NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “superbly executed mystery” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) from the award-winning master of literary crime fiction.

“Within the setting of a great Victorian mansion set on crumbling cliffs—a large cast of variously unscrupulous men and women is brought together in a tangle of murder, mayhem, betrayal, incest, and generally bad behavior.”—The...

Four previously uncollected murder mysteries, two of which feature the young Adam Dalgliesh: The newly appointed Sgt. Dalgliesh is drawn into a case that is pure Agatha Christie; A pedantic, respectable, censorious clerk's secret taste for pornography is only the first reason he finds for not coming forward as a witness to a murder; A best selling crime novelist describes the crime she herself was involved in fifty years earlier; Dalgliesh's godfather...

When lawyer Venetia Aldridge defends a man for murder, the case appears open and shut. But when Aldridge is found dead in her office, Dalgliesh and his team must make sense of events.

A community of forensic scientists are taken by surprise when a member of their own team is found in a bloody pool on the laboratory floor. Dalgliesh faces too many suspects as he tries to discover who might have wanted to kill the universally hated Edward Lorrimer.