David Williams - все книги по циклам и сериям | Книги по порядку

An old aristocrat has second thoughts about selling the family mansion to a reactionary group and calls in his friend, London financier Mark Treasure, to stop the sale. From there we encounter murder, treachery, romance, and a valuable Shakespearean manuscript.

University College, Itchendever is short of funds - and up for grabs. The rival parties in the proposed takeover seem to be the American Funny Farms Foundation, run by the widow of a board-games mogul, and a calculating Arab prince. Banker sleuth Mark Treasure tries his hardest to adjudicate, but instead finds a baffling murder on his hands.

And this isn't a mere case of finding the culprit - there are other knotty problems with a bearing on the case. Who sent the gory sheep's head to the eccentric American millionairess? Was the celebrated Dr Goldstein, senior tutor and TV personality, behind the bomb scare? And why have the Arabs kidnapped an English Literature lecturer?

The second of David Williams' wonderfully witty murder mysteries, starring the urbane banker and classy detective Mark Treasure, Treasure by Degrees is sure to delight.

King Charles Island, a British Colony in the West Indies, came dramatically awake through the foul murder of its most influential citizen. But then banker sleuth Mark Treasure arrived on business to discover that his accident-prone assistant was the number one suspect...However, Treasure quickly volunteered to assist the daunted Chief Inspector Small in finding the real villain...

Could the take-over of Rigley's Patent Footbalm by the giant American Hutstacker Chemical Corporation really be scuppered by Mrs Ogmore-Davies's parrot finding a body in Panty Harbour?
It looked like it, but banker sleuth Mark Treasure took a different view when a second body was discovered the morning after he arrived in the little West Wales sailing village close to St David's. By then Treasure had already survived a murderous assault aboard the Fishguard Express, a pitched battle on Whitland Station, and the inexplicable disappearance of a battered Australian clergyman. And that was only the start of his exceedingly unquiet weekend.

Roderick Copper (67), retired Major, and Benny Gold (70), London cabbie, apply on the same morning for residential places with the Rudyard Trust for Retired Officers and Gentlemen. But its eccentric and drunken Director tells them the Trust is technically bankrupt, its multi-million-pound assets about to be divided between the Founder’s descendants – a curious, motley crew. Banker Mark Treasure is called in when Copper and Gold’s bizarre scheme to preserve the charity goes wrong with terrifying consequences – kidnap, stabbing and sudden death – involving one of the bank’s clients, ex-President Cruba of Ngonga, exiled in London with his sensuous third wife, his 15-year-old son, and Gerard Opac, his handsome, ambitious aide.

It’s action all the way in this classic and witty whodunit centred round the fate of the 19th-century Round House could wreck the multi-million pound development in a south coast resort. A dozen interested parties are in favour of knocking it down. They include an Arab oil sheikh, a sexy English Literature drop-out from Sussex University, the head of a construction company, and a romantic novelist. And where does Canon Tring’s languorous young wife fit in to all this? Only Louella, Lady Brasset, is committed to keeping the Round House standing; she believes it to be the joint creation of two famous architects, Sir John Soane and William Butterfield. But four hours after Treasure promises her a stay of execution on the house, it’s Louella who is blown up―and another accident follows. Double accident―or double murder?

When Roger Rorch, the talented chairman of the London-based advertising agency RTB, supposedly commits suicide, banker and detective Mark Treasure is certain that all is not as it seems. Treasure's search for foul play reveals a tangled web of deals and egos - Rorch was defying his partners by opposing a £2m takeover bid by a huge New York firm; RTB's most powerful client stands to lose a fortune if the sale goes ahead; and the head of the rival Fentley agency is also deeply involved, and not just because his wife has her own key to Rorch's riverside London penthouse... With his own bank interested in the fate of RTB, it's up to Treasure to follow the clues and overturn the coroner's verdict of accidental death - and to substitute one of murder.

Litchester Cathedral, usually an oasis of cloistered calm, suddenly finds itself at the centre of an acrimonious dispute over the proposed sale of of its 1225 copy of the Magna Carta.
Merchant banker Mark Treasure is invited down to sort out the squabbling cathedral chapter. But even as he journeys to Litchester a fire destroys the ecclesiastical library - Magna Carta and all - and a body is discovered in the debris.
But it wasn't fire that killed the Dean's verger. And as Treasure's murder investigation unravels evidence of some most unholy mayhem and dark skulduggery, he realizes that Litchester is a place where sins and secrets abound...

Marton Manor, in rural Herefordshire, makes a romantic setting even for a hastily organised wedding. And it is a quickly-arranged ceremony indeed that Fleur Jarvas is demanding - even though marrying before her twenty-first birthday means forfeiting a large inheritance. Naturally all the guests, including banker-turned-sleuth Mark Treasure and his wife Molly, are dying to know why. But that's only the first mystery lurking beneath the surface of this increasingly sinister country weekend. The real question is why the long-straying father of the bride shows up uninvited... As the wedding-eve rituals gather pace, so does the tension. And when the next day dawns, it is not to bells and confetti but to two unexplained deaths, a pointed disappearance - and a testing case for Treasure.

To steal a painting from the Hermitage museum in Leningrad is going to take planning, nerve and ingenuity - and that's how Sergey Vasilefski does the job, unaided. But there's no way he'll be able to get the painting out of Russia alone... The police come to suspect that members of the Baroque Circle - a cultural group on a visit from England - are implicated in the theft, and their suspicions deepen when a Circle member is brutally murdered during the interval at the Kirov Opera House. The President of the Circle is horrified - and so is her husband, merchant banker Mark Treasure, who suddenly finds himself in the most beautiful of Russian cities with a pressing need to uncover a murderer. The investigating authorities are hot on Treasure's heels and he must work with pace and intelligence to protect his fellow travelers, even if that means teaming up with the greatest cynic in the KGB. Executed with David Williams' trademark verve and wit, Treasure in Roubles showcases the eponymous banker sleuth at his finest.