It was eight years since Patrick had vanished leaving his pitiful note, 'I'm sorry but I can't bear it any longer. Don't be angry with me, Patrick.' Now it seemed, he had returned - just in time to claim the family inheritance. But if Patrick really had committed suicide, who was this mysterious young man claiming to be him and calling himself Brat Farrar?

Steeped in eroticism, this novel captures the dilemma of lovers who look for complete fulfillment in one another and reflects the post-World War I era's despair at an increasingly mechanized, inhumane society.

"When a headless body is discovered on a popular jogging trail, Detective Inspector Bernard Watts and his team are plunged headlong into a baffling murder investigation. Why would someone stab to death a young woman on her daily run - and take her head? When a close examination of the crime scene results in a shocking discovery linking the present murder to a past crime, criminologist Will Traynor is brought in to assist the police. Aware of Traynor's...

"The emergency call comes in the early hours of the morning. A man and a woman found in a car in a rundown part of the city, both of them critically injured. A random, opportune attack by a stranger? Or were the pair deliberately targeted? Is there a connection to series of car-jackings which has been plaguing the area? Nothing about this case seems to add up. As each theory as to what might have happened leads to yet more questions, Detective Inspector...

"When, a year after she went missing, the body of 19-year-old student Elizabeth Williams is discovered in a field near her college, Dr Kate Hanson and her colleagues are faced with a seemingly impossible challenge. The badly decomposed remains are offering up few clues, and witnesses are proving either unreliable or reluctant to talk at all. With little in the way of forensic evidence, Kate realizes that if she is to have any chance of discovering...

"Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age fourteen. It's not ideal, but it's a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn't got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical ... Meanwhile, Victoria is up in the...