Julius Falconer: 11 books

While renovating the derelict twelfth-century chapel attached to their new house in rural Worcestershire in 1972, Grace and Benjamin Hothersall uncover three skeletons, which have clearly been the victims of murder. When news of this reaches the newspapers, a series of anonymous letters and telephone-calls...

We are in the sleepy village of Sherburn in Elmete, Yorkshire, in the year of grace 1729. When George Bywater, the vicar’s servant, is clubbed to death as he collects the parish tithes, the vicar undertakes to track his killer. Unfortunately, his efforts are thwarted at every turn. Threatened with...

On the night of a blizzard in January 1963, an elderly couple who live in a tiny Worcestershire village are summoned to their daughter’s cottage two and a half miles away at Longdon, on urgent but unspecified business. When eventually they reach their daughter’s cottage, exhausted and worried,...

Inspector Wickfield and Sergeant Hewitt find themselves caught up in a saga of murder, illicit money-making and racist thuggery. A young girl’s body is found one morning on the banks of a canal. With help from a clairvoyant, the trail leads the investigating officers to London, and thence to Reading...

It is August 1974. A respected teacher at a private girls’ school in rural Worcestershire, Adrian Carrick, physically attracted to one of the Sixth-Form leavers, discloses his feelings for her. Convinced that he has mishandled their final meeting, he writes her a letter of regret and then kills...

Struggling to maintain his usual round of pastoral care, agricultural concerns, family life and church services, the vicar of Sherburn in Elmete (1686-1771), parson and part-time farmer, again finds himself embroiled in a murder investigation forced on him by the indolence of the local law officers....

When Lady Amelia Walden is murdered at Monk Fryston Hall Hotel in Yorkshire on the night of her eightieth birthday, the chief suspect is Robert Purbright, a bachelor in his fifties engaged at Farlington Hall, the ancestral Walden mansion, to catalogue her extensive collection of stamps. At his trial,...

Looking for sophisticated and stylish entertainment to stimulate jaded brain-cells? LOOK NO FURTHER! Falconer has shown yet again that he can produce a top-rate whodunnit in the finest British traditions: urbane, cultured and witty. The peaceful estate of Wichenford Court, in deepest Worcestershire,...

The wealthy and reclusive Harry Quirke, misanthropist and student of the piano works of Alkan, is stabbed to death in his country house outside Tadcaster. Only one of the obvious suspects seems to have much of a motive: his alibi is shaky, it is true, but there is no proof of his involvement. DI Moat...

It is the summer of 1728, and we are in the village of Sherburn, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, with its handsome church, boys’ grammar-school, ancient tavern and tranquil rural population. Below the church lies the site of the palace of the kings of Elmete. Nearby, across the common and past...

If you think that religion, sex, the aristocracy and mystery might make a good crime novel, TRY THIS ONE! A police investigation into the violent death of a part-time cathedral verger stalls for lack of incriminating evidence. However, three people have a close interest in clearing the matter up where...