A Pig of Cold Poison

Tied to St Mungo's Cross by the cathedral to be cured of her madness overnight by the saint, the young woman is found in the morning beaten and strangled, still tied to the cross. But is she who she seems to be? And who would flout the saint's protection like this? Gil Cunningham must trace the dead woman and find her enemies, track down the thieves and murderers and identify the watchers in the shadows, particularly the elusive fourth person who holds the secret of what happened that night. Questioning cathedral staff and apprentice boys, pilgrims and tradesmen, he uncovers only more puzzles.

Gil Cunningham had hoped that the first time he set foot in the brothel on the Drygate it would also be his last, but by the time all was settled he felt quite at home within its artfully painted chambers. The bawdy house, along with the neighbouring property and two more in Strathblane, are all part of a deal offered to Gil and his wife Alys by the forceful Dame Isabella.

“And you are telling me,” said Gil Cunningham, “that David Drummond vanished away forty years ago and is now returned, seemingly not a day older?” “That’s about the sum of it,” agreed Sir William Stewart. In Sir William’s remote part of Scotland it seems almost possible that a young boy could have been stolen away by the fairies and returned forty years later, no older – and if he isn’t Davie Drummond, who is he? And then he suffers a succession of near-fatal ‘accidents’.

The tenth story in the popular Gil Cunningham series set in medieval Glasgow. 'The tale seems very improbable,' Gil Cunningham said. 'How should the Devil enter a religious house and carry off one of its members?' How indeed? But Arnold Fleming, the widely dislike pensioner, or corrodian, lodged in the Dominican's house in Perth, has vanished from a chamber, and a local knight and his mistress claim to have seen the Devil abroad that very same night.

When the peat-cutters came to report the dead man, Gil Cunningham was up in the roof-space of his mother's house, teaching his new young wife swordplay. They believe the corpse to be that of a local missing man. His wife and the widow who runs the local coalmine are sure the body belongs to someone else, but then they find themselves accused of having killed him by witchcraft. And if the corpse is not the missing man, who is it? Gil and Alys try to get to the heart of the matter.

Glasgow, 1492: Gil Cunningham remarked later that if he had known he would find a corpse in the university coalhouse, he would never have gone to the Arts Faculty feast. In this mysterious adventure Gil Cunningham returns to his old university for the Nicholas Feast, where he and his colleagues are entertained by a play presented by some of the students. One of the actors, William Irvine, is later found murdered and Gil, assisted by Alys, begins to disentangle a complex web of espionage and blackmail involving William's tutors and fellow students.

The warden of St Serf's has been found dead in the almshouse garden. He appears to have been killed on the previous night but there are those who are convinced he was present at that morning's service, The elderly residents, the almshouse nurse and Humphrey, her deranged favourite, have all been set against one another by the dead man's scheming - and then there is the discarded mistress and almshouse ghost to consider.

At the May Day dancing at Glasgow Cross, Gil Cunningham sees not only the woman who is going to be murdered, but her murderer as well. Gil is a recently qualified lawyer whose family still expect him to enter the priesthood. When he finds the body of a young woman in the new building at Glasgow Cathedral he is asked to investigate, and identifies the corpse as the runaway wife of cruel, unpleasant nobleman John Semphill. With the help of Maistre Pierre, the French master-mason, Gil must ask questions and seek a murderer in the heart of the city.

Oxford, Spring 1353. When young bookseller Nicholas Elyot discovers the body of student William Farringdon floating in the river Cherwell, it looks like a drowning. Soon, however, Nicholas finds evidence of murder. Who could have wanted to kill this promising student? As Nicholas and his scholar friend Jordain try to unravel what lies behind William's death, they learn that he was innocently caught up in a criminal plot.

Oxford, 1583. Giordano Bruno, a radical thinker fleeing the Inquisition, is sent undercover to Oxford to expose a Catholic conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth. But he has his own secret mission at the University, which must remain hidden at all costs. When a series of hideous murders are committed, Bruno is compelled to investigate. What he finds makes it brutally clear that the Tudor throne itself is at stake....

It is the year of our Lord 1363. And in the cathedral city of York people are dying in mysterious circumstances. But there seems to be a common thread - the herbal remedies dispensed by Nicholas Wilton, Master Apothecary. The first victim is an anonymous pilgrim. But when a highborn nobleman dies after taking the same potion the authorities decide to act. Dispatched to York, in disguise, to unravel the mystery, Owen Archer, former Captain of Archers, apprentices himself to the Apothecary.

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.

April 1950: The rusting hulk of a steam locomotive rises from the deep waters of a Montana lake. Inside is all that remains of three men who died forty-four years before. But it is not the engine nor its grisly contents that interest the people watching nearby. It is what is about to come next.... 1906: For two years, the western states of America have been suffering an extraordinary crime spree: a string of bank robberies by a single man who then cold-bloodedly murders any and all witnesses, and then vanishes without a trace....

February 1460. In the bitter dawn of a winter’s morning, a young man and a woman escape from a priory. In fear for their lives, they are forced to flee across a land ravaged by conflict. For this is the Wars of the Roses, one of the most savage and bloody civil wars in history. Where brother confronts brother, king faces king, and Thomas and Katherine must fight just to stay alive....

In 1482 the Englishman Thomas Berrington is living in the last remnants of Moorish Spain. A physician, he is an unwilling friend to the most powerful man in the kingdom. When bodies start to turn up, each showing the marks of a savage attack, Thomas is asked to investigate.