London, 1899: Head of Special Branch Commander Thomas Pitt is summoned to Buckingham Palace. In the twilight of her years, Queen Victoria is all too aware that the Prince of Wales will soon inherit her empire and must be beyond reproach. She tells Pitt she tasked her close friend and confidant, John Halberd, with investigating the Prince's friends, specifically Alan Kendrick, a wealthy playboy and betting man, but before he could report back Halberd was found dead in a rowing boat on the Serpentine.

It is 1910, and the century is full of change. Sir Thomas Pitt, head of Special Branch, has persuaded his son, Daniel, to take on his first case as a newly qualified barrister. Having successfully defended his client and made a lifelong friend, Daniel is summoned to the Old Bailey to assist in the defence of renowned biographer Russell Graves, who is accused of the brutal murder and disfigurement of his wife. When the jury finds him guilty, Graves is sentenced to be hanged in 21 days.

A tragic accident leaves Inspector Monk with amnesia just moments after he solves the murder of a popular Crimean war hero. Forced to redo his entire investigation, a frustrated Monk faces a desperate murderer who will do anything to keep the inspector from discovering the truth twice.

It is 1933, and Europe is a place of increasing fear and violence. Young British photographer Elena Standish is on assignment in Amalfi when she meets Ian Newton, a charming Englishman with whom she falls in love. But what does she really know about him? Accompanying him on a train across Italy to Paris, she finds him critically stabbed and dying. He tells her he is a member of Britain's Secret Service, on his way to Berlin to warn MI6 so that they can foil a plot to assassinate one of Hitler's vilest henchmen and blame Britain for it, thus causing a devastating diplomatic crisis. 

On his return from South Africa, Charles Knox is invited to spend the weekend at the country home of Sir Neville Strickland, whose beautiful wife Rosamund was once Knox's fiancee. But in the dead of night Sir Neville is murdered. Who did it? As suspicion falls on each of the house guests in turn, Knox finds himself faced with deception and betrayal on all sides, and only the enigmatic Angela Marchmont seems to offer a solution to the mystery. 

December 1899. After the death of her beloved grandmother, Cleopatra Fox moves into the luxury hotel owned by her estranged uncle in the hopes of putting hardship and loneliness behind her. But the poisoning of a guest throws her new life, and the hotel, into chaos. Cleo quickly realizes no one can be trusted, not Scotland Yard and especially not the hotel’s charming assistant manager. With the New Year’s Eve ball approaching fast and the hotel’s reputation hanging by a thread, Cleo must find the killer before the ball, and the hotel itself, are ruined. 

September, 1940. The sun is shining, and in the midst of the good weather Londoners could be mistaken for forgetting their country was at war - until the familiar wail of the air-raid sirens heralds an enemy attack. The Blitz has started, and normal life has abruptly ended - but crime has not. That night a man's body is discovered in an unmarked van in the back streets of West Ham. When Detective Inspector John Jago is called to the scene, he recognises the victim: local justice of the peace Charles Villiers. The death looks suspicious, but then a German bomb obliterates all evidence.

September 1940. The height of the Blitz. When the Savoy advertises its series of underground shelters, a crowd of people from East London arrive at the hotel and demand entry. There they find a shelter worthy of the Savoy's clientele, but the next morning, after the air raid and when the Stepney protestors have left, it is discovered that one of the hotel's guests is dead, stabbed through the heart.

It is 1864 when Lizzie Martin takes up the post of companion to a wealthy widow who is also a slum landlord. Lizzie is intrigued to learn that her predecessor disappeared, supposedly having run off with an unknown man. But when the girl's body is found in the rubble of one of the recently demolished slums around the prestigious new railway station at St Pancras, Lizzie begins to wonder exactly what has been going on.

On Christmas Eve, 1943, the newly formed but undermanned Homicide division of the Melbourne police force is called to investigate the vicious double murder of a father and son. When Military Intelligence becomes involved, Homicide's Inspector Titus Lambert must unravel the personal from the political. If only the killings had stopped at two. The police are desperate to come to grips with an extraordinary and disquieting upsurge of violence.

London, 1882. Alec Lonsdale, a young reporter on the Pall Mall Gazette, is working on a story about a fatal house fire. But the postmortem on the victim produces shocking results: Patrick Donovan's death was no accident. But why would someone murder a humble shop assistant and steal part of his brain? When a second body is discovered, its throat cut, and then a third, Lonsdale and his spirited female colleague, Hulda Friederichs, begin to uncover evidence of a conspiracy that reaches to the highest echelons of Victorian society.

London,1925. Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Devenand Hunter finds himself in the middle of a series of upper-class deaths in London. Bright young people are being extinguished in their favorite night spots, from a sleazy private jazz club to the Savoy ballroom. Dev knows just the person to help him navigate the treacherous society waters: Lady Adelaide Compton, a marquess's daughter and widow of a Great War hero. Unfortunately, he has put her in jeopardy once before, nearly leading him to turn in his warrant card.

Seeing Adam Waters is the last thing veterinarian Megan Young expects. Ex-marine. Ex-boyfriend. And still extremely dangerous territory. But Adam doesn't know the secret Megan has been keeping from him. The secret that was created three years ago, after their last night together...

February, 1927: The remains of a man are found in the grounds of Maxtead Court, home of the wealthy Scroope family. Meanwhile, Margaret Rees-Talbot is preparing for her wedding to the Rev Symon Scroope - to the disapproval of some residents of Folbury, who think it's too soon after the death of her father, Osbert, found drowned in his bath a few months previously. Before he died, Osbert had been writing an account of his experiences as a soldier during the Second Boer War. But what really happened in South Africa back in 1902?

Failed Shakespearean actor and would-be private detective William Power returns to Melbourne in this wry sequel that re-creates the tension and fear of wartime Australia. Bloodied and broken but somehow unbowed, he arrives in a town struggling under war-rationing and full of cocky American soldiers and lands squarely in the bosom of his childhood home in Carlton, now dominated by his sister-in-law, the odious Darlene.