Allison Busby: 459 books

‘A master storyteller’ Daily Mail December, 1860. An army of men is heading to the Swindon Locomotive Works for the morning shift from their nearby terraced houses built by the GWR. Frank Rodman should have been among them, but his new destination is the grave – or it will be, once his...

Two children dash past gravestones playing hide-and-seek. A freshly dug grave should provide the ideal hiding place, if it weren’t for an unscheduled body occupying the spot. The body is that of Vivian Quayle, director of the Midland Railway and pillar of the community, whose mysterious death...

A COLLECTION OF TWELVE NEW SHORT STORIES The Cotswolds are full of beauty, wonder . . . and death The rolling hills of the Cotswolds are brimming with warmth and, occasionally, something a little darker, as is revealed in this collection of short stories featuring the characters and...

Little Rose McGinley is just seven years old when her family is evicted from their Donegal home, victims of the Clearances of 1861. It is the first step in a long journey for Rose, one that takes her from Donegal to Kerry, and back again to the North. But the feisty girl blossoms into a woman of character with courage and the determination to keep her family together, against all the odds.

Murder turns the journey of a lifetime into a deadly nightmare The plague has struck London once again but so has opportunity for theatre company Lord Westfield’s Men. Invited to perform at the wedding celebrations of Sophia Magdalena, the fair maid of Bohemia, the company’s bookholder...

A laughing hangman turns the stage into the gallows... When Nicholas Bracewell finds himself once again in the parlour of his lost love, Anne Hendrik, he was not expecting her entreaties to embroil him in the murder of a beloved choir master. Between tales of cruelty, forgotten maps of London...

The Chasebridge Killer is out; racial tension is rising and the mutilated body of a young Muslim man is found in the stairwell of a tower block in Doncaster. As he gets drawn into the case, Sean Denton’s family life and his police job become dangerously entwined. Meanwhile a young woman is trying...

DI Charlie Priest is the kind of officer who likes to get on with the job, though his unorthodox ways have held him at inspector level for a record-breaking length of time; however Priest does get results. When Charlie suspects a businessman, with a background of extortion and GBH, of involvement...

There’s nothing Detective Inspector Charlie Priest hates more than a case involving children.   When Georgina, the eight-year-old daughter of a local businessman, goes missing, Charlie and his colleagues soon start to fear the worst. And there’s something about the distraught father...

‘A STUNNING READ’ CRIME REVIEW A friend from the past asks for private investigator Lee Arnold’s help in tracing his son: Fayyad al’Barri was last thought to be in Syria having embraced radical Islam. But a cryptic message has prompted his family to believe Fayyad is searching for a...

When Dr Clive Jordan’s dazzling career is brought to an abrupt end by a bullet, his colleagues are devastated – especially the female ones. Meanwhile Charlie has another case on his hands that is proving difficult to solve – although he’s traced the alleged attacker, something isn’t...

‘MARSTON HAS TAPPED INTO A RICH VEIN OF INSPIRATION. HIS HOME FRONT DETECTIVE SERIES PROMISES A LONG RUN’ DAILY MAIL June, 1917. While German bombers raid London from above, a man’s body is fished from the Thames below. With no identifying items or labels about his person, Detective Inspector...

Lies, Lechery and an anonymous Angel In the tenth installment of this dramatic Elizabethan series, Westfield’s Men are flying high after a celebrated performance of The Insatiate Duke at the Queen’s Head. However, victory is bittersweet as the company is soon faced with dissolution and...

‘Thefts of this kind are highly unusual. I’m sure the clerk never believed he was in any danger.’ ‘Well, he was. You’re after a cunning devil, Inspector – smoke him out.’ An eagerly awaited collection of brand new, specially commissioned short stories from the master of...