Fast Fashion and Flaneurs

Bill Wonder, the tyrannical billionaire fashion tycoon is found splattered on the pavement outside his fashion school in the West End of London.

Was he pushed from the balcony, did he jump, or it could have happened because of his high heel shoes?

The mystery of his death is stitched together by Sadie Silver, a hapless fashion history teacher, who needs to understand the incident to uncover her family’s sartorial secrets.

But wait, could she have killed Bill? 

After all, she was the last person to see Bill alive, and he really seemed to hate her new look.

His Mission Crossed His Path

A young man wakes up on a pavement with no sense of self and place.

His name is anonymous and his nationality is unknown. He doesn’t know his mother language even though he isn’t dumb. He is somewhere on earth but he doesn’t know the city in which he is lost and homeless. Moreover, he is looking for something he doesn’t know. It’s not an enigma but his life. At the first sign of the past a crime takes place. Flashbacks are enough to clear up somethings, but where is he? It remains a mystery and destiny aggravates it when it intervenes: divine retribution is sometimes a bequeathed mission to the descendants. Thus, he knows everything but he wishes he hadn’t known. Furthermore, he realizes that his war had already begun and now it’s the last battle.

A tale of finding one’s path, even if there is no idea where to begin.

Jayne’s Secret Temptation

We all have a “moral compass”, learned either from parents, religious leaders, school teachers or peers. It is basically a set of rules we live our life by. Some of us are unwavering in our direction, others are more liberal in the interpretation of their core values.

This book attempts to explore what happens when these core values are challenged. It begs the question: “What would you do when confronted with huge risk or reward?” No matter what you say, it’s what you do that counts.

Jayne’s Secret Temptation introduces you to colourful characters with a novel and new approach with a degree of humour and realism.

It comes with a guaranteed surprise but is nonetheless a believable tale. You never know, it could actually happen!

King Solomon’s Gold

A rumour re-emerges about the fabled King Solomon’s mines, a legend about fabulously rich gold mines in Africa, immortalized in novels and movies. James Buchanan, an exploration geologist in Tanzania, who has already solved the mystery of the ‘plagues’ in America to help US President Caitlin Custer to prevent a national disaster, sets out to investigate.

James soon realizes from his research on gold mines in the Middle East and North Africa that there were no major gold deposits that could have been King Solomon’s mines during his lifetime. James works on the assumption that the legends refer to King Solomon’s Gold, a golden treasure hidden somewhere in Africa. Using his geological knowledge, he progressively eliminates the possibilities, but discovering the real location is more difficult and hazardous. Can he do it alone, or will he have to call in a favour from President Custer to seek her political help?

Lasseter's Legendary Lost Reef

Headlines are made when a gold discovery that is claimed to be Lasseter’s legendary lost reef is made by the international company Krennerite Gold Corp. This is the most fabled lost gold reef in Australia’s long mining and exploration history, purported to have been discovered more than a century before. James Buchanan, a world-famous exploration geologist is intrigued because the region of the rediscovery is not known as a gold-bearing district but is frustrated in his efforts to access the discovery site to test his scepticism. Unexpectedly, James is approached by the Chinese chairman of the board of Krennerite, who is concerned about the veracity of the discovery and the damage to his reputation if any fraud is uncovered. He and James devise a plan which involves James and the chairman’s daughter Pearl posing as tourists in the Central Australian region near Alice Springs and Ayers Rock to remotely investigate the discovery site using a drone. How will they handle their contrasting western and Chinese cultures in the wild and dangerous Australian outback? Will conflict or romance evolve from their interaction? Will the reported discovery really represent Lasseter’s long-lost gold reef or are there more sinister motives and activities at play? Will rapidly evolving and challenging events played out in the Australian outback, in Western Australia, and China make positive or negative changes to the lives of those involved? Only time will tell!

Lights Out for Granddad

Stephanie Golding takes licentious advantage of men. Or so it seems. Is that why she is brutally murdered at the crest of a quiet ravine, and with a weapon suggesting more torture than passionate death? Her fiancé vehemently denies involvement, so does everyone else.

The murderer in this apparently vengeful killing is investigated relentlessly by Detective Chief Inspector Charles Merstowe and his team of police and medical experts. Voyeurs, opportunists, friends of the victim, a mysterious white-haired man, shadows: all are suspect. Secrets must be uncovered, foibles exposed and explanations ruthlessly delved. Merstowe knows this, but the case fast becomes a losing challenge. Not much adds up. And what about upsetting machinations and revelations closer to home? There are unwelcome surprises there too. Even the police are disturbed.

An eventual ownership of the crime raises more fog than it diffuses. Perhaps only another death will clear the air completely of jealousy, hatred, blame, retribution and revenge. In the meantime, the veteran Merstowe is forced to question his own skills as a detective. His protégé questions his morals as well. His own doubts cast shadows over himself. Is he remotely on the right track? Was the victim in fact an angel? Or was she instead a cunning devil, too clever by half? Who were really her friends, and who her enemies? Most importantly, what’s wrong with the evidence? Stephanie Golding suffered in death. But why? It needs to be sorted out.

Love Ever After

Everyone in town knows the Miller house and its occupant: old lady Miller. Local kids call it haunted while the adults just shake their head sadly thinking about poor Mrs Miller living all alone. Beyond that, no one gives it much thought, until the night Jason, his girlfriend, Erica, and a handful of friends venture off into the dark to check out the lake that borders her house. The lake is rumoured to hold the remnants of an earlier town lost to a flood. While checking out the forgotten town hidden in the murky water, the house seems to come to life.

With a dangerous storm coming, murderers on the loose and the mystery of the house looming over them, their small, sleepy town comes to life with imminent threats. Jason wants nothing more than to protect the love of his life, but with the group’s curiosity and a mystery to the Miller house that they just can’t let go, they are pulled into a tangled hunt that changes their lives forever.

Mary Copeland: Victorian detective

Mary Copeland: Victorian detective examines the life of this young woman who is raised by her uncle and aunt in London in the late nineteenth century and who develops into a detective of stature who works on request for Scotland Yard. As a woman, however, it is almost impossible to fulfil a social function and so she has to do her job anonymously. She is assisted in this by employees of Scotland Yard, with whom she forms a secret unit over time.

The stories, which take place from 1888, include many painters from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The titles of the four stories are taken from paintings from that time. Swiers impressively manages to portray the London of those days, just after The Ripper Murders and before The London Dock Strike.

In the Netherlands, the first four books on Mary Copeland were published between 2019 and 2022 and subsequent volumes are in preparation.

Murder Unchained

When Private Investigator Paul West took on his next case, it seemed easy and one that would pay handsomely. All West had to do was compile a profile of Jason Knox for his only son, Matthew, who had no memory of him. His father had walked away from Matthew’s mother when he was an infant and left him the sole beneficiary of his multi-million-dollar estate.

It didn’t take long before he was thrust into one of the most complex cases in a long and illustrious career. It took him to Ebony River, a small town, on Vancouver Island’s east coast that seldom gave a wink or nod to the outside world.

What he found was the two-year-old unsolved murder of Jason Knox and his wife that was still baffling RCMP Sergeant Andy Holt. When West told him why he had come to Ebony River, Holt asked him if he would go undercover and help him solve the case.

West’s investigation concentrated on an eclectic range of residents including: bikers with an agenda, a former member of the town council with a grudge to settle, a small church time had left behind, a farmer’s Sunday dinner that revealed hidden secrets and a mayor desperately trying to get re-elected.

Murder Unchained is a page-turner. It will keep the reader guessing up to the last page.

Prunes

Old spies don’t retire, they just sit on the sidelines until needed. This is what Mr Eggington and Violet believed until they uncovered a plot that would reshape the financial world. Mr Eggington was counting toilet rolls and paperclips until he reached retirement, and his best former operative, Violet, had ended up as a tea lady.

Events unfold with surprising speed after she tries to buy a packet of biscuits to go home with Mr Eggington’s tea. She is set up and ‘roofied’ ending up in an old person’s home after this dastardly attack and Mr Eggington is ridiculed when he tried to bring his fears to the attention of his boss.

Rallying the most unlikely people they engineer a plot to save the country. Hidden depths are uncovered in their new friends and they pool all their skills to overthrow the evil megalomaniac, after trying to break all the codes and riddles of course!

The Hideout

A number of criminals of all types are seemingly vanishing whilst on the run in Britain. A detective superintendent in Scotland Yard is tasked with the job of finding out where they have been hiding. D.S. Leo Mason from the Serious Crime Squad puts together a small, unusual team to do this and is supplied with whatever he requires to do the work. This takes a long time and the team are joined by two others when they get their first break in the case. Utilising all this team’s unusual, and in some cases unorthodox, talents together find what they are searching for and in so doing also apprehend and arrest a great number of the criminals. The team are then given a new brief, to help other units and squads to solve crimes that have stalled or seem unsolvable. This team uses those both in the force and outside the force for this task and is highly regarded by the top brass for this work. Given a suite of offices in a police station separate from others, the team set to work in earnest to carry out their brief, soon earning a great deal of respect from high, far and wide. The team is also given a name and an acronym all of its own.

Whispering Shadows

Money, the need of an estranged parent, paedophiles or trafficking, these are the usual motives for kidnappers. If their plans fail, fear and panic may end in murder.

It is June 1995 in Sydney, Australia. Detective Chief Inspector Martin Janson is investigating a heinous crime: a small boy is missing. It appears random, and motiveless. Janson is frustrated, there are no witnesses and few clues.

A troubled Irishman who is said to have a ‘mysterious gift’ which he uses in the TV show ‘Spirits and Mind-blowing Magic’. His manager, a flamboyant, loud showman; a known paedophile, a children’s entertainer and a Scotsman, are all suspects.

The Irishman, Kieran Madigan, may be a phony, and his ‘mysterious gift’ a nonsense, thought up for the TV show. Barchester, his manager, is a liar and a fraud, but does that make him guilty?

In Melbourne, where two women are found dead, a Scotsman is a major suspect. A Scot was seen near the scene of the crime in Sydney; is there a connection?

Detective Chief Inspector Janson and his team race the clock to solve the mystery and find the murderers before it is too late to save the child.