Patience Tomlinson

October 1940. When VAD nurse Evie narrowly escapes being killed in an air raid during the London Blitz, it propels her to make a life-changing decision to break free of her troubled and unhappy life. She escapes to the Norfolk countryside to start...

Bel Lamington finds London a very lonely place – until a young artist literally drops in on her rooftop garden... Bel, an orphan daughter of an Army colonel, is brought up in an English village and flung into the whirl of London life to earn a hard...

In 1664, four years after Charles II is restored to the throne, Mercia Blakewood stands to lose everything: her father to the executioner's axe, her freedom to her treacherous uncle, her son to his resentful grandparents. But when her father leaves...

'You don’t mean you're going to divorce him?' Miss Spanner said with horror. A sophisticated, emotive novel, Chatterton Square concerns the complex web of relationships between two neighbouring families, the Blacketts and the Frasers. Framed by the...

March 1915. Caroline Lilley's fiancé, Reggie, is away at the Front and Caroline gives up her job and returns home at this request. Frustrated in her desire to help the war effort, she throws herself into saving the harvest by organising the village...

For Miss Cordell, principal of Persephone College, there are two great evils to be feared: unladylike behaviour among her students, and bad publicity for the college. So her prim and cosy world is turned upside down when a secret society of...

March, 1941. After Flo Butterworth loses everything in Manchester's Christmas Blitz, she decides to leave the area and join the Women's Land Army. Putting the past firmly behind her, she arrives at Rookery House in Norfolk hoping for a new start and a...

Bea Abbot’s friend Leon Holland has asked for her help in establishing an alibi. But why would he need one? First, he tells her, he had a narrow escape from being run down in the road, and then he was lured to a car park to meet someone who didn’t...

Bea Abbot's plans are disrupted by the unexpected arrival of one of her clients, bearing a brown leather briefcase full of expensive jewellery. Magda Summerleys has been working as a housekeeper for wealthy art expert Lucas Rycroft who, she says,...

Shortly before Bel's marriage to Ellis Brownlee, her friend, Louise Armstrong, goes house hunting for them and discovers a charming but neglected old stone cottage in the Cotswolds. Bel adores the house, called Fletchers End. Ellis buys the place from...

1812. Clever, strong-willed Vivienne Fox is unexpectedly endowed with riches beyond her wildest dreams when a distant cousin dies, leaving her his fortune. Unwed at 24, Vivienne still hopes the right man is out there, but she despairs of ever finding...

Katherine 'Kitty' Marshall was destined to break with convention. Brought up in a socially active family, her inherent rebellious streak came into play in 1901, when she daringly divorced her husband and joined the newly founded Women's Social and...

The Oast Theatre in Steeple Martin is hosting a touring production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night which is attracting a lot of attention. But very soon it begins to attract attention of an entirely different kind when a document goes missing along...

When the sleepy village of Steeple Martin announces its first beer festival, the locals are excited. Beer, sun and music, what could possibly go wrong? But when an unexpected death shakes the village, it’s up to Libby Sarjeant to solve the puzzle. Was...

Mrs Bradley, sharp-eyed detective and celebrated psychiatrist, has decided to spend Christmas with her nephew at his beautiful house in the Cotswolds. It isn’t long before a mystery unfolds. There are strange events occurring in the nearby wood and...

1934. When Miss Pongleton is found murdered on the stairs of Belsize Park station, her fellow-boarders in the Frampton Hotel are not overwhelmed with grief at the death of a tiresome old woman. But they all have their theories about the identity of...

"The horror on the train, great though it may turn out to be, will not compare with the horror that exists here, in this house." On Christmas Eve, heavy snowfall brings a train to a halt near the village of Hemmersby. Several passengers take shelter...

Armistice Day, London, 1918. Fiercely independent Georgie is tired of being told what's best for her by men. When she defies her father's wishes by going out into the peace festivities, she tries to help a woman being attacked and encounters Patrick,...

Following adventures she would sooner forget in the newly renamed New York, Mercia Blakewood is hopeful that she has gained the leverage with the king she needs to reclaim her family's home back in England. The breathtaking new world piques her...

'Owing to frequent acquaintance with peril, I had become unusually hardened for a woman.' Mrs Paschal, the heroine of Revelations of a Lady Detective, is regularly consulted by the police and serves as an undercover agent as well as investigating her...

With the help of her old diaries, Sarah Morris recounts her life story. The daughter of an English vicar, she begins by telling of her happy childhood with her brothers and sister in their country village. As a teenager, Sarah’s brother brings home a...

1944. With deadly doodlebugs terrorising London, Bessie Rushbrook agrees to give shelter to eight-year-old evacuee, Marigold, in her Norfolk home. However, the little girl is no stranger, and Bessie must honour the promise she gave to Marigold's...

Christmas 1917, and as the Lilley family gathers at the Rectory in the Sussex village of Ashden, the mood is far from festive. But while the sisters face heartache and the new year brings fresh tragedy, the Rectory opens its doors to a new world, its...

“The end of the old world”, people said about the long hot summer of 1914. That summer Aunt Tilly comes to stay with her brother the Rector and his four lively daughters in the sleepy Sussex village of Ashden. Aunt Tilly’s visit sparks off a chain of...