Most Popular Books by Robert Barnard

Vernon Watts may have been beloved by the millions of faithful viewers of the long-running soap opera Jubilee Terrace but his fellow cast members knew him for what he was -- an egotistical former music-hall performer whose untimely death in a pedestrian accident was not something to be universally regretted. Sadly, though, director Reggie Friedman soon fills the supposed void by asking Hamish Fawley, an equally unpleasant former member of the Jubilee Terrace troupe, to rejoin the soap. Hamish was never much liked. Now he''s more obnoxious than ever. The mood on the set is not exactly serene, a situation made worse when the police receive an anonymous letter suggesting that Vernon Watts''s "accident" may in fact have been murder. Did one of his fellow actors push Vernon into the oncoming traffic? Detective Inspector Charlie Peace faces tough challenges as he probes the make-believe world of skilled thespians to find a possible killer. With a cast of suspects who are trained to emote on cue, Charlie will need all of his policeman''s instincts if he''s to avert further tragedy. Writing with his usual acerbic wit and penetrating insight into human foibles, acclaimed master of mystery Robert Barnard gives us another winning entry in his magnificent body of work.

Old church meets new with a vengeance when a monk is brutally murdered at St. Botolph’s.

When British policemen Charlie Pearce and Mike Oddie investigate the unsurprising murder of the village parish Lothario, they question Rosemary Sheffield, the vicar’s wife. Rosemary, who has recently “lost” her faith and been accused of immoral behavior with a Yugoslavian refugee, makes a perfect suspect. Another winning combination of plot, character, and wit from Barnard.

Prize-winning author Robert Barnard presents seventeen witty mystery stories featuring everyday characters who discover their potential for murder, including a young woman who weds a string of old men and develops a penchant for widowhood.

In A City of Strangers, Barnard creates one of his most memorable characters ever; the dreadful Jack Phelan. Dirty, potbellied, vulgar, selfish, Jack is a man everyone loves to hate. And the rest of his family isn’t much better. The wife is slatternly, the teenaged children flirt with petty crime and prostitution, even the baby is unpleasant. Only twelve-year-old Michael Phelan seems to have escaped the family curse, and it may be just a question of time until he, too, sinks to the Phelan level.

Lill Hodsden was a monster. She rode roughshod over her daughter, wiped her feet on her husband, blackmailed her lovers and smothered her sons with a mother love that left them screaming out for freedom. Lill set the hackles rising all over Todmarsh, the little South Coast town she queened it over. She was just asking to be done in. And her sons were very ready to oblige. In fact, they had it all worked out, for Saturday night. But when Lill was found garrotted on Thursday, on the way home from one of her boy-friends'', the case was wide open, and half Todmarsh would have regarded the murderer as a civic benefactor. Inspector McHale, on his first murder case, is a man who values intelligence, particularly his own. He is convinced he is going to discover the killer. But is he going to discover the right one? In the claustrophobic relationships around the appalling Lill, Robert Barnard has used his gift for creating murderable monsters to set up a murder everybody can sympathize with.

From eight-time Edgar Award nominee Robert Barnard comes a thrilling murder mystery set against the backdrop of a romance writer convention in Norway. Scotland Yard’s Perry Trethowan never wanted to make the trip to Norway for the World Association of Romantic Novelists convention. But it was hard saying no to his newly published sister, Christobel. And besides, the worst he expected was the chilly Scandanavian weather and a harmless if irritating menu of fanciful writers and flowery language. Who could’ve known that backbiting, malice, and bitter rivalry were the true customs of this convention and that the plot line would soon include murder? Amanda Fairchild, the genre’s amorous doyenne, ends up dead while en route to a fjord-side tryst of her own, and the dauntless Trethowan must discover which of these authors has turned the page from romance to homicide.

It can be a bit of an embarrassment when your old man is done in. Particularly, when you are a rising inspector with CID, and hated his guts. Particularly, when your old man was at the time subjecting himself to a do-it-yourself version of a Spanish Inquisition torture. And wearing spangled tights. What it meant was that Perry Trethowan had to go back to the home of his ancestors and do a bit of semi-official sleuthing. Like the Sitwells and the Mitfords, the Trethowans proved that Birth and Artistic Talent could go together. The Trethowans, though, made one hope it didn''t happen too often. Perry''s father had been a dilettante composer so minor that he stopped composing long before he started decomposing. His Uncle Lawrence, head of the family, was a poet of sorts, one of his aunts a stage designer, another an overgrown schoolgirl who had never grown out of her Thirties crush on Adolf Hitler. And that''s only the older generation. Perry goes with fear and trembling back into the lions'' den, and finds that his worst forebodings are mere shadows of the grisly reality.

From Robert Barnard, the internationally acclaimed Diamond Dagger–winning crime writer . . . Kit Philipson has always felt like something of a stranger in his family. Growing up as the only child of professional parents in Glasgow, Scotland, he had every advantage. His mother was a teacher; his father, a journalist, escaped from Nazi Germany at the age of three on one of the 1939 Kindertransports. But on her deathbed, Kit’s mother tells him he was adopted and that his birth name was Novello. Soon, vague memories of his early life begin to surface: his nursery, pictures on the wall, the smell of his birth mother when she’d been cooking. And, sometimes, there are more disturbing memories—of strangers taking him by the hand and leading him away from the only family he had ever known. A search of old newspaper files reveals that a three-year-old boy named Peter Novello was abducted from his parents’ holiday hotel in Sicily in 1989. Now the young man who has known himself only as Kit sets out to rediscover his past, the story of two three-year-old boys torn from their mothers in very different circumstances. Kit’s probing inquiries are sure to bring surprises. They may also unearth dangerous secrets that dare never be revealed. With sharp wit and deep insight, Robert Barnard sweeps away all preconceptions in this powerful study of maternal love and the danger of obsession.

First published in 1979, Unruly Son received an Edgar Award nomination for “Best Novel” of the year. Sir Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs, overweight and overbearing, collapses and dies at his birthday party while indulging his taste for rare liquors. He had promised his daughter he would be polite and charitable for the entire day, but the strain of such exemplary behaviour was obviously too great. He leaves a family relieved to be rid of him, and he also leaves a fortune, earned as a bestselling mystery author. To everyone’s surprise, Sir Oliver’s elder son, who openly hated his father, inherits most of the estate. His wife, his daughter, and his younger son are each to receive the royalties from one carefully chosen book. But the manuscript of the unpublished volume left to Sir Oliver’s wife—a posthumous “last case” that might be worth millions—has disappeared. And Sir Oliver’s death is beginning to look less than natural. Into this bitter household comes Inspector Meredith, a spirited Welshman who in some ways resembles Sir Oliver’s fictional hero. In Robert Barnard’s skilful hands, Inspector Meredith’s investigation becomes not only a classic example of detection but an elegant and humorous slice of crime.

A new mystery set at one of England''s stately homes and featuring beloved Yorkshire cop, Charlie Peace. By Diamond Dagger award winner Robert Barnard.

Intrusion Detection Systems has long been considered the most important reference for intrusion detection system equipment and implementation. In this revised and expanded edition, it goes even further in providing the reader with a better understanding of how to design an integrated system. The book describes the basic operating principles and applications of the equipment in an easy to understand manner. This book was written for those security directors, consultants, and companies that select the equipment or make critical decisions about security systems design. Mr. Barnard provides sufficient detail to satisfy the needs of those interested in the technical principles, yet has included enough description on the operation and application of these systems to make Intrusion Detection Systems, Second Edition a useful reference for any security professional.

The body of a young man, almost naked, found in the car park behind a Haworth restaurant marks the beginning of the case, and it is his identity that is the first puzzle for DC Charlie Peace and his superior, Detective Superintendent Oddie. But before long the puzzle that most concerns them is the nature of the close-knit artistic community where Declan O’Hearn had acted as odd-job boy. The little knot of people seem united less by their ability as painters than by a common worship of the distinguished artist Ranulph Byatt, who seems to prefer the adulation of his inferiors to the judgement of his equals. Peace soon starts to wonder if there isn’t a sinister reason for this. And as the search for the killer gathers pace, Peace and Oddie uncover a series of dark secrets in the harsh Haworth landscape.

Murder pays no respect to rank...or the neighborhood. And so it happened that young aristocrat Timothy Wycliffe was bludgeoned to death in his elegantly furnished flat in Belgravia by a person or persons unknown. Unknown, in fact, for thirty years. When the dead man’s friend Peter Proctor, once a young man on his way up in the diplomatic service, now a retired Member of Parliament, seeks an antidote to boredom by attempting to write his own memoirs they create more problems than he anticipated, and not just of the writer’s-block variety. Peter keeps getting sidetracked by speculations on Timothy’s death. The murder was allegedly accomplished by a beating from one of his boyfriends. But Peter can’t accept so simple a solution, so he begins to probe the past. In so doing, he opens a fascinating window on British society during the 1950s and its changing, and unchanging, mores since.

Award-winning author Robert Barnard, hailed by critics for his brilliant novels of suspense, proves himself equally master of the short story with this delightful first collection. 16 tantalizing stories show ingenious killers at work in cozy English villages, sophisticated London neighborhoods, and the darkly paneled walls of academe.

***Winner of the National Crime Short Story Prize*** Robert Barnard''s contribution ''Sins of Scarlet'' won the National Crime Short Story Prize. A woman contemplating suicide on Beachy Head finds a bench dedicated to the memory of herself. An art lover in Venice conducts a spree of mutilations as a response to the Surrealist Movement. At Heathrow Airport, armed police take up positions to apprehend the wrong man... The latest showcase of shorts from the CWA celebrates the ‘who’ in the whodunnit, the psyche behind the psychological profile. Husbands lead double lives, psychologists confuse perpetrators with ex-partners, neighbours reassess the people they thought they knew. It seems if there’s one thing you can’t classify or slap an ID card on, it’s the id. The collection includes stories by two recipients of the Crime Writers’ Association ‘Diamond Dagger’ lifetime achievement award (Peter Lovesey and Robert Barnard), and an American Grand Master awardee (Edward D Hoch, who has published more crime short stories than anyone else, ever!).

Rosemary Sheffield has a sort of "reverse epiphany" one day while walking in the park: she no longer believes in God. This sudden loss of faith is at first entirely liberating, but the situation gradually becomes more complicated. Rosemary is, after all, the beloved wife of the vicar at St. Saviour''s parish. A storm of controversy erupts in her husband''s church congregation, but Rosemary, with the words "I do not believe," leaves behind the scandal and gossip for a seaside sojourn in Scarborough. Here she meets Stanko, a Bosnian refugee who illegally entered the country. But what begins as a supportive friendship launches an ungodly chain of events-and Rosemary soon finds herself back at home caught up in a murder investigation. "Barnard''s trademark seamless plotting and riotous sense of humor stand out wonderfully in his latest whodunit." "Booklist" "His plots are downright Mozartian in their effortless complexity" "New York Newsday"

A BRONTË ENCYCLOPEDIA “This lively, absorbing, meticulously researched compendium is a rich resource both for the general reader and for the specialist Brontë scholar. It contains much to enlighten and surprise even those who think they know the Brontës well.” Heather Glen, University of Cambridge “Aficionados of all things Brontë must have this encyclopedia on their desks. Even those with just a passing interest in Brontë or literary research can become trapped in this book for hours. Looking up one entry leads to looking up another, and then another. This book has references to the important and the arcane and the obscure, references to places the Brontës visited, people they knew; in short, everything.” English Literature in Transition 1820–1920 A Brontë Encyclopedia is a complete guide to the life and work of the most notable literary family of the 19th century. Comprising approximately 2000 alphabetically arranged entries, this authoritative volume: Brings to light the significant people and places that influenced the Brontës’ lives Defines and describes the Brontës’ fictional characters and settings Incorporates original literary judgments and analyses of characters and motives Includes coverage of Charlotte’s unfinished novels and her and Branwell’s juvenile writings Features a full range of illustrations A Brontë Encyclopedia is the most original and accessible work of its kind.

An Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity Award-winning Author Well-known actress Caroline Fawley has given up a successful stage and television career for love and life in the country. International business titan Marius Fleetwood can''t marry her. He already has a wife, though he claims they are "just friends." But Marius has done something very special for Caroline: he has "bought" her Alderley, an elegant country home. If he should die he''s arranged to leave her enough money to maintain the extensive house and gardens. Caroline is happy and the world is good, until one day when Caroline''s life begins to fall apart. A mysterious young man backpacking his way through the countryside arrives at the door. He says his name is Peter Bagshaw, but Caroline sees instantly that he must be related to Marius; perhaps even his son. What else has Marius hidden from Caroline? Is everything about him a lie?