Showing results by narrator "Judy Ford" in All Categories

Peter Johns is just a green young police constable walking his beat in a suburb of Oxford, but when a child goes missing, he becomes involved in a criminal investigation that radically changes the course of his life.

DI Peter Johns was brought up in a children's home. He never expected to know his parents and never wanted to. He is unsure how to react when his mother makes contact with him and asks to meet. Follow his thoughts and feelings as he faces this unexpected development in his life.

The police are reluctant to believe young Lucy Paige when she tells them that she saw two men chasing a woman across a field. They suspect her of inventing a mysterious stranger, who hit her, and then ran away, in order to protect her friend Martin, from accusations of child abuse and assault. But they have to reassess her story, when a woman's body is found a few days later, and Lucy recognizes it as her attacker. Who is the corpse in the graveyard? Why was she running away? And who were the men that Lucy saw chasing her?

A second marriage after the first ended in tragedy is bound to have its challenges. In the case of DI Peter Johns, his new wife, "Our Bernie", is very different from Angie, the love of his life. This short story plots the path of their friendship from first encounters to final commitment.

You would think that the easiest crimes to solve would be the ones where you have several eyewitnesses who saw what happened and are willing to tell the police about it. However, as DI Peter Johns discovers in this short story, witnesses don't always always remember what they saw - and sometimes they even remember things that they did not see!

Detective Sergeant Peter Johns is resentful of the young PC who catches the attention of his friend and boss, DI Richard Paige. Richard encourages his new protégé to apply for promotion and Peter fears that he is being left behind. They go their separate ways, but then fate throws them together again. Peter now has the upper hand. How will he treat his erstwhile rival?

A man lies dead in the Fellows’ Garden at Lichfield College. He’s been seen working there, but he’s not on the payroll. What motivated him to weed the beds and mow the lawns? And who stabbed him in the back and left him to die? When Geology Fellow Martin Riess happens upon this grisly scene, it is only natural that he should call on his old colleague Bernie and her ex-police friends to help with disentangling this complex puzzle. And it’s not long before the official police inquiry is calling on their services too, when this case turns out to have its roots deep in the past.

Exiled Liverpudlian, Bernie Fazakerley, makes a sentimental journey back to her home city to visit relatives and to take her daughter, Lucy, back to their roots. Before long, events take a sinister turn when they are witnesses to a murder aboard the famous Mersey Ferry. Then the killer strikes again, and the race is on to make an arrest before more lives are lost. Who could have wanted to kill a young Roman Catholic priest? And is Bernie's own life under threat?

Newly promoted Detective Inspector Andy Lepage is in charge of a murder investigation for the first time. It looks like a routine street crime, but how did it come about on the doorstep of one of Oxford’s ancient colleges? Who is the victim, and why was he out on the streets without a coat on a cold November night? Then an unexpected twist makes it a more personal affair, and Andy is forced to face difficult questions about his own identity.

The police are called when a young man is found dead in the garden of his family home. It looks like an all-too-familiar story of depression and despair, but when DCI Anna Davenport starts asking questions, a few things don’t quite add up. Short-staffed and with an important court case looming, she calls on her trusted assistant DI Andy Lepage to help to untangle the mystery.