From the bookshelf this month...

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1920. The Great War has been over for two years, and it has left a very different world from the Edwardian certainties of 1914. Following the death of his wife and baby and his experiences on the Western Front, Laurence Bartram has become something of a recluse. Yet death and the aftermath of the conflict continue to cast a pall over peacetime England, and when a young woman he once knew persuades him to look into events that apparently led her brother, John Emmett, to kill himself, Laurence is forced to revisit the darkest parts of the war. As Laurence unravels the connections between Captain Emmett's suicide, a group of war poets, a bitter regimental feud and a hidden love affair, more disquieting deaths are exposed. Even at the moment Laurence begins to live again, it dawns on him that nothing is as it seems, and that even those closest to him have their secrets ...

Set in London, this classic murder mystery introduces Inspector Alan Grant, who is charged with sorting out not only the identity of a victim, but the logistics of the stabbing itself, which occurred in a dense crowd of theatre-goers, none of whom saw anything.

 Summer, 1935. Inspector Archie Penrose has invited Josephine Tey to his family home in Cornwall, a struggling but beautiful country estate on a magnificent stretch of coastline. Disillusioned with the London stage, Josephine is ready to begin work on her second mystery novel and finds much to inspire her in the landscape and its legends - in particular, a lake on the estate which is said to claim a life every seven years, and the nearby Minack Theatre, an open-air auditorium which overlooks the sea.

But death clouds the holiday from the outset: Josephine's arrival coincides with the funeral of a young estate worker, killed in a mysterious riding accident, and another local boy disappears shortly afterwards. When the Minack proves to be a stage for real-life tragedy and an audacious murder, Archie's loyalties are divided between his friends and his job, and he and Josephine must confront the violent reality which lies beneath a seemingly idyllic community - a community with one face turned towards the present, and another looking back to the crimes of the past.

When Alex Loding passes Brat Farrar in the street, he's struck by Brat's uncanny resemblance to Simon Ashby. Simon had a older twin brother, Patrick, who disappeared a decade ago, and was presumed drowned. Simon now owns the family farm, Latchetts, a top-notch stable. Alex asks Brat, who loves horses, if he'd care to impersonate Patrick to disinherit Simon. But as Brat grows closer to the Ashby family, he finds the role a dangerous and wearing one; especially as he begins to suspect that Patrick's death wasn't an accident.