Andrew Taylor's The Anatomy of Ghosts is both a ghost story and a murder mystery set in the cloistered world of a Cambridge college in the late 1700s.

The leading character of the The Anatomy of Ghosts, John Holdsworth, is a former printer and bookseller who has fallen on straitened times because of his son and wife’s deaths. His wife sought solace with the ghost of their dead son until she, too, dies. As a consequence he is highly sceptical of ghosts.

Holdsworth writes his book , The Anatomy of Ghosts, to debunk ghostly sightings and to show them as mere delusion but his dreams are haunted by his dead wife.

Ghosts and Murder Create a Fascinating Mystery

A chilling thriller, CSI Darby McCormick faces a strange enemy. Young children go missing only to return years later in bizarre and macabre circumstances.

The Soul Collectors starts with a grotesquely disfigured Charlie Rizzo holding his family at gunpoint and demanding Darby McCormick meet him in the family home. Charlie Rizzo's presence is a surprise as he disappeared as a ten year old more than twelve years before.

arby arrives as part of a SWAT team and goes into the house alone. Before she can resolve the situation and discover what is happening a group of men disguised as SWAT officers burst in. They release sarin nerve gas and kill Charlie and all of the Rizzo family. A badly injured Darby escapes to discover her SWAT colleagues have been killed and she is on her own.

Just before he died Charlie Rizzo, whilst barely able to speak due to his mutilated face, tries to tell Darby what has happened and what he wants. The message raises as many questions as it answered.

The murder of King Ludwig II and cover-up is the basis for Chris Kuzneski’s fast paced thriller. Will the good guys find the treasure and the historical truth first?

The Secret Crown opens with a Prologue that is set in Bavaria on 13 June 1886. It tracks an assassin as he follows King Ludwig II of Bavaria who had just been deposed as monarch due to alleged insanity. Ludwig was a popular king but his lifestyle and excessive building led to near-bankruptcy and accusations of madness. The spendthrift ways and artistic leanings of the Swan King, as he was known, led to him being deposed. Now the assassin had to get him into talk and then kill him without leaving evidence as to why or how.

Chase, Battles and Treasure Hunt through Bavaria

The story jumps forward to modern day Germany and the Bavarian Alps where a hunter finds a hidden bunker by falling through the roof, unfortunately he does not get to tell the tale as the boar he has just shot kills him.

Richard Miles' book, and the BBC televisions series it supports, explores the history of western civilization from the establsihment of the first cities in what is now Iraq.

Ancient Worlds cover the period from just before 5,000BC, the Bronze Age, to the end of the Classical period with the fall of the Roman Empire in the 4th century AD. Miles tells a story that is, almost entirely, centred on the eastern Mediterranean and what is now called the Near or Middle East.

Revolution: The First Cities

The story begins with the founding of the first cities, at Uruk, in the region between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in southern Iraq. This Sumerian civilization grew out of collaboration between clans to become a major empire. The history then moves to Egypt, a period that will be more familiar to most western readers. This comes about as growing trade exported civilization across the region, and wide and it carries it further afield as empires wax and wane.

In Pop Goes the Weasel,  Albert Jack has produced a fascinating exploration of the story behind much-loved nursery rhymes.

Many of the seemingly innocent songs and rhymes that we remember from our childhood often have a darker history. Albert Jack explores the origins of those popular and much loved nursery rhymes and other popular songs in Pop Goes the Weasel.

The sections are arranged in alphabetical order by title and each consists of a few pages of background and in most cases the full words to the rhyme. Where he can the author is definitive about a rhyme's source but in many cases there is more than one possible explanation. In such cases Albert Jack is even-handed and details the alternative origins and leaves it to the reader to draw their own conclusions.

Caro Ramsay's latest novel, Dark Water, is out in paperback. Set around Glasgow in Scotland it should satisfy lovers of challenging detective mysteries.

Complex and Challenging Murder Mystery

Dark Water, Murder Lies Beneath the Surface starts with a violent attack on a young woman, Emily Corbett, on the eve of the new millennium and then jumps forward ten years when a body is uncovered in macabre setting. The murder investigation is picked up by Detective Chief Inspector Rebecca Quinn at Partickhill police station.

DCI Quinn is close to retirement and her station, Partickhill, feels as though it is being run down prior to closure. As a result Quinn and the investigating officers, detectives Anderson and Costello, have a particular interest in keeping control of the case. This becomes increasingly difficult as it becomes linked to the Corbett attack, the investigation of which, in theory, is still open at nearby Paisley, a larger police station.