Friendship, love, and misplaced hope drive the characters who populate a new collection of Maeve Binchy stories.

Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce is an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. In the summer of 1950, a series of inexplicable events strikes Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that her family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp pinned to its beak. Later, Flavia finds a man dying in the cucumber patch. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw.

"Detective Elise King investigates a man's disappearance in a seaside town where the locals and weekenders are at odds with each other in this rich and captivating new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow. Elise King is a successful and ambitious detective--or she was before a medical leave left her unsure if she'd ever return to work. She now spends most days watching the growing tensions in her small seaside town of Ebbing--the...

Lottie just knows that her boyfriend is going to propose during lunch at one of London's fanciest restaurants. But when his big question involves a trip abroad, not a trip down the aisle, she's completely crushed. So when Ben, an old flame, calls her out of the blue and reminds Lottie of their pact to get married if they were both single at thirty, she jumps at the chance. No formal dates -- just a quick march to the altar and a honeymoon on Ikonos,...

Camped in her horse-drawn caravan at Buckshaw, a young Gypsy woman is charged with the abduction-and then the murder - of a local child, and Flavia must draw upon her encyclopaedic knowledge of poisons - and Gypsy lore - to prevent a grave miscarriage of justice.

"Hailed as "a combination of Eloise and Sherlock Holmes" by The Boston Globe, Flavia de Luce returns in the much anticipated new mystery novel from award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Alan Bradley. In spite of being ejected from Miss Bodycote's Female Academy in Canada, twelve-year-old Flavia de Luce is excited to be sailing home to England. But instead of a joyous homecoming, she is greeted on the docks with unfortunate news: Her...

Mrs. Braithwaite, the self-appointed queen of her English village, finds herself dethroned, despised, and dismissed at the age of fifty following her husband's selfish divorce petition. And, to make matters worse, a family secret is now at risk of being revealed. Undeterred, she sets off hotfoot to London to find the only person she has left: her clever daughter, Betty, who took work there at the first rumbles of war. But when she arrives, Betty's...

"Colonel de Luce, in desperate need of funds, rents his beloved estate of Buckshaw over to a film company. They will be shooting a movie over the Christmas holidays, filming scenes in the stately manse with a famous and reclusive star. She is widely despised, so it is to no one's surprise when she turns up murdered, strangled by a length of film from her own movies! With the snow raging outside and Buckshaw locked in, the house is full of suspects....

In the disorderly evacuation of Southampton, England, newly married Ellen Parr finds a small child asleep on the backseat of an empty bus. No one knows who little Pamela is. Ellen professed not to want children with her older husband, and when she takes Pamela into her home and rapidly into her heart, she discovers that this is true: Ellen doesn't want children. She wants only Pamela. Three golden years pass as the Second World War rages on. Then...

When the tomb of St. Tancred is opened at a village church in Bishop's Lacey, its shocking contents lead to another case for Flavia de Luce, where greed, pride, and murder result in old secrets coming to light.