Cirrus@Austlit

'It was a picture-postcard English village, but like all such villages, it had its share of secrets, scandals and tragedies. The Player murder, however, was seldom discussed: in fact, the whole unpleasant affair was as good as forgotten – or would have been if a visitor to the village hadn’t fed the local rumour mill with the startling information that the rather mysterious woman known as Mrs Edwina Charles had, ten years before, been the notorious clairvoyant, Madame Adele Herrmann, implicated in a sensational, unsolved murder case.

'And then the gossip really began. What had happened to the fabulous diamond necklace that Edwina Charles was reputed to have made away with after that earlier crime? What was her exact relationship to the eccentric Cyril Forbes, who was known as ‘the Punch and Judy man’?

'Finding it necessary to solve not one but two murders out of the past, ex-Detective Chief Superintendent David Sayer hopes to silence the wagging tongues and restore peace to the village. There were too many coincidences, but he needs proof that Henrietta Player was the enigmatic medium’s second homicidal success.

'And that’s where Edwina Charles surprises him – in more ways than one. And without her crystal ball!'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Young women are being murdered, the only clue to the identity of their killer, a Tarot card left with their bodies. That is, according to Professor Rupert Roxeth, the recognised authority on the Tarot called in by the Gidding police to assist them in their enquiries into the murders.

'The clairvoyant, Edwina Charles, when approached privately by ex-Detective Chief Superintendent David Sayer, acting on behalf of friends of his, who have a vested interest in knowing the identity of the Tarot murderer, has other ideas. Her reading of the cards left by the Tarot murderer tells an entirely different story.

'Playing a lone hand, Mrs Charles pits her wits against the Tarot murderer, using both her knowledge of the Tarot and her undisputed natural psychic skills, before he claims yet another victim. It proves to be no easy task. She finds herself up against Professor Roxeth, who is far more interested in protecting his reputation than in finding the Tarot murderer. Added to the mix is Amery Walters, a prominent racehorse trainer with a guilty conscience, and young nursing students with petty jealousies.

'It becomes a game between the Tarot murderer and Mrs Charles, a deadly game that only one of them can win.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Everyone makes mistakes, no one would deny that. But the one Nigel Playford made in allowing his sister, Cynthia, to accompany him to a magicians’ convention in Wales over the Easter holiday weekend was monumental. Never mind that it was thanks to Cynthia’s friendship with the clairvoyant, Edwina Charles, that Mrs Charles agreed to give a lecture on clairvoyance and fortune-telling to the magicians’ wives while their menfolk were otherwise engaged. Cynthia was spoiling for a fight and Nigel knew it.'

'Cynthia and the wife of her ex-lover had brawled publicly at the last magicians’ convention they had all attended, and the scene was set for the two women, once they met again, to finish what they had started. The consensus of all attending the Welsh convention was that it was inevitable.

'But then Cynthia surprised everyone. She had an entirely different agenda for the weekend that was far more spectacular than an undignified cat-fight. Halfway up Great Mountain, she got off the early morning ride she took with a stranger on the town’s main tourist attraction, a cabin lift… Stepped out of the cabin and into fresh air, falling into the valley below and onto spiked railing in a graveyard. An accident? Or was it murder?

'Ex-Detective Chief Superintendent David Sayer, the investigator hired by the insurance company covering the cabin lift proprietor’s responsibility for providing a safe ride for his customers, has his suspicions. Something doesn’t add up.

'Who was the man who rode up the mountain with Cynthia Playford? No one seems to know. The answer, however, lies in an envelope that has gone missing from Cynthia’s shoulder bag. But where is it? Who took it and why?

'Mrs Charles has the answer and more. A warning. But even with David Sayer as an ally, she fails to convince the local police that steps should be taken immediately to prevent another death equally, if not more dramatic than Cynthia’s. A price both the police and the next person to die in similarly spectacular circumstances that weekend have to pay.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'There were few who would have said that the letter Edwina Charles received from deeply troubled Peggy May, a former dancer with an end-of-pier dancing troupe who, twenty-five years earlier, had requested the clairvoyant to read the cards for her, didn’t fulfil the prophecy of the Tarot.

'Except for one thing…

'It was not Mrs Charles’s interpretation of the Tarot cards in Peggy’s reading. With the passing of the years, a certain sequence of disturbing events in Peggy May’s life had led her to misinterpret the clairvoyant’s reading to fit them, and with fatal consequences, not just for Peggy, but for those closest and dearest to her.

'It was too late for Mrs Charles to help Peggy, it was always too late, but not too late to right a terrible wrong which the clairvoyant knows she cannot ignore despite the grave risk she knew she would be taking in meddling in the affairs of other people… Particularly of those living in an introverted, close-knit community who knew that Peggy had written to her and that sooner or later she would respond, in person, to Peggy’s plea for help and be a definite threat to them. All the clairvoyant had to do was to stay away from them and get on with her own life. Leave them to keep their ugly secrets and get on with theirs. They knew, though, that it was inevitable that one day she would come, but it was of no real consequence or threat to them. They were ready for her. Waiting.

'Some secrets are deadly, never more so than the one which had cast a shadow over Peggy’s life. The clairvoyant had warned Peggy to beware of a hermit with a secret which, if she discovered what that secret was and didn’t heed her warning, would destroy her.

'This was fair enough… Peggy freely admitted in her letter that there was a hermit – the ghost of an old prior, a Cornish smuggler of fine old French brandy – who wandered about the cliff-tops of Michaelmas Cove where Peggy and her late husband, Albert, had lived for many happy, contented and untroubled years. The hermit was part of local folklore; had probably never existed. He couldn’t harm Peggy.

'The girl who was clairvoyant, though, could.

'And did…'

Source : publisher's blurb

'It was Big John Little, the village inebriate, who late one night stumbled about in the flower-beds beneath the bedroom window of Little Gidding’s hated postmistress, Mae Holliday, shaking his huge fist and bawling out to her that she was a mouldy old witch he wished were dead…

'Prophetic words Big John was later to regret when Mae Holliday is found lying dead, murdered, in front of the altar in Gidding Cathedral’s Lady Chapel, staked through the chest with one of his withies.

'Was Mae Holliday really a witch, a member of a coven meeting secretly in the derelict old brewery in the village?

'And who was Mae Holliday, anyway? This was a question which even she had no answer for. Mae Holliday was a fiction; she didn’t exist; and it was to the clairvoyant, Edwina Charles, that the postmistress turned, in desperation, for help with unravelling her past. Mae Holliday had a deeply worrying reason for knowing who she really was, but there were strict conditions laid down by her when it came to a reading of the Tarot. Edwina Charles was made to promise that she would not look at the present and the future. It was the past that concerned Mae Holliday and only the past.

'Looking back is never a good idea, and for Mae Holliday it proved to be fatal.

'For both the police and the clairvoyant, the answer to the murder of Mae Holliday lay buried in a myriad of shared mistakes, one compounding another, until Edwina Charles finally discovered that it was the reel of old movie-film, which the police had found in the skirt pocket of the murder victim, that would finally unmask her killer. That and the Devil’s Knell.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'What was expected to have been a night to remember proves to be exactly that, but for all the wrong reasons.

'An invitation to a lavish dinner party at a country mansion was intended to be a special thank you to the creative team of the West End smash hit musical, ‘Abracadabra’, instead of which it proves to be a night of pure horror for all concerned, with murder the main dish on the menu.

'What none of the creative team realizes is that Danny Midas, the producer and director of the musical – on whose life the show is based – has somewhat controversially hired a professional clairvoyant, Edwina Charles, to tell him which member of the team is behind a death threat he has received.

'Mrs Charles has little more to work on than a threatening note that was delivered to Danny at the theatre, and what she has been told of the night Danny answered the door of his home and someone fired off several rounds of blank shots at him before vanishing into the darkness.

'Danny’s bitterness towards his wife, Jo, who walked out on him many years ago, is believed to be the motive for the threat to his life. Ignoring the protests of Bennie Rosenberg, who wrote the book and is the composer of the show’s music and lyrics, Danny had insisted that Jo should be portrayed in the worst possible light.

'So who among the team is being used by Jo to exact her revenge?

'Or is there a much bigger, more sinister hidden agenda behind the death threat Danny has received?

'As Lilla Osborne, the costume designer, warns the rest of the team, Edwina Charles is no fool. Watch out!'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Rendell Maxwell Pym brutally murdered his beautiful young wife. The fact that his conviction was overturned by the Appeal Court made no difference. He was the man everyone loved to hate. Only one person, right up until the moment the last dying breath left his body, claimed he was innocent of the crime everyone believed he had committed, and that was Pym himself.

'Who, then, is carrying out his, a dead man’s, vendetta against the three prosecution witnesses who testified against him at his trial? Or is it no more than a mere coincidence that the doctor – the first of Pym’s three wise monkeys, ‘See No Evil’, who gave damning evidence of Pym’s brutality – was himself brutally murdered in a Scottish graveyard and found with his eyes taped shut?

'And what of Mr Justice Halahan – the so-called ‘Hanging Judge’ – who passed sentence on Pym? He was found hanged in his home with one of his hands taped over his good ear. Coincidence again that Pym’s second wise monkey, ‘Hear No Evil’, is now dead?

'Antonia Manners, a young private investigator, doubts it. She takes her suspicions that Pym is alive to Benjamin Bing, a prominent spiritualist healer, who advocated a controversial form of hanging as a means of treating the judge’s severe migraine headaches. Hours later, Tony, who was known to be depressed over a health issue, fell to her death from a train while thought to be journeying to Scotland to investigate the doctor’s death.

'Suicide…or murder?

'The shadowy underworld figure who employs a hint of blackmail to coerce the clairvoyant, Edwina Charles, to investigate Tony’s death, wants the truth.

'Mrs Charles is far from convinced that there is any reason to doubt the coroner’s verdict of suicide at Tony’s inquest. That is, until Pym’s third wise monkey, the detective who arrested Pym and charged him with murder, is found with his mouth taped closed.

'The question Mrs Charles has to find an answer for is this: why would Pym – if he is alive, as it would seem Tony Manners suspected – target the three wise monkeys he swore vengeance on, and not the man he claimed murdered his wife?

'In a startling dénouement, Mrs Charles finds her answer, one that leaves her no less shocked than everyone else who was involved, in one way or another, with Rendell Maxwell Pym, the wife murderer.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Mrs Charles, the clairvoyant-detective, finds herself with not only one of the most baffling investigations of her career, but also in a race against time to prove the innocence of her brother, the eccentric Punch and Judy entertainer accused of murdering pop star Judith Caldicott…Judith’s clairvoyant, Edwina Charles, warned her repeatedly of a lurking danger in the Tarot cards, a threat from something hidden deep in the past. Judith ignored that advice – and she paid with her life!'

Source : publisher's blurb

'It had long been rumoured that there was a witches’ coven active in Little Gidding, but that was all it was, a rumour. That is until the body of the old woman widely known in the village as “the Black Widow” was discovered staked to a scarecrow and ritually burnt to death as a witch.

'It falls to the clairvoyant, Edwina Charles, and the tarot cards to prove not only the Black Widow’s connection with witchcraft and the spate of anonymous letters circulating in the village that warned, “I am the Devil’s Hand. I know your guilty secret;’ but also who murdered her and why. A further horrific ritual black magic sacrificial killing and more anonymous letters do little to help matters, not least of which is the threat to the clairvoyant’s own life.

'‘I am the Devil’s Hand,’ confessed Rosemary Linthorpe. But was she?
'The 10th Mrs Charles murder mystery, ‘The Tarot Reading’, is soon to follow.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'The tarot reading was a gift, albeit an unusual one, bearing in mind that it was supposed to be a wedding present for a young bride, and all the more so, since the giver of the gift was the bridegroom’s mother. The clairvoyant, Edwina Charles, has deep misgivings over the wisdom of the bride in accepting this gift. Mrs Charles fears that it will serve only to fan the flames of what was allegedly an accidental death in which the bride-to-be was directly involved, and which was actually widely thought to have been cold-blooded murder.'

'But then, in a bizarre twist of fate, the wrong young woman receives the gift in the mistaken belief that it was intended for her, and in accepting it, sets off a disastrous chain of events which no one, not even Mrs Charles can avert.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Everyone was agreed. The clairvoyant, Edwina Charles, not only had the perfect motive for murder, she was also in the right place at the right time to commit the crime. Her alleged victim, the wealthy celebrity clairvoyant, Angela Castle – whom some might say was Edwina Charles’s protégée – had cheated on her, stolen her clients and to add insult to injury, invited her to take part in a television debate on clairvoyance during which Angela and the programme’s presenter, Mark Devereux, ridiculed her.'

'For the first time, Mrs Charles is at a complete loss. Her powers of perception as a clairvoyant and her ingenuity are tested to the limit as she seeks for the answers that she must find to clear her name.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Amber Rojano, a beautiful young Romany gypsy, loved to dance, and it would be fair to say that this is what cost her her life, even though her body was never discovered.'

'Some years after her mysterious disappearance, Amber’s physically abusive, universally disliked partner, Adam Newton, made an appeal against his conviction for her murder. Finally acquitted of the crime on a technicality, he approaches Edwina Charles, the clairvoyant, asking her to assist him with a reading of the tarot cards to prove beyond all doubt that he had no direct hand in Amber’s disappearance. Despite her belief in his innocence, Mrs Charles refuses to help him.. Mrs Charles has conflicting interests in the matter. Gypsy Luke Rojano, Amber’s grandfather, is a friend, and Luke is determined to make Newton pay for the crime which, with the exception of Mrs Charles, no one doubts Newton committed.

'And then events take a dramatic turn. A female skeleton is unearthed on Hell’s Acre which was once the travellers’ camp site where Amber was born and spent her early childhood years and which is now owned by the clairvoyant’s brother. Newton’s arrest following this discovery changes everything. Mrs Charles is now involved in the disappearance of Amber Rojano far more heavily than she would ever have imagined. Her belief in Newton’s innocence of the murder of Amber, however, is undiminished, all the more so when the remains of the skeleton give up only more questions to be answered, including those she finds herself faced with following the discovery of the body of a complete stranger, known only as Elena Butterly, in the wood at the bottom of her garden.

'It is the most complex case the clairvoyant has ever undertaken and for the most part, she is obliged to investigate it entirely on her own. Ex-Detective Chief Superintendent David Sayer, who has worked in partnership with her in the past on various problematical cases undertaken by her, shares the opinion of everyone else. Adam Newton is and was guilty of the murder of Amber Rojano. But was he? That is the task Mrs Charles sets for herself, the answer to which lies in her reading of the tarot for Adam Newton with its shocking consequences for all concerned.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'It was a particularly savage murder and all the more shocking as the victim, Leslie Hepworth, was a teenager and furthermore because he and his parents were virtual  newcomers to Little Gidding. The villagers themselves had never encountered anything like it before. The real problem was that everyone knew that the killer was one of them. Leslie was arrogant, did what he pleased and cared nothing for the distress caused  by his outrageous behaviour.

'It became an impossible task for the police. Too many people had a motive for  killing Leslie. Many more were suspected of having been targeted by him, but for their own personal reasons had kept silent.

'Doubt and suspicion spreads like wildfire and quickly takes hold with the inevitable result that Little Gidding becomes a village on trial. With the murder enquiry at a standstill, the villagers take matters into their own hands. A petition is presented to the police, insisting that the clairvoyant Edwina Charles, is requested to assist them with their enquiries, but Mrs Charles refuses to become involved. For her, the whole issue is too close to home. And then matters take an even darker turn. One of the three teenagers who had hero-worshipped Leslie disappears while delivering a blackmail note to the person all three of them consider they have good reason to believe murdered Leslie.

'A battle of wills ensues. Will the clairvoyant revise her decision and assist the police with their further enquiries into what now shows every sign of proving to be another murder, or will she stand by her word and refuse to involve herself in any way?

'The stakes are high, and no one knows this better than Edwina Charles…'

Source : publisher's blurb