"The time is winter 1962, the place London. Teddy Bean’s detective agency isn’t doing too well lately. Their most illustrious client is an ageing actor who thinks he will be murdered. Another case is even more complicated when ex-police detective Tony Halliday is assigned to a worried wife who thinks her husband is planning a bank robbery and falls for her in the process.
Meanwhile, Teddy’s worries about his failing business and on-off relationship with a divorcee are beginning to take their toll on his mental health.
This story is the fifth outing for the Teddy Bean murder mystery series."
"Towards the end of the 19th century, two young mothers meet violent ends in a large South London house. Reverend Bernard Paltoquet and Dr Robbie MacTavish, together with their friend, clairvoyant Dorothy Plunkett, are drawn into these tragic events, when young November Jones walks into Robbie’s surgery in the late autumn of 1962.
What is the mystery surrounding her, and why is a restless spirit trying to communicate through her? The disused cellar in the house she rents seems to hold the answer. Meanwhile, two senior citizens are wandering in and out of Bernard’s vicarage trying to find answers of their own."
"This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
The time is winter 1962, the place London. Teddy Bean’s detective agency isn’t doing too well lately. Their most illustrious client is an ageing actor who thinks he will be murdered. Another case is even more complicated when ex-police detective Tony Halliday is assigned to a worried wife who thinks her husband is planning a bank robbery and falls for her in the process.
Meanwhile, Teddy’s worries about his failing business and on-off relationship with a divorcee are beginning to take their toll on his mental health.
This story is the fifth outing for the Teddy Bean murder mystery series."
"What links the murder of seventeen-year-old Helen Carstairs in 1954 to the murder, over thirty years earlier, of Private Rodney Purbright?
The tragic story of two sisters, one pretty, one plain, is key to both murders. The Rowan sisters are bound together by a secret they must keep, and their reclusive behaviour plants suspicion in the minds of their neighbours, who regard them as ‘witches’. Dispensing herbal remedies and keeping a mangy black cat add to their air of mystery and seem to bear out the rumours.
It doesn’t take the police long to arrest and charge Helen’s father of her murder. Henry Carstairs is also accused of incest by her best friend and of being the father of his daughter’s unborn baby. According to Inspector Craddock, it is an open-and-shut case, especially when the murder weapon turns out to have Carstairs’ fingerprints on it.
But things are never as simple as they seem in the world of Reverend Bernard Paltoquet and his friend Dr Robbie MacTavish who, although taking a backseat in this novel, are watching events unfold with interest and have theories of their own."
"The date 1888; the place Whitechapel in London’s East End. Yes, it is the time of the unholy, but mercifully brief, reign of Jack the Ripper.
Prostitutes are being viciously murdered by an unknown assailant and, as the murders become ever more horrific, young Polish immigrant, Jacek Kaminski, is gradually suspected of being the perpetrator. He even begins to suspect so himself, being subject to blackouts during which he has no recollection of what he has done.
But can it be true? Can he ever be sure? We follow Jacek’s trials and tribulations in this highly fanciful story of just one possible solution to the Ripper case."
"A ghost with a secret to tell … but who will hear her?
Rev Bernard Paltoquet becomes involved in another psychic mystery when a young woman, Alice Troy, is murdered and Howard Drake, one of Bernard’s parishioners, is convicted of the crime and sentenced to hang. However, thanks to a mongrel dog, Bernard and his psychic doctor friend, Robbie MacTavish, are alerted to Alice’s unquiet spirit at her graveside.
But time is running out for Drake, and it is only Robbie who can help him. However, he is convinced the verdict is safe…."
"When Fiona and James Brett move into their fashionable London home, they discover the attic room harbours a dark and deadly secret. James locks himself away inside, ostensibly to take up oil painting, but he soon becomes moody, even violent. Local prostitutes are being attacked, and then the Bretts’ Polish cleaner is murdered. Another murder soon follows and this time it is even more close to home. James’s former lover is found mutilated, mirroring the Whitechapel killings of over a century ago.
Could James be responsible, or is the evil of Jack the Ripper’s crimes casting its shadow over him?"
"It is 1961. Teddy Bean takes on his toughest case yet when a mysterious woman walks into his office asking him to find her son. But the assignment proves far from simple, as Teddy and brother John start to uncover a 22-year-old mystery.
At the same time, Teddy’s friend, Inspector Halliday of Scotland Yard, needs his help to solve a series of baffling murders. Charwomen at a London office are being picked off by an unknown assailant, with no apparent motive.
Teddy’s new secretary, meanwhile, is determined to do some investigating of her own and makes a devastating discovery that changes her life forever."
"Sometimes, the only enemy a man has is his own …
Jed Parks, Bernard Paltoquet’s new gardener, has an unusual psychic gift: he can see people’s auras. A black aura is a death sentence. He also has a guilty secret.
Having helped to cover up two murders, he lives in fear his past will come back to haunt him. Thus, when Lady Mountjoy, his former employer and lover, turns up telling him he is the father of her son, he is torn between his old life and his new.
Bernard and his friend Robbie become involved in Jed’s plight, but they are powerless to prevent the tragedy which follows…"
"Once again we are in the cosy, but slightly scary, world of private eye Teddy Bean. It is 1959 and into his life comes a new client, Brian Amory, who claims he is being followed.
Meanwhile, in a quiet leafy street in a north London suburb a woman is brutally murdered in her hallway. Teddy becomes unofficially involved in the case when Amory’s wife finds the murder weapon in the wardrobe and another client brings him an incriminating letter.
And then, one cold December night, Teddy unwittingly walks into danger when he finally unmasks the murderer."
"This is another slice of murder, mystery and psychic phenomena in the Reverend Paltoquet series.
Just what happened to two young women who disappeared from the Sunnyside Guest House in Blackpool just after the First World War? Their fate has remained a mystery for many years, despite attempts by the husband of the first woman and the prospective husband of the second to find out.
In 1957, Reverend Bernard Paltoquet and his good friend Dr Robbie MacTavish turn up at the very same Blackpool guest house for a fortnight’s rest and recuperation. Their summer break, however, proves very far from restful or recuperative. Robbie is visited in the night by a ghostly bed companion, and another guest, young curate Oliver Johnson, sees a ghost bleed to death in front of his eyes. The scarred landlady of Sunnyside has a secret or two of her own, as well.
Professional medium, Anna Judge, who we first met in the previous novel in the series, THE DARK SIDE OF THE MIRROR, arrives to try and contact the ghosts. However, her powers are waning and it is only the Reverend Nigel Soames who can help. Soames is a colleague of Bernard’s and is staying at the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool at the same time as Bernard and Robbie are staying at the much less expensive Sunnyside. He is an obese and pompous man (described by Anna Judge irreverently as the ‘fat vicar’) who turns out to be the unlikely and very reluctant conduit for the restless spirits that haunt the Blackpool guest house.
Bernard and Robbie, meanwhile, try to enjoy their holiday, but Robbie is spooked by ghosts and Bernard is unsettled by the attentions of another guest at the Sunnyside, the charming and beautiful Celia Pargeter."
"‘Oh dear, what can the matter be ....’
Why does a woman keep falling from the Big Wheel at a South London fair?
Hallucination or something more sinister? It seems that Robbie MacTavish and Mrs Harper’s great-nephew Alfie are the only two people who can see her.
Meanwhile, Rev. Bernard Paltoquet is asked to investigate a 60-year-old mystery, when the Vicarage plumber asks for his help in tracing his long-lost grandmother. As Robbie tries to discover who the falling woman is and what she wants, Bernard begins to uncover the tragic events surrounding Albert’s grandmother’s fate."
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