Once Guy and Leonora were lovers. Now it's over but Guy can't forget ... or forgive. Every day he calls Leo with fantasies about their love and their future. All she wants is him out of her life.

A young boy dies, another goes missing, and one mother's choice will forever alter many lives   When Benet's young son dies on the operating table, she cannot be comforted-not even by her mother who cares for a young boy just about the same age. Meanwhile, another mother's son goes missing, and police circle around possible suspects in what must be murder. These three mothers-the schizophrenic Mopsa, upwardly mobile Benet, and gold-digging Carol-become...

A young woman in London faces the prospect of a deadly thank you in return for an act of selfless generosity. She is Mary Jago who donates her bone marrow to save the life of a man she does not know. As her grandmother puts it, some people dislike those who have done them a service.

Sixteen-year-old Elvira's mother is dead. Elvira is sad, of course, but not so sad as her younger sister Spinny. Spinny is afraid their father, Luke, will be heartbroken, but Elvira knows better -- after all, Luke has her to take her mother's place. But then Luke brings home a pretty young woman and introduces her as his fiancee, and Elvira decides that she will stop at nothing to stop her father's marriage.

In Blood Relations, one of 11 stories in the collection, a woman discovers her stepfather's beaten body and says she has no idea who could have done it. But Inspector Wexford is convinced it was a family killing. A tale of infidelity, avarice and spouse abuse.

On Valentine's Day, four members of the Coverdale family--George, Jacqueline, Melinda and Giles--were murdered in the space of 15 minutes. Their housekeeper, Eunice Parchman, shot them, one by one, in the blue light of a televised performance of Don Giovanni. When Detective Chief Superintendent William Vetch arrests Miss Parchman two weeks later, he discovers a second tragedy: the key to the Valentine's Day massacre hidden within a private humiliation...

When the truffle-hunting dog starts to dig furiously, his master's first reaction is delight at the size of the clump the dog has unearthed; at the going rate, this one truffle might be worth several hundred pounds. Then the dirt falls away to reveal not a precious mushroom but the bones and tendons of what is clearly a human hand. Chief Inspector Wexford tries to piece together events that took place eleven years earlier, a time when someone was...