Peter Grainger

The story opens with the apparently accidental drowning of a sixth form student in the Norfolk countryside....

Sir Roger Parkes is a man of some influence in the West Country. When he loses touch with his youngest daughter, he has a word with the Assistant Chief Constable of the local force....

As the first anniversary of the formation of the Kings Lake murder squad approaches, there is a problem—they've run out of murders. As a result, they are reviewing unsolved cold cases. The team try to discover the identity of the woman whose body was found in the Norfolk countryside....

Charlie Hills, former desk sergeant at Kings Lake Central, is in trouble. He hasn't told Smith, his old friend and sparring partner, but someone has, and now the two former policemen are about to embark on a difficult and potentially dangerous search for the truth....

Life, as Smith used to say, is just one thing after another - as one investigation ends, a new one begins. But for reasons unknown to the rest of her team, DCI Cara Freeman will be haunted by the next case for the Kings Lake Central murder squad....

Mark Randall lay dead in a field near Lowacre long before Smith had done what he had to do in Belfast....

In the peace and tranquility of the woods at Pinehills on a Saturday afternoon, a mobile phone begins to ring. The phone belongs to DC Smith....

Two weeks of rest and recuperation - that's what the doctor ordered. Detective Sergeant DC Smith is almost looking forward to it. And then there is a knock on the door....

When a local man, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, goes missing, his parents have good reason to be concerned. Emily Willows is a friend of the family and says that she knows just the person to find him....

Change is afoot at Kings Lake Central police station. A most unexpected new detective inspector takes up his post this Monday, and the oldest detective in the place takes a momentous decision....

When a worker goes missing from a North Sea gas platform, there seem to be just two possible explanations - it was a tragic accident or a suicide....

When another resident of the Rosemary House care home is found dead in her chair one Saturday evening, no one is very surprised - not until the results of a routine post-mortem....

"So I thought I might take up paragliding. You know, buy one on eBay and just jump off the cliff one morning"....

When 14-year-old Zoe Johnson doesn't come home on a Monday night in early December, the alarm bells in Kings Lake Central police station do not ring straight away - after all, she's from the Dockmills, one of the toughest estates in the town....

The new Kings Lake Central murder squad is about to spend its first morning on team-building exercises and reviewing cold cases when the call comes in that the body of one of the city's rough sleepers has been found in a shop doorway.

Detective Sergeant Chris Waters got the call at 05.29 that July morning. This is it, said DCI Reeve, you'll be first there, it's all yours, you're the crime scene manager. Suddenly, Waters finds himself in at the deep end, and alone at the scene of a puzzling murder....

This is DC Smith's third investigation with the Diver and Diver Associates agency. They have been asked by a member of Norfolk's aristocracy to look into the tragic death of her younger brother, Freddie, the late Lord Thorpe of the title.

Just a few seconds—but seconds which will set in motion a sequence of events involving every member of the Kings Lake Central murder squad in the days to follow....

Jo told him the phone call had been about a woman who wanted to have her husband declared dead. Smith thought for a moment and then said, 'Hmm. There must be a few million women in this country who feel like that'....