Pat Herbert

It is London in the early 1960s and Teddy Bean is making a name for himself as a private detective. However, his personal problems are taking over, with his brother, John, only slowly recovering from a heart attack and his wife, Pearl, dying in a car accident. Added to this, he takes on a...

A serial killer is on the loose, going round strangling women with their own tights and removing their right shoes. Various suspects turn up but, with no obvious motive, the police are impotent and the murders continue. The only link they can find concerns a ‘religious’ meeting, regularly...

Sometimes we're not alone.... What is the dreadful secret hiding behind the front door of an insignificant South London terraced house? Following a triple killing in 1896, a series of murders occur sporadically in the same house, culminating in the murder of the new occupant's girlfriend over a...

The year is 1961. Barney Carmichael is about to take on his toughest case yet when a mysterious and glamorous woman walks into his office unannounced. Her request is simple: find her son. It is soon clear that the task is far from simple, however. In fact, the more Barney and brother Jim delve...

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...

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...

When a mysterious middle-aged woman moves in next door to St Stephen’s vicarage, she is immediately taken under the wing of Nancy Harper, the Reverend Bernard Paltoquet’s redoubtable housekeeper. As the relationship between the two women develops, however, ‘Mrs Aitch’ begins to entertain...

Towards the end of the Nineteenth 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...

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...

Twins sometimes run in families; in the Fentimans’ case, they positively stampede. In 1937, Robert Fentiman is hanged for the murder of a barmaid. Twenty years later his ghost claims his innocence, and Rev Bernard Paltoquet is called on to help clear his name by the dead man’s son, Carl. As...

It is winter in the Cotswolds and a suspicious death has occurred. Psychic medium ‘Madame Zelda’ is found dead on Christmas morning, an open box of chocolates by her side. DCI Hayley Pascal and her new oppo, DS Artie Frobisher, have little to occupy themselves over the dead time that is...

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...

The year is 1935. Art connoisseur-cum-private investigator Felix Underwood is asked to find out what happened to Reggie Soper, a young solicitor who disappeared without trace 15 years previously. Determined to help Charlotte Soper find her missing father, his investigations take him from the...

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...

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...