A beautiful suspect causes Detective Inspector Rafferty to do a double take When the blood-spattered Felicity Raine stumbles into the police station reception and confesses that she has just murdered her husband, Rafferty thinks he has never seen a more unlikely murderer. Slender and half the size of her dead husband, she seems confused and admits that she can?t actually remember doing the deed . . .

Lapsed Catholic DI Joe Rafferty wasn't best pleased when he learned their latest case was at the local RC Convent, where a body had been discovered in a shallow grave in the grounds. The nuns' order was a closed, contemplative one, and access to their house and grounds, with its surrounding 8 foot high walls, far from easy. Rafferty was inclined to think this was an inside job. Prejudiced by his rigid schooling, he didn't find it as hard as his DS, Dafyd Llewellyn, to believe that nuns were capable of murder. But then, events meant that the suspects stretched to include the nuns' doctor and the priest û who turned out to be none other than Father Roberto Kelly, 'the greatest sinner in the parish'. It was, for Rafferty, a difficult case from the start, not helped by the fact that he had received a blackmail letter that very morning. Convinced that one of the nuns had killed the man, Rafferty's question: 'why', required him to dig deep into the past and to the mores of an earlier generation.

Rafferty becomes chief suspect in his own double murder inquiry Detective Inspector Rafferty signs up with the Made in Heaven dating agency, discreetly using an alias. He's very much charmed by the first two women he meets, but love is fickle. Both of them are dead by the following Monday. Now he's got to double up the ingenuity required to solve the crime with the slyness to avoid being found out.

When Chandra Bansi and her baby are burnt to death, the police are anxious to get their race relations right. DCI Casey and his less than politically correct sergeant rapidly come under pressure from their superintendent to put a couple of skinhead thugs behind bars. But there are other, stranger possibilities--and Casey has some less than conventional ways of examining them...

Returning to Elmhurst many years after his involuntary departure, Sir Rufus Seward doesnt get the chance to make amends for the past: hes promptly murdered with a wood chisel. Rafferty and Llewellyn are on the case, but when Raffertys younger brother is in the frame for the murder, Rafferty finds himself torn between protecting his family and finding the real killer...

Detective Inspector Joseph Rafferty is having a bad week -- two pensioner suicides already and he can't help feeling trouble comes in threes. Also niggling in his mind is the fact that Llewellyn, his posh sergeant, has brought a 'bargain' suit from Rafferty's mother. Sure to be stolen goods, the suit is bound to drop Rafferty in it when the holier-than-thou Llewellyn wears it on his wedding day. Rafferty's first premonition turns out to be accurate when a company manager is found dead at his desk. The tyrannical Barstaple had known full well that he was hated by most of the office. But did he really deserve to be poisoned? Rafferty thinks his week has been trying enough. But then someone else is poisoned and from bad to worse becomes worse again. And when you take the 'bargain' suit into the equation, the week really has gone to Hell in a handcart. And taken Rafferty with it.

When local loan shark John Jaws Harrison is found with his skull caved in in an alleyway backing on to rundown Primrose Avenue, DCI Joe Rafferty, and dour sidekick Dafyd Llewellyn, imagine the case will be easily solved. Armed with a list of local debtors, they begin their investigations. But they hadnt counted on the apparent consensus of silence amongst the residents most of whom had good reason to want Jaws dead . . .