Laura Wilson Libros

War-torn London hides a killer without a face... The second in a brilliant crime series featuring Ted Stratton of the CID, set in central London during WW2 and its aftermath.

When Dodie Blackstock, only child of multi-millionaire Wolf Blackstock, is told that her mother’s body has been found in a housing estate in Hackney, she is shocked. When she is told that her mother, Susan, has been dead for less than 48 hours, she is devastated. For Susan was kidnapped, apparently by a politically motivated group, when Dodie was nine. Susan was never found, and she was presumed dead. Traumatised by her lonely childhood, Dodie has been estranged from her dysfunctional and complicated family for years. She returns to Camoys Hall, the Blackstock’s stately home, to talk to her step-mother Joan, who lives there by herself. But when she arrives, she discovers that Joan, surprised by an intruder, has had a fatal heart attack. Alone with her memories in the big house, Dodie must come to terms with the anger she still feels for her father whose vast fortune she has now inherited. She must make up her mind whether she can trust Jimmy, the local boy who appears to have her best interests at heart. Most importantly she must find out who it is who is sending her anonymous and threatening letters; who it is who’s waiting in the darkness outside Camoys Hall, watching her every move …

London, November, 1956. DI Ted Stratton is tasked with investigating the murder of Jeremy Lloyd, a strange young man with a taste for esoteric religion. Stratton's enquiries lead him to Suffolk, where the mysterious Mr Roth has founded a Foundation for Spiritual Understanding. Apparently Lloyd had believed himself marked out for great things. But at the Foundation, Stratton meets twelve-year-old Michael who is proclaimed as the next incarnation in a long line of spiritual leaders that stretches back to Christ and Buddha. He is rumoured amongst Roth's disciples to have been immaculately conceived, but the woman who is said to be his mother, and whose photograph was cherished by Lloyd, has disappeared. When a woman's body is found in woods nearby, Stratton initially assumes he has found 'the mother', but the reality turns out to be far stranger and far more terrifying...

In 1987 Sheila Shand was given a suspended sentence for murdering her father. At her trial, it emerged that she, her mother and her sister, were all subject to brutal abuse at the hands of Leslie Shand. Years later, investigative journalist Amy Vaughan discovers letters and a newspaper cutting about the Shand case while clearing out her late mother's flat. Curious about the case, she decides to visit Sheila's mother who is in a care home. Amy herself had a difficult childhood, subjected to Munchausen By Proxy by her mother in order to keep the affections of Amy's father George. Then George appears on Amy's doorstep after a long absence, saying he is dying... As she pursues her investigation of the Shand case, Amy realises that there is more to the murder of Leslie than the police ever unearthed, including two long-buried skeletons in woods near the family's home ¿

An outstanding historical crime thriller based on real-life events: the framing of Timothy Evans for murders committed by notorious serial killer John Christie

In the heat of summer, 1958, tensions are escalating in DI Stratton's new manor of Notting Hill, as a murder exposes society's divisions.

A dark and gripping mystery of celebrity obsession and the lies families tell each other.

London, 1955. The bodies of three elderly recluses are found in a house in South Kensington. One of the victims is former society beauty Georgina Gresham, prime suspect in the notorious murder of her husband, James, almost thirty years earlier. Beside her lie the bodies of her brother Edmund and housekeeper Ada. The story behind these deaths takes us back to the late 1890s, to a prosperous and beautiful country house where children are playing in the garden. And then the youngest child, Freddie, is found with fatal head injuries ... Told through three narrators, this is a tight, claustrophobic piece of writing so authentic, so completely in period, that it¿s hard to believe it is not a true story.

Autumn, 1940, and London is in the grip of the Blitz. An unidentified female corpse is discovered in an alleyway in Soho - the fourth to have been found in a matter of weeks. Rene is a Soho prostitute with a young son to support. She's learnt to cope with the air-raids, but each night on the streets is a terrifying ordeal as the killer begins to pick off her friends. Lucy is a young, middle-class office worker living with her family in Clapham, struggling to make sense of things as her peaceful suburban life degenerates into chaos. Jim is a fighter pilot, handsome and much admired for his heroism in battle. The killer instinct makes him perfectly suited to the daily challenge he faces in the skies of southern England, but the strain is beginning to tell. In ordinary circumstances, their paths might never have crossed, but in war-torn London, anything can happen. One night a bomb falls, with terrifying consequences for them all...

In 1967 Bunny Girl Alice Jones met Lenny Maxted - one half of the brilliant comic duo, Maxted and Flowers - and fell deeply in love with him. But, like so many great comics, Lenny had a dark side. Their love affair ended when Alice found his body hanging from a beam in a Wiltshire cottage. Seven years after his death, in the long hot summer of 1976, Alice is leading a quiet, almost reclusive life in an Oxfordshire farmhouse when, out of the blue, Lenny's partner, Jack Flowers, turns up on her doorstep. Alice has not seen him since Lenny's funeral, but her surprise and pleasure turn into an all too familiar sense of unease when she discovers that he is distressed and drinking heavily. At the same time, a car containing human remains is fished out of a Wiltshire lake...