Foul Play
A DI Ambrose Mystery
Chalk Heath Players are mid-rehearsal when the leading lady is found unconscious at the side of the stage. It is clearly not an accident.
Read Case File: Foul Play
The Complete Catalogue
Ten books.
Ten books.
One pen name.
Five mysteries for DI Ambrose, and five that go somewhere else entirely.
The Series
The DI Ambrose Mysteries
Chalk Heath, from 1958 onwards. Each case closes, so you can start anywhere — but the team changes as the years turn, and the order below is the order they were lived.
Poison Pen
A DI Ambrose Mystery
DI Ambrose goes undercover at an artistic house party at the fading Chalk Heath Hall. How do you poison one guest when everybody eats the same food?
Read Case File: Poison Pen
Close Disharmony
A DI Ambrose Mystery
A touring choir, a string of hotel thefts, and the vicious murder of the lead soprano. Why would anyone want the best singer dead?
Read Case File: Close Disharmony
Poetic Justice
A DI Ambrose Mystery
Threatening packages reach the judges of a poetry competition. Then two of them die in apparent accidents, and the trail leads to Guernsey.
Read Case File: Poetic Justice
Skull Days
A DI Ambrose Mystery
It is 1960. The boss’ daughter is missing, organised crime is moving onto the patch, and a skull turns up in a school’s grounds.
Read Case File: Skull Days
Chalk Heath CID
Four coppers, one notebook, no forensics.
The same team works every case — and every case costs them something.
Paul Ambrose
A gentle giant, and an amateur writer himself. By Skull Days he has made DCI and runs a new Serious Crime Team.
Samuel Winters
Red-haired and steady. Ambrose’s second on every case, and promoted to DI alongside him.
Gary Sutton
One of two young recruits. The open question is whether he lets his personal life bleed into the work.
Pauline Meadows
Coping in a very male world, and asked to take on duties not normally expected of a woman officer.
Beyond the Beat
Other Novels & Collections
Short stories, a family saga, a wartime record, and two novels set in a future that feels uncomfortably close.
Night Call
Short Stories
Eighteen tales of murder and mystery, set in eighteen different times and places. A book to dip in and out of.
View Book: Night Call
Waters of Time
A Family Saga
Martha Cooper comes home from Australia to a village, a river, and the death of a teenage boy she has never stopped remembering.
View Book: Waters of Time
Thinking of You Always
A Wartime Record
The letters Lewis Hill wrote home to his wife from the moment he was mustered into the RAF in 1941, and everywhere the war then sent him.
View Book: Thinking of You Always
The Keepers
A Futuristic Thriller
A twenty-second-century England where the Keepers enforce peace and happiness at any cost. To want knowledge is treason.
View Book: The Keepers
Border 7
A Companion Novel to The Keepers
Jude is a skilled member of The Corporation’s security force. In a world of subterfuge and spies, trusting the wrong person is a death sentence.
View Book: Border 7
Never Read One?
Start with Foul Play.
It is where Ambrose, Winters, Sutton and Meadows first work a case together — a body at the back of a village stage, in 1958.