The body found under the hedge was that of a middle-aged woman. With nothing more to go on than what appeared to be a sardonic gleam in the wide and staring eyes of the victim, It’s time for Wexford and his team to get pro-active. From a seemingly unremarkable death comes an intricate web of lies and deception.

Sir Manual Camargue had just announced his intention of taking a second wife, 50 years his junior. On the same cold winter's day, he died as a result of what was surely a tragic accident. But Wexford doubts that Camargue's death came by misadventure.

For a while the music Festival in Kingsmarkham was going well. The sun shone, the groups played and everyone - except a few angry neighbours - seemed to enjoy themselves. Then the weather changed, and a young couple made a gruesome discovery.In spite of dire predictions, the rock festival in Kingsmarkham seemed to be going off without a hitch, that is, until a hideously disfigured body is discovered in the nearby quarry.

Rodney Williams's disappearance seems typical to Chief Inspector Wexford - a simple case of a man running off with a woman other than his wife. But when another woman reports that her husband is missing, the case turns unpleasantly complex.

The death of an unknown girl in a London cemetery shouldn't have been a case for Wexford, but it proved to be one of the most macabre of his career.

There were some things about Chief Inspector Wexford's trip to China that he could never have dreamt of: That an old woman would haunt him from one city to the next. That a man would be tragically drowned. Or that, back in England, he would be investigating the murder of one of his fellow tourists.

Concealed by a shroud of dirty brown velvet was what looked like a heap of rags. In a desolate subterranean car park of a Shopping Centre, Dorothy Sanders pulled back the velvet curtain revealing the grim discovery of a woman’s body. Inspector Michael Burden, for a while conducting the investigation without the help of Wexford’s intuitive genius, blunders down a number of blind alleys before uncovering the truth.

The massacre at Tancred House seems at first to be the work of a burglar, panicked into killing. But Chief Inspector Wexford believes there are links with the murder of a Kingsmarkham detective some ten months earlier.

Who could have suspected that the exciting stag party for the groom would be the prelude to the murder of his close friend Charlie Hatton? And Charlie's death was only the first in a string of puzzling murders involving small-time gangsters, cheating husbands, and loose women. Now Chief Inspector Wexford and his assistant join forces with the groom to track down a killer.

The Nightingales were always a very happy couple. So why did someone batter Elizabeth Nightingale to death in the woods that dark September night? Can DCI Wexford discover a motive?

Anita Margolis had vanished. There was no body, no crime, nothing more concrete than an anonymous letter and a name. A pattern soon emerged to the investigation. Not only had Anita been wealthy and flighty, she had been thoroughly immortal, too.

Only eighteen black people live in Kingsmarkham. One of them is Wexford's new Doctor, Raymond Akande. When the doctor's daughter, Melanie, goes missing, the Chief Inspector takes more than just a professional interest in the case. Melanie, just down from university but unable to find a job, disappeared somewhere between the Benefit Office and the bus stop. No one liked to voice the suspicion that something might have happened, that Melanie might be dead...

Wexford had every reason to remember the Painter case - it was the first murder he'd ever handled on his own. There had been no doubts about the case, until now. Someone wants the case reopened, and they want Wexford proved wrong.

A lump of concrete dropped deliberately from a little stone bridge kills the wrong person. The young woman in the car behind is spared. But only for a while... A few weeks later, George Marshalson lives every father's worst nightmare: he discovers the murdered body of his eighteen-year-old daughter on the side of the road. Wexford steps into the case but soon a second teenage girl is murdered - a victim unquestionably linked to the first - and another family is shattered...

Two young girls disappear then return home unharmed some days later. Chief Inspector Wexford is concerned about a pedophile who has been recently released back into the community but cannot foresee a series of serious crimes waiting to happen.