Lumbered with working alongside reptilian Chief Spy Anacrites, Falco has hit upon the perfect plan - offering his services to Vespasian and Titus in conducting the 'great Census' of AD 73 as a tax collector with draconian powers. If he does well, his fee will finally allow him to join the middle ranks and wed long-suffering companion Helena Justina. Meanwhile, Falco is needed to trace a relative who has eloped, and has a crazy plan for finding an extinct herb. Read More...

Anna Lee... Private Investigator at Brierly Securities where account books are more important than case files. A missing furniture dealer is revealed to be a fraud, poacher and lecher - and shadowless. Anna heads from London to Exmoor. Read More...

The tip-off could have been a joke. But there was nothing funny about the woman's corpse, clad only in a fur coat and jewellery, that was dragged from the murky waters of the Arno in Florence's foggy dawn. With a murder hunt on his hands, the Marshal soon discovered he was investigating an enigma - a woman everyone said was a recluse, yet who had some very strange friends ... Read More...

As Dr Helen Wilkinson stands over the body of her husband Edward it is just as she had imagined it so many times before. He looks calm, asleep almost... And yet something isn't right: in her fantasies there was never so much blood. How can she convince the police she didn't murder her husband - when she doesn't know herself...? Read More...

John Sebastian Lafcadio's one-picture exhibition became very fashionable, and so it was that one spring afternoon when the eighth picture was being exhibited for the first time, at the Lafcadio, a number of well-known people were gathered. It was when the lights failed for a few minutes that one amongst them stabbed young Tommy Dacre. Read More...

The gruesome discovery of an unidentified, decomposed corpse sealed in a railway wagon on a disused siding marks the beginning of Inspector Aurelio Zen's most difficult and dangerous case, set against the backdrop of the three-thousand-year-old city of Catania. Read More...

Carl Carson has a prosperous business, a dotty wife, and a fictitious son. When financial ruin threatens, he puts all these resources to use by staging an elaborate 'kidnapping' and liquidating his assets to pay the ransom. It might have worked, if Sir John Appleby hadn't been his neighbour. Read More...

'It was the smell that Mrs Powell noticed first. Slightly sweet. Slightly unpleasant ... It shocked her badly to find a dead man in the corner, his head slumped on his knees.' Who was Billy Blake, other than a homeless alcoholic who wandered the streets? Read More...

Twelve hours after a woman's broken body is washed up on a deserted shore on the south coast of England, her traumatized three-year-old daughter is discovered twenty miles away walking the streets of Poole, alone and apparently abandoned ... Read More...

A woman found shot dead in a flat in provincial Holland leaves behind her a daughter of doubtful parentage and a dull soldier husband. Van der Valk discovers strange links with Dien Bien Phu. Read More...