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 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.




Compline


Book Description

The body of a fifteen-year-old boy is discovered ten years after he disappeared. Dennis Lewis's remains are bound with rope in a makeshift grave in a farmer’s field near Maryport, Cumbria. Community Sergeant Harriet Calder was not involved in the original investigation, but her name is highlighted on a church bulletin found with the body. Scrawled on the same page is the word ‘Compline’. Calder, in her part-time role as a Methodist preacher, had led the service at his church the week before Dennis disappeared. Through her recall of events, she is drawn back into the Major Investigation Unit to assist the renewed investigation.




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.




Chalice


Book Description

The Lake District Trilogy 3. A man is arrested at a house in Carlisle, Cumbria, after a witness reports an assault on a young teenage girl. The evidence is incontestable, the trial verdict a certainty. The man, Gerald Neames, turns out to be an ordained priest. Other girls also appear to be at risk, but Neames refuses to cooperate with the police. Detective Inspector Harriet Calder is seconded to the Safeguarding Unit, tasked with the identification of any other victims. Among the forensic exhibits is a small chalice bearing the fingerprint of a girl who went missing years ago.




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 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.




The Chiswick Chauffeur


Book Description

The eighth Catrin Sayer Mystery. Sayer returns from an extended maternity leave with the same challenge as most new mothers. She needs to rebalance her life and get back into the workforce. In her case, as a detective inspector in the Metropolitan Police, her work is the specialized world of art crime. A tip-off from an informant about a painting, a savage knife attack on a person near her home, and a police undercover operation at a casino weave together to giver her the biggest challenge of her career; a critical role in a major police operation against vicious gang operating in East London.




The Tavistock Lieutenant


Book Description

The tenth and final novel in the Catrin Sayer series. In the middle of family upheaval during the Covid pandemic, Catrin Sayer takes a career development assignment with the Devon and Cornwall Police. There, at the rank of superintendent, she chairs a reorganisation task force, a far cry from her former operational roles with the Metropolitan Police. During her contract, the violent deaths of a man and his daughter in Tavistock are linked to an art theft. Art crime being Sayer’s core expertise, she suddenly has two roles: chair of the task force and oversight of the team investigating the murders. After one perpetrator is identified and arrested, Sayer’s actions to achieve further arrests place her career as a police officer at risk.




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.