Reverend Paltoquet Mystery Series

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 century later. But is there a connection or are they simply coincidences? Reverend Bernard Paltoquet, the vicar of the local parish, is determined to find out.

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 Robbie’s surgery in the late autumn of 1962. What is the mystery surrounding her, and why is a restless spirit trying to communicate through her?

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 reclusive behaviour plants suspicion in the minds of their neighbours, who regard them as ‘witches’. Dispensing herbal remedies and keeping a mangy black cat add to their air of mystery and seem to bear out the rumours.

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 back to haunt him. Thus, when Lady Mountjoy, his former employer and lover, turns up telling him he is the father of her son, he is torn between his old life and his new.

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.

Just what happened to two young women who disappeared from the Sunnyside Guest House in Blackpool just after the First World War? Their fate has remained a mystery for many years, despite attempts by the husband of the first woman and the prospective husband of the second to find out.

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 dog, Bernard and his psychic doctor friend, Robbie MacTavish, are alerted to Alice’s unquiet spirit at her graveside.

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 suspicions that her new neighbour is not all she seems. Bernard and his friend Dr Robbie MacTavish also begin to think she has a dark secret.