Marcus Attwater

A novella from the 'Histories of Claybrooke'. The lives of Ann, a maidservant, and Frederick, the son of an earl, should be entirely separate. But there are always cross-currents at work beneath the politesse of eighteenth-century society which link the different parts of 'the big house' - from the village children to …

"Apollo thumped the steering wheel in frustration. They were such a sorry excuse for a family. Playing at being human. Like Hermes, when they'd said goodbye: 'Come and see me'. They always said things like that. 'Come and visit', 'Let's have lunch', 'We'll keep in touch'. They never did. He had never seen Hermes' …

THE TELLER OFTEN TELLS THE TALE HE WANTS TO HEAR... "Why, given its sad ending, did my not-quite-ancestor choose this particular story? I wonder whether he had noticed the same tendency as I have: how young men – specifically pairs of young men – from Greek myth go missing in modern accounts. There was a time when …

When he was eleven years old, Jack Riley spent two golden months at Greystone House with Gwendolyn, Ian, Rory and Jamie. Seventeen years later his job as a newspaper reporter brings him back, to learn that it wasn't just the children who kept secrets that summer. Those days just before the war were not as idyllic as …

Three decades on, everyone who was there has long accepted their own version of events about the night Kester Johnson disappeared. But when an unexpected find lands the case on DI Collins' desk, those certainties start to crumble, and life in Abbey Hill suddenly becomes a lot less peaceful. Owen Collins has never been …

"Detective Inspector Collins stared at the whiteboard in his office. He hated the thing. It had photos of the murder victim stuck to it with little magnets, and his name in a big red circle in the centre. Other people had pictures of their family in the office. He had a boy in a blood-soaked T-shirt." Dominic …

Oxford, 1973 By the time they are in their early twenties most people have forgotten the magical otherworld they knew as children, or have at least convinced themselves that it was wholly imaginary. But for James Hastings the memories of his first adolescence in that other place are as vivid as his recent years in …