Touchstone

Paris, 1929. For Harris Stuyvesant, his current assignment is a private investigator's dream - he's getting paid to trawl the cafés and bars of Montparnasse, looking for a pretty young woman. The missing person in question is Philippa Crosby, a 22-year-old from Boston, whose family have become alarmed at her lack of communication. As Stuyvesant follows Philippa's trail through Paris, he finds that she is known to many of its famous - and infamous - inhabitants, from Shakespeare and Company's Sylvia Beach to the surrealist photographer Man Ray. But when the evidence leads Stuyvesant to the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Montmartre, his investigation takes a sharp and disturbing turn.

London, 1915. Just 10 months into the First World War, the city is flooded with women taking over the work vacated by men in the armed services. Chief Inspector Peter Beech, a young man invalided out of the war in one of the first battles, is faced with investigating the murder of an aristocrat, and the man's wife, a key witness and suspect, will speak only to a woman about the unpleasant details of the case. 

It's 1914, and a bold, young American called Mary Russell is about to experience a rather dynamic change of life. Deep in the rural English countryside, she meets a retired beekeeper by the name of Sherlock Holmes. Although many years have passed since he astonished Watson by solving Scotland Yard's most baffling crimes, The Great Detective is still very much in possession of his excellent faculties. Surprisingly for both of them, he sees Mary's untapped potential for his old line of work.

In a case that will push their relationship to breaking point, Mary Russell must help reverse the greatest failure of her husband Sherlock Holmes's past - a personal defeat that still has the power to sting.

From suicides at Stonehenge to a bizarre religious cult, Russell will find herself on the trail of a killer more dangerous than any she's ever faced - a killer Sherlock Holmes himself may be protecting....

Kate and her partner, Al Hawkin, are called to a scene of carefully executed murder: the victim is a muscular man, handcuffed and strangled, a stun gun's faint burn on his chest and candy in his pocket. The likeliest person to want him dead, his often-abused wife, is meek and frail - and has an airtight alibi. Kate and Al are stumped until a second body turns up - also zapped, cuffed, and strangled...and carrying a candy bar.