Patricia Wentworth

The only survivors of a shipwreck off a Pacific island are Cambridge professor Edward Bowden and an orphaned baby girl. When Valentine Ryven is discovered 20 years later, Edward has recently died, and she is relieved and excited to be taken to England, where she believes her loving family awaits.

As a mute, burly German peasant is helping British soldiers move a fallen tree, he's struck on the head. When he regains consciousness he calls out to the astonished Major Manning, using his nickname "Monkey"—in perfect English....

Miss Silver helps a woman with no memory reconstruct a terrible crime....

Edward Random returns to Deeping a forgotten man. Although raised in the village's manor house, he is no longer wealthy - the result of a quarrel with an uncle, which left him out of the old man's will....

Twelve-year-old Peter Waring is an orphan with an assortment of relatives who don't quite know what to do with him. But Peter's concern is for Rose Ellen, the little girl his mother took in before she died, and for whom none of his relations feel any responsibility....

Hired to trace Anna Ball, who has vanished, Miss Maud Silver encounters an eccentric art colony, bank robberies, and counterfeiting....

The engagement of effervescent Mally Lee to handsome, well-connected Roger Mooring is not going well. They quarrel constantly and Mally's idea is to spend time apart and delay the wedding....

Bill Waring went to America with a bright future ahead of him. In London, he had a promising career and the love of a young beauty, Lila Dryden, and there were plans for marriage....

Hugo Ross is perfect for the job as irascible inventor Ambrose Minstrel’s new secretary: young, completely inexperienced, and with an occasional stutter that makes him seem somewhat dim—a mug, in fact. But from his first day, odd things begin to happen.

It is a black Chinese cabinet decorated with figures that once ignited little Chloe Dane's imagination. It was in the drawing-room of her family home, Danesborough. Later, it held secrets that shamed and sickened her....

Althea Graham's hypochondriac mother seldom visits the gazebo - yet she is found dead in it one morning....

Jane is broke, she's just lost her job and her landlady has kicked her out. When an amorous young man approaches her on a park bench it soon becomes clear that he has mistaken her for her cousin Renata. Their mothers were identical twins....

Amabel Grey, a widow with a modest income, needs money. Fast. She overhears a client requesting the lawyer find someone to live in his Dower House. The catch? Previous tenants have been driven away by strange happenings....

Tanis Lyle was one of those passionate women who always get their own way.....

Things had never been quite the same at Latter End since Lois had taken over....

Mary Stokes was walking through Dead Man's Copse one evening when she saw, in the beam of a torch, the corpse of a young woman....

When her fiancé, Giles Armitage, is lost at sea in the middle of the Second World War, Meade Underwood is left in the company of a middle-aged aunt with nothing but a monotonous round of bridge parties....

First she felt herself being pushed downstairs. Then there was the bowl of poisoned mushroom soup....

The two Miss Pilgrims, Columba and Janette, think its unwise to leave their fine ancestral home, Pilgrim's Rest....

The Catherine-Wheel had once been a home for pirates and smugglers, but now it looked like it was harbouring a murderer....