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 epic of Theseus, the boy-king of Eleusis, ritually preordained to die after one year of marriage to the sacred Queen, but who defies the God's decree and claims his inheritance - the throne of Athens. 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...

Two women had committed suicide, and a third had to be led away by men in white coats. There had been an outbreak of anonymous letters, but there was something much more, and Inspector Van der Valk wonders what lies behind the small-town imoralities, eavesdropping and hysteria. Read More...