Before the Poison

Gallows View is the first novel in Peter Robinson's best-selling Inspector Banks series. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks has recently moved to the Yorkshire Dales from London to escape the stress of the metropolis. But he soon finds that life in the country is not quite as idyllic as he had imagined. A peeping Tom is frightening the women of Eastvale. Two glue-sniffing thugs are breaking into homes. An old woman may or may not have been murdered....

Vintage Peter Robinson: a standalone LAPD crime thriller, written and set 20 years ago - never before available in the United Kingdom. In 1980s Hollywood, the beautiful star of a hit TV cop show is being sent strange letters. At first Sarah Broughton dismisses the letters as the ramblings of a lonely fan. But when the letters take on a disturbing tone, and Sarah discovers a body in the sand outside her Malibu beach house, the experts are brought in.

A skeleton has been unearthed. Soon the body is identified, and the horrific discovery hits the headlines. Fourteen-year-old Graham Marshall went missing during his paper round in 1965. The police found no trace of him. His disappearance left his family shattered, and his best friend, Alan Banks, full of guilt.

The body of a well-liked local historian is found half-buried under a wall near the village of Helmthorpe, Swainsdale. Who on earth would want to kill such a thoughtful, dedicated man? Penny Cartwright, a beautiful folk singer with a mysterious past, a shady land-developer, Harry's editor, and a local thriller writer are all suspects, and all are figures from Harry's previous, idyllic summers in the dale. A young girl, Sally Lumb, knows more than she lets on, and her knowledge could lead to danger.

Playing With Fire is the fourteenth novel in Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series, following on from The Summer That Never Was. In the early hours of a cold January morning, two narrow boats catch fire on the dead-end stretch of the Eastvale canal. When signs of accelerant are found at the scene, DCI Banks and DI Annie Cabbot are summoned. But by the time they arrive, only the smouldering wreckage is left, and human remains have been found on both boats. 

Chief Inspector Banks is back - in an original tale that makes up part of a new crime collection of seven short stories by Peter Robinson, never published in the UK before. With settings ranging from the Pacific Northwest in the Sixties to the Yorkshire of the Second World War and present-day Toronto to Eastvale at Christmas, these stories feature hippies, policemen and models, little girls dancing ballet, PIs and soldiers.

There's a serial killer targeting the streets of Newcastle, seemingly picking his victims at random but subjecting them all to the same torturous end. When the Chief Inspector on the case goes missing, it falls on DCI Ryan to track down the man who is brutally murdering women and goading the police to 'catch me if you can'. As everyone becomes a suspect, Ryan and his team get drawn further and further into the case, but for Ryan the nightmare gets closer to home than he could ever have imagined. 

It is a cold January morning and Shetland lies buried beneath a deep layer of snow. Trudging home, Fran Hunter's eye is drawn to a vivid splash of colour on the white ground, ravens circling above. It is the strangled body of her teenage neighbour Catherine Ross. The locals on the quiet island stubbornly focus their gaze on one man – loner and simpleton Magnus Tait. But when police insist on opening out the investigation a veil of suspicion and fear is thrown over the entire community. For the first time in years, Catherine's neighbours nervously lock their doors, whilst a killer lives on in their midst.

Three very different women come together at isolated Baikie’s Cottage on the North Pennines to complete an environmental survey. Rachael, the team leader, is still reeling after a double betrayal by her lover and boss, Peter Kemp. Anne, a botanist, sees the survey as a chance to indulge in a little deception of her own. And then there is Grace, a strange, uncommunicative young woman hiding plenty of her own secrets. 

Who hanged the headmaster in the playground on the night of the school Hallowe'en party? Almost everyone in Heppleburn either hated or feared the viper-tongued Harold Medburn. Inspector Ramsay is convinced it was the headmaster's enigmatic wife, but Jack Robson, school governor and caretaker, is determined to prove her innocence. With the help of his restless, enthusiastic daughter, Patty, Jack digs into the secrets of Heppleburn, and uncovers a cesspit - of lies, adultery, blackmail and madness.

One psychopath. One killer. The Stabber. Six victims, all wife beaters. Each stabbed to death through their left eye. Six victims, all wife beaters. Each stabbed to death through their left eye. The cobbled lanes and backstreets of St Andrews provide the setting for these brutal killings.

It was meant to be a harmless stag-night prank. A few hours later Michael Harrison has disappeared, and his friends are dead. With only three days to the wedding, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace - a man haunted by the shadow of his own missing wife - is contacted by Michael's beautiful, distraught fiancée, Ashley Harper. Grace discovers that the one man who ought to know Michael Harrison's whereabouts is saying nothing.

When Professor Francombe and her team of archaeologists find the remains of three women on a remote Kintyre hillside - a site rumoured to have been the base of Viking warlord Somerled - their delight soon turns to horror when they realise the women tragically met their end little more than two decades ago. It soon becomes clear that these are the three missing victims of the ‘Midweek Murderer’, a serial killer who was at work in Glasgow in the early 1990s.  DCI Jim Daley now has the chance to put things right.

DS Wesley Peterson, newly arrived in the West Country town of Tradmouth, has his hands full when a child goes missing and a young woman is brutally murdered on a lonely cliff path. Then his old friend, archaeologist Neil Watson, unearths the skeletons of a strangled woman and a newborn baby in the cellar of an ancient merchant's house nearby. As the investigation continues, Wesley begins to suspect that these deaths, centuries apart, may be linked by age-old motives of jealousy, a sexual obsession and desperate longing.

When a troubled model falls to her death from a snow-covered Mayfair balcony, it is assumed that she has committed suicide. However, her brother has his doubts, and calls in private investigator Cormoran Strike to look into the case.Strike is a war veteran - wounded both physically and psychologically - and his life is in disarray. The case gives him a financial lifeline, but it comes at a personal cost: the more he delves into the young model's complex world, the darker things get - and the closer he gets to terrible danger...