Showing results by author "M J Trow"

The position of Assistant Headteacher has become available at Leighford High, but Peter "Mad Max" Maxwell won't be applying. He has his hands full juggling his beloved Sixth Form, fatherhood and impending marriage. When a member of staff dies after a special lunch for the prospective Assistant Headteachers, Maxwell's hopes for a quiet term, followed by a quiet wedding, are swiftly shattered, as he finds himself embroiled in yet another sinister murder case.

It is 1891, and London is still reeling from the horror of the unsolved Ripper murders when Inspector Lestrade is sent to the Isle of Wight to investigate a strange corpse found walled up in Shanklin Chine. It is merely the beginning of a series of brutal and bizarre killings so apparently random, that only a warped genius could be responsible.

Murder is afoot among the footmen of Britain's Royal Household: a servant girl, Amy Macpherson, has been brutally slaughtered. And so our hero, Sholto Lestrade of Scotland Yard, is once again on the trail of mystery. As he tries to untangle a villainous web of conspiracy, the superintendent must venture north to Scotland. His investigations take him from Balmoral Castle to the Isle of Skye to the North British Hotel, where he narrowly escapes an inferno in Room 13. The intrepid investigator contends with the most baffling clues he has yet encountered.

Having had his retirement snatched from him by malfunctioning technology, Peter “Mad Max” Maxwell finds himself facing yet another year at Leighford High School. His wife, Jacquie, is further annoyed when a family holiday quickly becomes an impromptu Year Seven trip to the Isle of Wight. The situation takes another turn for the worse when the wife of Tom Medlicott, the new Head of Art, goes missing.

There is a new broom at Scotland Yard: Nimrod Frost. His first “little job” for Lestrade is to investigate the reported appearance of a lion in Cornwall. This is hardly a task for an Inspector. Yet even as Lestrade questions a witness, a man is reported dead - horrifically mauled. Having solved that case to his own satisfaction, Lestrade returns to London and to more suspicious deaths - all old men who should have died quietly in their sleep. Is there a connection? Lestrade's superiors discount his speculations....

It is 1879, and the young Detective Sergeant Sholto Lestrade has his work cut out for him as he investigates mysterious goings-on at "Lord" George Sanger's Circus. First, the best juggler in Europe is shot in full view of a thousand people. Then Huge Hughie the dwarf dies an agonising death whilst performing the Ether Trick. Finally, the Great Bolus dies by swallowing the wrong sword. And all of this comes after two bodies are found with multiple slashes.

The papers call it suicide. The deceased’s father doesn’t. And when Superintendent Lestrade investigates the death by duelling pistol of Anstruther Fitzgibbon, his suspicions are immediately aroused. One of Britain’s leading athletes, Fitzgibbon is the first victim in a series of murders which threatens to extinguish the torch of the Olympic Games in London, in that glorious summer of 1908.

The end of civilisation, as Peter Maxwell knows it, is just around the corner. It comes in the form of Fiona Braymarr, the new superhead. She is a new broom, and she sweeps good people along the way. And the odd thing about her? She has no past. And within days of her arrival, two local women have no future; one is found dead in a car showroom, the other is stabbed at the foot of her own stairs. Two murders so closely linked in time and space must surely be connected.

When Peter Maxwell attends a school reunion of the class of '65, all is not as it seems among his old chums. They are career men, family men - but the years have taken their toll, and the seething tensions of the school years surface in unlikely ways. At the end of the reunion weekend, a man is dead, hanging from the bell rope of the old school. When a second death occurs, Maxwell finds himself in the midst of a murder investigation. What is the secret that has been lurking under Maxwell's nose all these years - and could he be on the murderer's list for killing number three?

With girlfriend DS Jacquie Carpenter back at work, and baby Nolan rapidly growing into a feisty toddler, Peter "Mad Max" Maxwell, Head of Sixth Form at Leightford High, hires an au pair. But one afternoon Max returns home to find that the exotic Juanita seems to have disappeared into thin air. Meanwhile, two walkers are surprised and disturbed when their Border collie digs up an arm on Dead Man's Point.

The derelict house on the edge of the sleepy seaside town was a haven for courting couples, down-and-outs - and someone with altogether more sinister intentions. It was there that they found the corpse of 17-year-old Jenny Hyde. She'd been strangled.

The murder of Sarah Culdrose is just the first in a series of mysterious and often gruesome deaths that London's subterranean trains will witness. The deceased - all women - pile up quickly. There is a maniac at large, and Inspector Sholto Lestrade of Scotland Yard is detailed to work with the Railway Police. The detective plunges through a tangled web of deviants to solve a string of murders so heinous that every woman in London fears for her life. Will the London Transport System survive? Or will Lestrade run out of steam?

As Head of Sixth Form at Leighford High and a new father, Peter "Mad Max" Maxwell is a very busy man. Despite this, he still finds time for some amateur sleuthing, even though his policewoman "Significant Other", DS Jacquie Carpenter, has decided that, this time, he's leaving any murder investigations to her. But how can he refuse when the school photographer asks for his help after accidentally photographing a murder on the beach?

There comes a time in every teacher's life when he must face his nemesis - the Ofsted Inspection. On the third day, with the atmosphere at Leighford High decidedly fraught, one of the Inspectors is found stabbed to death. Events move quickly, and the Head is arrested on suspicion of the murder. But Peter Maxwell, Head of Sixth Form, cannot help but notice that Sally Meninger, the Ofsted Humanities expert, is not as distraught at her colleague's death as one might expect....

March, 1587. Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine has opened at the Rose Theatre. But the play is almost shut down on its opening night. For a member of the audience, Eleanor Merchant, lies dead, hit by a musket ball fired from the stage. The man with his finger on the trigger? A bit-part player named Will Shakespeare. Convinced of Shakespeare’s innocence, Marlowe determines to find out what really happened. When a second body is found floating in the River Thames, it becomes clear that Eleanor Merchant’s death was no accident and that something deeper and darker is afoot. And why is the Queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, taking a close personal interest in the case?

Peter Maxwell didn't want to attend the GNVQ course. He didn't want to get mixed up in murder either - but perhaps it was all part of death's rich tapestry. And while a disparate gathering of teachers was breaking ice upstairs at the Carnforth Centre, someone else was in the basement - breaking skulls. But what the killer couldn't have foreseen was that one of the victims was an old flame of Maxwell's. So now it was personal. And when 'Mad Max' takes something personally, he doesn't get madder - he gets results.

July 1585. Desperate to escape Sir Francis Walsingham's clutches and pursue his chosen career as a professional playwright, the young Christopher Marlowe abandons his Cambridge studies to join Lord Strange's men, a group of travelling players.

Peter “Mad Max” Maxwell, the “dinosaur” Head of Sixth Form, doesn’t see the need to know how to send a text or an email. However, it soon becomes vital that he learns. Some of his female pupils begin to receive threatening messages. Then Max starts to receive messages too, and two of the girls go missing. When a body is found it seems that the prank has taken a sinister turn. And Mad Max may well be next.

Cambridge, 1583. About to graduate from Corpus Christi, the young Christopher Marlowe spends his days studying Virgil and Aristotle, and his nights carousing with old friends. But when one of them, Ralph Whittingside, is discovered lying dead in his King’s College room, mouth open in a silent scream, Marlowe refuses to accept the official verdict of suicide.

April 1865. Having been an eyewitness to the assassination of President Lincoln, Matthew Grand, a former captain of the 3rd Cavalry of the Potomac, has come to London on an undercover assignment to hunt down the assassin's coconspirators. Ambitious young journalist Jim Batchelor has been charged with writing a feature article on the visiting American. Both men are distracted from their missions by the discovery of a body in London's Soho district.