Scribner imprint: 1661 books

It was midday on December 21st in the city of Tromsø when the boy was last seen: a tall, blond boy swathed in anorak and scarf against the Arctic noon. After that he wasn’t seen again, not until three months later, when Professor Mackenzie’s dog started sniffing around in the snow and uncovered...

Radio Broadwich decides to do a documentary on the small village of Twytching for international broadcast, and the townspeople divide between those who seek the patronage of Mrs. Deborah Withins, arbiter of taste and morals, and those determined to displace her in the cutthroat contest for media recognition....

A complex story dealing with forgeries, people turning up alive who are supposed to be dead, and literary hoaxes.

Can the rich get away with murder, or is there always a price? Two days in May bring Colin Pinnock’s career to a peak. His party wins a stunning election victory and he wins a new government office. What a pity that among the congratulations pouring in lurks one grubby card asking: “Who do you...

A man’s home is his castle, but for Percy Spender that motto has been taken just a bit too literally. After the sudden death of first one distant relative and then another, the amiable Perce has become the 12th Earl of Ellesmere. And his home, no longer a cozy council flat, is now the drafty, imposing...

Opera singers are often described as being larger than life, and certainly this is true of Gaylene Ffrench. Her appetites for men, for food, for attention are gargantuan, and her ability to irritate is similarly outsized. So when someone electrocutes the bombastic Australian contralto, few tears are...

From Robert Barnard, the internationally acclaimed Diamond Dagger–winning crime writer . . . Kit Philipson has always felt like something of a stranger in his family. Growing up as the only child of professional parents in Glasgow, Scotland, he had every advantage. His mother was a teacher;...

Vernon Watts may have been beloved by the millions of faithful viewers of the long-running soap opera Jubilee Terrace but his fellow cast members knew him for what he was -- an egotistical former music-hall performer whose untimely death in a pedestrian accident was not something to be universally...

From master of mystery Robert Barnard comes a brilliantly witty and piercingly observant new suspense novel featuring one of the most dysfunctional families ever to grace crime fiction. Meet the Cantelos of Leeds, England. To call the Cantelos dysfunctional is actually a wild understatement. But is...

Inspector Perry Trethowan reads in the obituaries that his estranged father has died under peculiar circumstances: he was fooling around with a form of self-torture called strappado. At the request of his supervisor, Peter returns to his ancestral home to determine if any of his cousins or siblings might have helped the old man to his bizarre end.

In A City of Strangers, Barnard creates one of his most memorable characters ever; the dreadful Jack Phelan. Dirty, potbellied, vulgar, selfish, Jack is a man everyone loves to hate. And the rest of his family isn’t much better. The wife is slatternly, the teenaged children flirt with petty crime...

Murder pays no respect to rank...or the neighborhood. And so it happened that young aristocrat Timothy Wycliffe was bludgeoned to death in his elegantly furnished flat in Belgravia by a person or persons unknown. Unknown, in fact, for thirty years. When the dead man’s friend Peter Proctor, once...

From Robert Barnard, the internationally acclaimed Diamond Dagger-winning crime writer . . . Some memories are better left buried in the past. Well-known author Graham Broadbent has managed to repress one particularly dangerous memory for many years, but a trip home to a school reunion brings...

Lill Hodsden was a monster. She rode roughshod over her daughter, wiped her feet on her husband, blackmailed her lovers, and smothered her sons with a mother’s love that left them screaming out for freedom. Lill set the hackles rising all over Todmarsh, the little South Coast town she queened over....