DI Tremayne Thriller

An abandoned church in a village set in time-the ideal setting for murder. Detective Inspector Tremayne and his sergeant, Clare Yarwood, are hard pushed to solve the crime and to stay alive. 'Do you believe in spontaneous human combustion?' Detective Inspector Keith Tremayne asked. 'Not me. I've read about it. Who hasn't?' Sergeant Clare Yarwood answered. 'I haven't,' Tremayne replied which did not surprise his young sergeant. In the months they had been together, she had come to realize that he was a man who had little interest in the world. A cigarette in his mouth, a beer in his hand, and a murder to solve was about the happiest she ever saw him, and even then, he could hardly be regarded as one of life's most sociable. And as for reading? The occasional police report, an early morning newspaper, the back pages for the racing results. Hardly the ideal attributes for a trip into the murky world of paganism and its rituals, but that's where they were heading and it was going to get dangerous, very dangerous.

Amateur dramatics was never meant to be so deadly! The man was not meant to die; the daggers were only theatrical props, plastic and harmless. A summer's night, a production of Julius Caesar among the ruins of an Anglo-Saxon fort. Detective Inspector Tremayne is there with his sergeant, Clare Yarwood. The assassination scene, the man collapses to the ground, Brutus defending his actions, Mark Antony's rebuke. They're a disparate group, the amateur actors. One's an estate agent, another, an accountant. And then there is the teenage man, the gay, the funeral director, the commodities trader. And what about the women? They could be involved. They've all got a secret, but which of those on the stage wanted Gordon Mason, the actor who had portrayed Caesar, dead?

Sixty-eight million pounds and DEAD! Someone had once told Detective Inspector Keith Tremayne that some people were lucky and some weren't. Tremayne knew only one thing: the man lying dead in a pool of blood had qualified on the lucky after winning sixty-eight million pounds on a lottery ticket, but now his luck had run out. Tremayne knew the victim, Alan Winters; even knew his family. The man with all his new wealth had not hidden behind closed doors, fending off the scrounging relatives, the newly-found friends. That wasn't Winters's style. He had been out and about, driving expensive cars, living well. And now he was dead. Tremayne knew the questions would start to roll. And why was he lying on the Altar Stone at Stonehenge, naked, with his throat cut? Clare Yarwood, his sergeant, had seen the body as well, turned away initially at the sight of it, but had taken a deep breath and stood alongside Tremayne. 'Nasty one, guv,' she said.

An idyllic setting. A violent death! If it hadn't been for the circumstances, Detective Inspector Keith Tremayne would have said the view was outstanding. Up high, overlooking the farmhouse in the valley below, the panoramic vista of Salisbury Plain stretching out beyond. The only problem was that near where he stood with his sergeant, Clare Yarwood, there was a body, and it wasn't a pleasant sight. 'What happened?' Tremayne asked. He was a cantankerous man, he knew that, and he wasn't in a good mood on account of the biting wind and the squelching mud underfoot. 'I found him when I came up here to check on the livestock,' the farmhand said. 'At what time?' Tremayne moved away from the body, attempting to find somewhere drier. The condition of the track up to the site was so bad that the vehicle sent to transport the dead man to the mortuary could not make it up. Even Tremayne and Clare had had to hang onto a tractor to get up the slope, and now the weather looked as if it were about to worsen. Tremayne had never been keen on farms, and especially horses, although Clare loved them. Tremayne assumed she wouldn't be so fond of the one that trampled Claude Selwood to death.

Dead men don't commit murders. Or do they? A flawed heist of forty gold bars from a security van late at night. One of the perpetrators is killed by his brother as they argue over what they have stolen. Eighteen years later, the murderer, released after serving his sentence for his brother's murder, waits in a church for a man purporting to be the brother he killed. The threads stretch back a long way, and now more people are dying in the search for the missing gold bars. Detective Inspector Tremayne, his health causing him concerns, and Sergeant Clare Yarwood, still seeking romance, are pushed to the limit solving the current murder, attempting to prevent any more.

No one confessed to having murdered the woman, but when the body count starts to rise, secrets start to be revealed. Nobody liked Gloria Wiggins, a woman who regarded anyone who did not acquiesce to her jaundiced view of the world with disdain. James Baxter, the previous vicar, had been one of those, and her scurrilous outburst in the church one Sunday had hastened his death. And now, years later, the woman was dead, hanging from a beam in her garage. Detective Inspector Tremayne and Sergeant Clare Yarwood had seen the body, interviewed the woman's acquaintances, and those who had hated her.

A Bronze-Age burial mound close to Stonehenge, an archaeological excavation. What they were looking for was an ancient body, historical artifacts. When they found a modern-day body, it was then that the police became interested. It's another case for Detective Inspector Tremayne and Sergeant Yarwood. The more recent of the two bodies, the brother of the mayor of Salisbury. The person responsible keeps leading back to the brother, the upright and serious-minded Clive Grantley. Tremayne's sure that it's him, but Clare Yarwood's not so sure. But is her belief based on evidence or personal hope?

A group of children play. Not far away, in the ditch on the other side of the farmyard, the body of a young woman. The nearby village hides as many secrets as the community at the farm, a disparate group of people looking for an alternative to their previous torturous lives. Their leader, idealistic and benevolent, espouses love and kindness, and somebody's not following his dictate. The second death, an old woman, seems unrelated to the first, but is it? Is it part of the tangled web that connects the farm to the village? The village, Detective Inspector Tremayne, and Sergeant Clare Yarwood find out soon enough, is anything but charming and picturesque. It's a hotbed of intrigue and wrongdoing, and what of the farm and those who live there. None of them can be ruled out, not yet.

A day at the races for Detective Inspector Tremayne, idyllic at the outset, soon changes. A horse is dead, and then the owner's daughter is found murdered, and Tremayne's there when the body is discovered. The question is, was Tremayne set up, in the wrong place at the right time? He's the cast-iron alibi for one of the suspects, and he knows that one murder leads to two, and more often than not, to three. The dead woman had a checkered history, not as much as her father, and then a man commits suicide. Is he the murderer, or was he the unfortunate consequence of a tragic love affair? And who was it in the stable with the woman just before she died? There is more than one person who could have killed her, and all of them have secrets they would rather not be known. Tremayne's health is troubling him. Is what they are saying correct? Is it time for him to retire, to take it easy and to put his feet up? But that's not his style, and he'll not give up on solving the murder.

Jacob Montfield, regarded by the majority as a homeless eccentric, a nuisance by a few, had pushed a supermarket trolley around the city for years. However, one person regards him as a liability. Eccentric was correct, a nuisance, for sure, mad, plenty thought that, but few knew the truth, that Montfield is a brilliant man, once a research scientist. And even less knew that detailed within a notebook hidden deep in the trolley, there is a new approach to the guidance of weapons and satellites-a radical improvement on the previous and it's worth a lot to some, power to others, accolades to another. And for that, one cold night, he died at the hand of another. Inspector Tremayne and Sergeant Clare Yarwood are on the case, but so are others, and soon they're warned off. Only Tremayne doesn't listen, not when he's got his teeth into the investigation, and his sergeant, equally resolute, won't either. It's not only their careers on the line, but their lives.