesses to murder. The corpses multiply as Maxwell nears the end of his search for the truth - but will one of them be his own niece?

Peter Maxwell is delighted when an old college friend asks him to be the historical adviser on a film being made on the coast near Leighford. Dreams of becoming the next Spielberg soon founder when he discovers that the world of film is pretty much the same as the world of education - full of incompetents and backstabbers. Unfortunately, shooting becomes all too literal when the director takes a musket ball to the head. With one of his students implicated, another off on a jealous rant, and almost everyone out to get everyone else, Maxwell finds telling the truth from fiction to be more difficult than even he could have imagined.

When Peter 'Mad Max' Maxwell takes his kids from Leighford High on an archaeological dig, they uncover a grave. But the corpse was not Saxon, and it wasn’t a king - this was an altogether more recent death. Then a policeman on the case is found dead at the wheel of his car. What knowledge did he possess that led to his death? And does his colleague, Maxwell’s partner, Jacquie Carpenter, unwittingly have the same information? Maxwell locks horns with the great and not so good in a vicious world of skulduggery, academic backbiting and religious mania which can only end in murder.

Teenage girls are being picked up on the seafront, and two of them are found dead. DI Jacquie Carpenter-Maxwell has barely set foot on her old patch before she is up to her jet-lagged neck in somebody else’s tragedy.

The murder of Sarah Culdrose is just the first in a series of mysterious and often gruesome deaths that London's subterranean trains will witness. The deceased - all women - pile up quickly. There is a maniac at large, and Inspector Sholto Lestrade of Scotland Yard is detailed to work with the Railway Police. The detective plunges through a tangled web of deviants to solve a string of murders so heinous that every woman in London fears for her life. Will the London Transport System survive? Or will Lestrade run out of steam?

The madness begins when Captain Orange and his three nieces are killed in a carriage accident. The only clues? A tall man seen near the Captain's house, and a broken mirror found in the Captain's breast pocket. Next, Janet Calthorp of King's College, London, tumbles to her death as she makes her way to her lover's bedroom, the victim of a tripwire. The clue? A broken mirror found in said lover's boudoir.

At Leighford High, Peter “Mad Max” Maxwell is temporarily promoted to Head of History when his colleague is chosen for an American exchange. His counterpart is Hector Gold, who is accompanied by his eccentric family including his in-laws, Jeff and Alana O’Malley.

It is a puzzle that has faced Scotland Yard from the beginning - whose was the limbless body found among the foundations? And in the murderous world of Sholto Lestrade, one question is invariably followed by another - what do a lecherous rector, a devious speculator and a plagiarist novelist all have in common? Answer: they're all dead - each of them with a bloody space where his head used to be. And six others are to join them before our intrepid inspector brings the perpetrator to book.

March, 1587. Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine has opened at the Rose Theatre. But the play is almost shut down on its opening night. For a member of the audience, Eleanor Merchant, lies dead, hit by a musket ball fired from the stage. The man with his finger on the trigger? A bit-part player named Will Shakespeare. Convinced of Shakespeare’s innocence, Marlowe determines to find out what really happened. When a second body is found floating in the River Thames, it becomes clear that Eleanor Merchant’s death was no accident and that something deeper and darker is afoot. And why is the Queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, taking a close personal interest in the case?

The year is 1888 and Jack the Ripper terrorises the East End of London; all the victims are found in Whitechapel – but Scotland Yard has to look into another suspicious death, that of Edmund Gurney in Brighton. Foremost amongst the Yard’s top men is young Inspector Sholto Lestrade. It is to his lot that a number of unsolved cases fall – cases that include the murder of a former Whitechapel prostitue, and that of Gurney.