St Pauls, Bristol. 1980. Joseph Tremaine Ellington, now 57 years old, has long abandoned his former career as an enquiry agent for the safety of teaching. But his old life draws him back.One of the very few lights from Ellington’s dark and violent past has flickered out. His fiance Ruth Castle is dead – leaving him again heartbroken and alone to bring up his fifteen year old niece, Chloe. Ellington’s days are long and lonely, his nights tormented by old ghosts.When the wife...

'Saying farewell to the dark side doesn't mean the dark side wants rid of you.'It's a new decade, and in a new career as a school caretaker, JT Ellington is desperate to rid himself of the guilt that creeps into his present and the ghosts that haunt his dreams. As Ellington's nights of torment turn into days, an unwelcome figure from the past, Superintendent Fletcher, arrives with an offer he can't refuse, plunging JT into a demi-monde of vice, violence an...

Salonica Greece, 1976. Hellenic Gendarme, Major Mikhail Remis is a man in demand. A dark soul with a fearsome, brutal reputation who operates in the twilight world left after the end of the murderous Regime of Colonels. Feared as much by fellow officers as the criminal underworld, Remis grapples with his own sense of rough justice. When the body of Mossad undercover agent, Konrad Tafel is found deep in the Balkan Mountains, Remis is ordered by his veiled, powerful master, Manolis Callas to...

Bristol in the early 1960s: Joseph Tremaine Ellington is a Barbadian ex-policeman who, like many of his generation in the West Indies, has come to the UK to make a new life in the mother country. But the land of opportunity is not all it is cut out to be. It is not just the weather that is cold: so is the welcome. Facing hostility and prejudice at every turn, Ellington struggles to make ends meet. But then he meets community bigwig, Earl Linney, a man with a finger in every pie, who has ma...

St Pauls, Bristol, 1980. Joseph Tremaine Ellington, now 57 years old, has long abandoned his former career as an enquiry agent for the safety of teaching. But his old life draws him back. One of the very few lights from Ellington’s dark and violent past has flickered out. His fiancée Ruth Castle is dead – leaving him again heartbroken and alone to bring up his 15-year-old niece, Chloe. Ellington’s days are long and lonely, his nights tormented by old ghosts. When the wife of a locally resp...

'It's quite simple Mr Ellington. When you find Fowler, just ask where we can find the truth.' With these words, private detective J.T. Ellington embarks on a seemingly simple case of tracking down a local GP with a dubious reputation and retrieving a set of stolen documents from him. For Ellington, however, things are rarely straightforward. Dr Fowler is hiding a terrible secret, and when he is gunned down outside a Bristol pub, his dying words send J.T. in pursuit of a truth more disturbi...

‘Brother, a dead body can’t run from a coffin, but their spirit sure as hell can try.’ 1969, Bristol. Bajan ex-cop and reluctant private detective, Joseph ‘JT’ Tremaine Ellington is still trading in cash and favours, lending a helping hand to those too scared to go to the police or anyone trying to stay one step ahead of them. Life is tough for JT, who is broke. It is about to get a lot tougher when he receives a telegram informing him of a tragedy that has unfolded thousands of miles away...

1970, Bristol. What's buried doesn't always stay buried. It's a new decade and J.T. Ellington has taken himself out of the investigation game. But when an old friend asks him to help a doctor whose son disappeared hours after his wedding, J.T.'s commitment to a life lived under the radar is tested. His quest hurls him back into the underworld he's worked so hard to leave behind. Charred remains in a churchyard, the savage beating of a Hindu priest and a series of cold-blooded threats are s...

Sophie Bradford is pretty, blonde and an accomplished flirt. When her body is found dumped in a ditch on a lonely West Country road, Jamie Mullin is the prime suspect. He was her latest boyfriend and they'd had a very public row just before she disappeared. Jamie protests his innocence but soon spirals into a breakdown fuelled by frustration, self-pity and drink, and it is left to his friend, Matt Shepherd, to fight his corner. Can he find the truth behind what appears to be a motiveless m...

We uncovered the last of the bodies in the red hour before dusk, as the sun stained the snowcaps of the Tian Shan mountains the colour of dried blood and the spring air turned sharp and cold . . .Inspector Akyl Borubaev of Bishkek Murder Squad has been exiled to the far corner of Kyrgystan, but death still haunts him at every turn.Borubaev soon finds himself caught up in a mysterious and gruesome new case: several children's bodies have been found buried together -...

The last time Tess de Vere saw William Benson she was a law student on work experience. He was a twenty-one year old, led from the dock of the Old Bailey to begin a life sentence for murder. He'd said he was innocent. She'd believed him.Sixteen years later Tess overhears a couple of hacks mocking a newcomer to the London Bar, a no-hoper with a murder conviction, running his own show from an old fishmonger's in Spitalfields. That night she walks back into Benson's life. The price of...

80TH BIRTHDAY EDITION - NOW WITH 10 NEW TALL TALES!THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'Connolly's raucous run through his life is as furious, funny and foul-mouthed as you'd expect' Sunday TimesIn December 2018, after fifty years of belly-laughs, energy and outrage, Billy Connolly announced his retirement from live stand-up comedy. It had been an extraordinary career.When he fi...