Search results for ""Author Diane Janes""

The night before she's due to make a speech to the Robert Barnaby Society on the subject of the famous writer's 'magic chair', committee member Linda Dexter disappears. When her body is discovered two days later, fellow members Frances Black and Tom Dod determine to find out the truth about her death. Does the answer lie in the dead woman's past?

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On 22 June 1931, Lieutenant Hugh Chevis and Frances, his bride of six months, sat down to dinner as usual at their bungalow at Deepcut Barracks. Within an hour, Chevis was showing signs of strychnine poisoning and by the next morning he was dead. Thus began one of the most intriguing unsolved murder enquiries of the twentieth century — soon to become known as ‘The Case of the Poisoned Partridge’. When a mysterious telegram arrived from Dublin on the day of Hugh’s funeral, containing the words ‘HOORAY HOORAY HOORAY’, the Surrey Police found themselves at the centre of an international investigation, considering clues from Eire, India and the Far East. Suspicion also fell on those closer to home. Was it possible to break the alibi provided by Major Jackson, Frances Chevis’s former husband? And what of the enigmatic Frances herself? Featuring previously unpublished material, this book provides the definitive account of the Poisoned Partridge Case.

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Three sudden deaths have occurred in the sleepy village of Durley Dean. Are they tragic accidents? Tom Dod's Aunt Hetty isn't so sure. All three took a stand against the new vicar of St Agnes Church and his controversial changes. But is there really a killer among the parishioners? Fran and Tom are soon plunged into a new mystery.

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In suburban Croydon over a period of ten months during 1928-9, three members of the same family died suddenly. A complex police investigation followed, but no charges were ever brought and the mystery remains officially unsolved. In the eighty years which followed, the finger of suspicion has been pointed at one member of the family after another: now, using the original police files and other contemporary documents, Diane Janes meticulously reconstructs these astonishing events and offers a new solution to an old murder mystery.

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Caroline Luard was shot near Ightham in Kent in 1908. Within weeks her husband, a respectable Major-General, committed suicide. Two years later John Nisbet, a colliery cashier, was robbed and murdered on a train in Northumberland. Police arrested a man called John Dickman, who was subsequently executed. The conviction, however, relied on circumstantial evidence. In 1950 C.H. Norman, who acted as official shorthand writer at Dickman's trial, claimed that Dickman was framed for Nisbet's murder. Is it conceivable that John Dickman was guilty of both murders? Or was he framed, and unjustly executed? These true crimes bear all the hallmarks of traditional English period murder: steam trains, revolvers, an isolated summerhouse, retired army officers, parlour maids, as well as murder and love.

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