The Funeral Owl
Book 7First published 2013 When a reader contacts local newspaper The Crow to report a rare sighting of the Boreal, or ‘Funeral’ Owl, journalist Philip Dryden has a sense of foreboding. The bird has been spotted in the West Fens – a bleak area of sandy farmland and wild woods. In the violent and terrible week…
Nightrise
Book 6First published 2012 Journalist Philip Dryden is shocked to be informed by police that his father has been killed in a car accident – given that he drowned during the fenland floods of 1977, 35 years before. What is the real identity of the victim? At the same time, two unrelated cases are demanding Dryden’s…
The Skeleton Man
Book 5First published 2007 For seventeen years, the Cambridgeshire hamlet of Jude’s Ferry has lain abandoned, requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence for military training. In its thousand-year-old history, it had been famous for one thing ― never having recorded a single crime. But when The Crow’s star (and only) reporter Philip Dryden joins the Territorial…
The Coldest Blood
Book 4First published 2006 Declan McIlroy, a 39-year-old loner, is found frozen to death in his flat as Arctic temperatures grip the cathedral city of Ely. His is not the only cold death that winter, but nevertheless reporter Philip Dryden has worrying doubts – for it seems Declan may not have been alone as he slowly…
The Moon Tunnel
Book 3First published 2005 From beneath a wartime POW camp near Ely, deep in the Cambridgeshire Fens, a man crawls through an escape tunnel. But he won’t emerge until fifty years of peace have passed. When he does, unearthed by archaeologists seeking a Saxon burial tomb, Dryden knows he has a mystery to solve. The human…
The Fire Baby
Book 2First published 2004 Summer, 1976., and the country swelters in the Great Drought. A US military aircraft crashes on a farm in the Cambridgeshire Fens. Out of the flames walks young Maggie Beck, clutching a baby in her arms. Twenty-seven years later, Philip Dryden – visiting his wife, Laura in hospital – is witness to…
The Water Clock
Book 1First published 2003 Introducing local newspaper reporter Philip Dryden in the first of the Fenland mysteries which eventually won a ‘Dagger’ – the crime novel equivalent of an ‘Oscar’. The story begins with the finding of a body on the roof of Ely Cathedral. Dryden, chief reporter for The Crow, knows he has a great…