Risultati letto da "Peter Wickham" in Tutte le categorie

John Wilkins meets a beautiful, irresistible girl, and his world is turned upside down. Looking at his wife, and thinking of the girl, everything turns red before his eyes - the colour of murder. But did he really commit the heinous crime he was accused of?

Aristotle considers ‘the principles and causes of change, or movement’ behind both animate and inanimate things. It is philosophy, not science, but over centuries affected the views of those involved in the ‘natural sciences’. The text emerged from the Lyceum, the school founded by Aristotle, and is accepted to be a compilation of texts, some of which - but perhaps not all - is by Aristotle. Regardless of authorship, its importance is unquestioned.

After rising to prominence for his role investigating the case of Jack the Ripper, former Detective Inspector Daniel Wilson is now retired. Known for his intelligence, investigative skills, and most of all his discretion, he's often consulted when a case must be solved quickly and quietly. So when a body is found in the Egyptian collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, Wilson is called in.

Proclus - or Proclus of Athens, as he is sometimes known - is widely and rightly considered to be one of the most significant later Neoplatonist philosophers. At age 40 (c.437 CE) or so, Proclus became head of the revived Plato’s Academy in Athens. In his role for the next 50 years, the unmarried Proclus worked hard, combining effectively the roles of administrator, teacher and writer. Astronomy, ethics, mathematics, physics, theology - Proclus tackled all of those topics that together fell under the umbrella of philosophy in his time.

John Pearce is hiding in Gravelines with his mysterious companion, known to him as Oliphant. Although they find a crew willing to take them back to England, they learn on the journey that Pearce’s old enemies, the Tolland brothers, are still active on the route and may have been responsible for the murder of Catherine Carruthers. Back in England their problems continue: Pearce must seek to mend fences with Emily Barclay, in a relationship in which nothing is simple.

Widely acknowledged as the first detective novel, this story is narrated by insurance investigator Ralph Henderson, who is building a case against the sinister Baron “R**”, suspected of murdering his wife in order to obtain significant life insurance payments. Henderson descends into a maze of intrigue including a diabolical mesmerist, kidnapping by gypsies, slow poisoners, a rich uncle’s will and three murders.

Cambridge, 1939. The opening weeks of the Second World War, and the first blackout - The Great Darkness - covers southern England, enveloping the city. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke, a wounded hero of the Great War, takes his nightly dip in the cool waters of the Cam. Daylight reveals a corpse on the riverside, the body torn apart by some unspeakable force.

In the Spring of 1857, with India on the brink of a violent and bloody mutiny, Krishnapur is a remote town on the vast North Indian plain. For the British there, life is orderly and genteel. Then the sepoys at the nearest military cantonment rise in revolt, and the British community retreats with shock into the Residency. They prepare to fight for their lives with what weapons they can muster. As food and ammunition grow short, the Residency, its defences battered by shot and shell and eroded by the rains, becomes ever more vulnerable.

The derelict house on the edge of the sleepy seaside town was a haven for courting couples, down-and-outs - and someone with altogether more sinister intentions. It was there that they found the corpse of 17-year-old Jenny Hyde. She'd been strangled.

When Peter Maxwell attends a school reunion of the class of '65, all is not as it seems among his old chums. They are career men, family men - but the years have taken their toll, and the seething tensions of the school years surface in unlikely ways. At the end of the reunion weekend, a man is dead, hanging from the bell rope of the old school. When a second death occurs, Maxwell finds himself in the midst of a murder investigation. What is the secret that has been lurking under Maxwell's nose all these years - and could he be on the murderer's list for killing number three?

History teacher Peter 'Mad Max' Maxwell, a bit of a maverick, is sent on a short-term swap with another teacher at a nearby private school, Grimonds.

When Peter 'Mad Max' Maxwell takes his kids from Leighford High on an archaeological dig, they uncover a grave. But the corpse was not Saxon, and it wasn’t a king - this was an altogether more recent death. Then a policeman on the case is found dead at the wheel of his car. What knowledge did he possess that led to his death? And does his colleague, Maxwell’s partner, Jacquie Carpenter, unwittingly have the same information? Maxwell locks horns with the great and not so good in a vicious world of skulduggery, academic backbiting and religious mania which can only end in murder.

There comes a time in every teacher's life when he must face his nemesis - the Ofsted Inspection. On the third day, with the atmosphere at Leighford High decidedly fraught, one of the Inspectors is found stabbed to death. Events move quickly, and the Head is arrested on suspicion of the murder. But Peter Maxwell, Head of Sixth Form, cannot help but notice that Sally Meninger, the Ofsted Humanities expert, is not as distraught at her colleague's death as one might expect....

Maxwell’s Millennium is not quite like other people’s - for a start, it is a year later. After much quibbling with the maths department, everyone calls it an honourable draw and he celebrates as only he can: with his cat, his model soldiers and his Southern Comfort. A knock on the door could be Jacquie Carpenter, released from night shift earlier than expected, but instead of a warm girl Maxwell opens his door to find a very cold old lady, dead and naked.

The school outing to the Museum of the Moving Image is not an unqualified success. For in the darkened cinema complex of MOMI, two members of the party disappear without trace....

While riding the Wild Water, a man is killed in the float ahead, and Max and the girls become witnesses to murder. The corpses multiply as Maxwell nears the end of his search for the truth - but will one of them be his own niece?

March, 1587. Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine has opened at the Rose Theatre. But the play is almost shut down on its opening night. For a member of the audience, Eleanor Merchant, lies dead, hit by a musket ball fired from the stage. The man with his finger on the trigger? A bit-part player named Will Shakespeare. Convinced of Shakespeare’s innocence, Marlowe determines to find out what really happened. When a second body is found floating in the River Thames, it becomes clear that Eleanor Merchant’s death was no accident and that something deeper and darker is afoot. And why is the Queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, taking a close personal interest in the case?

London, 1896. Madame Tussauds opens to find one of its nightwatchmen decapitated and his colleague nowhere to be found. To the police, the case seems simple: one killed the other and fled, but workers at the museum aren’t convinced. Although forbidden contact by his superior officer, Scotland Yard detective John Feather secretly enlists ‘The Museum Detectives’ Daniel Wilson and Abigail Fenton to aid the police investigation. When the body of the missing nightwatchman is discovered encased within a wax figure, the case suddenly becomes more complex.

London, 1895. Daniel Wilson and Abigail Fenton have been hired by the Natural History Museum to find out who deliberately smashed the fossilised skeleton of a small dinosaur. At first Daniel is reluctant to take the case, pointing out that they deal in murders, not vandalism. But then one of the attendants in the dinosaur room is murdered, his body found tied to a dinosaur skeleton and a note pinned to him saying 'The price of betrayal'. As Daniel and Abigail investigate, they must negotiate a web of legal and professional tensions.

1894. A well-respected academic is found dead in a gentlemen’s convenience cubicle at the British Museum, the stall locked from the inside. Professor Lance Pickering had been due to give a talk promoting the museum’s new 'Age of King Arthur' exhibition when he was stabbed repeatedly in the chest. Having forged a strong reputation working alongside the inimitable Inspector Abberline on the Jack the Ripper case, Daniel Wilson is called in to solve the mystery, and he brings his expertise and archaeologist Abigail Fenton with him.