The Powys Deacon


Book Description

The Fifth Catrin Sayer Mystery. Sayer returns to art crime investigation with a promotion to detective inspector in the ‘elite’ Art and Antiques Unit at New Scotland Yard. Her first assignment is to join a major investigation into an international art crime ring. As she begins her new role she is also hand-picked by a senior Home Office bureaucrat to look into the origin of a painting found in a village in mid-Wales, in the home of a recently-deceased judge. As she balances the competing casework assigned, a deacon at the local church in the village, Tregynon, comes into her sights. John Farrell had been open about his past life of crime and imprisonment when he was appointed at St. Deiniol’s. But is there more, unshared? Bit by bit, between events in London, Dubai and a small village in Wales, Sayer unravels the secret of the painting and the burden still carried by the Powys Deacon.




The Stratford Hunter


Book Description

The Sixth Catrin Sayer Mystery. Detective Inspector Catrin Sayer now leads art investigation within the prestigious Art and Antiques Unit of the London Metropolitan Police. Her team is suddenly assigned to assist Trident, the organized crime unit, at a crime scene in East London where a valuable painting has been discovered. It is a suspicious death; a young woman has fallen from the balcony of an apartment owned by a gang leader. The painting has links to a drug gang in Glasgow where, some years earlier, Sayer was part of an investigation that led to the imprisonment of its leaders. Now she is sent to Scotland to conduct interviews of the gang leader and his accountant, with instructions to ‘stir them up a bit’. She does; and it has surprising consequences.







The Chinese Sailor


Book Description

A cruise ship officer from Hong Kong disappears during a port stop in Holyhead on the North Wales coast and a missing person investigation turns up no leads. On the same cruise, an international police operation to break an art smuggling ring loses track of three valuable Russian paintings thought to be on board. Four months later the younger sister of the missing sailor becomes a student at Bangor University, nearby. The Metropolitan Police Art Crime Unit wants to know why she is in the UK and whether it has any bearing on their case. Constable Catrin Sayer is looking for promotion and a new role away from drug squad work in Brixton. Coincidence and her Welsh background lead her to go undercover and assist the investigation. She is twenty-four at the time; keen, ambitious, trying to balance her work as a police officer with her interests as an artist, a ceramic decorator.




The Falmouth Model


Book Description

The Third Catrin Sayer Mystery. Janis Mitchell, a second-year student at Falmouth University in Cornwall, receives a shocking image ‘hacked’ into her Facebook page, one of her being viciously assaulted at knifepoint. Janis realizes that it is probably derived from a session where she modelled for a figure-drawing class at a nearby college. Worked into the image and partially buried is a vase, but no-one understands its significance. Detective Sergeant Catrin Sayer with the Art Crime Unit at New Scotland Yard is asked to help, based on her experience as an artist rather than as a formal member of the investigation team. She is drawn further into the strange case with the appearance of a second image of the student hacked into the website of the Tate Art Gallery.




The Scottish Colourist


Book Description

The second Catrin Sayer mystery. A retired clergyman collapses in the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, right in front of the painting by Salvador Dali called ‘Christ of Saint John of the Cross’. It is thought to be a heart attack until the angina medication he took at the onset of the attack was discovered to be a placebo; it was totally ineffective. Meanwhile, a drug 'baron' in Glasgow searches out the services of a friend of his late father, a man with prior convictions for art forgery; he has a job for him. Detective Constable Catrin Sayer is now nearly a year into her assignment with the Art Crime Unit at New Scotland Yard. The journey north to Glasgow on a new case is tied to both the death of the clergyman and a rumour of theft or fraud associated with paintings by a group of artists known as ‘The Scottish Colourists’.




The Thornham Copyist


Book Description

The seventh Catrin Sayer Mystery. Detective Inspector Catrin Sayer of the Art and Antiques Unit, Metropolitan Police, has her life in order she thinks, before a series of setbacks affecting her personally and professionally prove her quite wrong. In the middle of the upheaval, a call from the Norfolk Police about a forged painting discovered in the Norwich Castle Museum leads her into conflict with an ‘outlaw’ biker gang in North London and eventually to the unusual artist behind a widespread series of forgeries and thefts. But outlaw bikers don’t forgive - ever. They get even.




The Carnforth Double


Book Description

The Fourth Catrin Sayer Mystery. Detective Sergeant Catrin Sayer of the Art Crime Unit, Metropolitan Police returns from a supposedly routine assignment in Malaysia that went disastrously wrong, to be assigned to a new case. Two years after an unsolved major art robbery from a merchant bank in London, a prisoner in Rome sends a message: he is prepared to talk about a sentencing deal for information about the bank robbery. Three paintings were stolen, two of them near-priceless canvases by the ‘horse artist’ George Stubbs. Sayer’s proposal to arrest the perpetrators is unusual; to focus on the obscure third painting stolen, a portrait of a farmer’s wife, Mrs. Rosalind Heaton of Carnforth, Lancashire.




Powys


Book Description

This volume covers the old counties of Montgomeryshire, and Breconshire. The gazetteer ranges from early Christian memorials in remote rural churches to the splendours of Powis Castle's baroque interiors and terraced gardens and the monumental achievements of the Victorian reservoir engineers.




Alumni Cantabrigienses


Book Description

Detailed and comprehensive, the second volume of the Venns' directory, in six parts, includes all known alumni until 1900.