Robert Barnard

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  • Bibliography:
    62 Books (2 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1976
  • Latest Book:
    January 2020
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Full Series List in Order

Charlie Peace

1 - Death and the Chaste Apprentice (Oct-1989)
2 - A Fatal Attachment (Aug-1992)
3 - A Hovering of Vultures (Sep-1993)
4 - The Bad Samaritan (Oct-1995)
5 - Unholy Dying (Apr-2001)
6 - The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori (Apr-1999)
7 - The Bones in the Attic (Apr-2002)
8 - Everybody's Girl (2003)
10 - A Charitable Body (Jan-2012)
A Fall from Grace (May-2007)
The Killings on Jubilee Terrace (May-2009)

Perry Trethowan

1 - Death by Sheer Torture (Mar-1982)
2 - Death and the Princess (Sep-1982)
3 - The Case of the Missing Bronte (Jul-1983)
4 - Bodies (Oct-1986)
5 - The Cherry Blossom Corpse (Jul-1987)

Book List in Order: 62 titles

  • A Little Local Murder

    A MEDIA DEBUT FOR MURDER It was the worst possible time for murder. Radio Broadwich had come to do a documentary on Twytching's local charm. Mrs. Withens, self-appointed arbiter of community affairs, was determined to see the town put its best foo...

  • Death of a Mystery Writer

    From award-winning mystery writer Robert Barnard comes a classic British whodunit about a bestselling author who is murdered -- and his latest unpublished manuscript has gone missing.Sir Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs, overweight and overbearing, collapses ...

  • Death of a Literary Widow

    MURDER BY THE BOOK Oswaldston was a nasty industrial town in northern England, famous only as the home of the novelist Walter Machin. Machin had died after the war, leaving behind two obscure books and two extraordinary wives. Now all four had been ...

  • Death in a Cold Climate

    It was midday on December 21st in the city of Tromsø when the boy was last seen: a tall, blond boy swathed in anorak and scarf against the Arctic noon. After that he wasn’t seen again, not until three months later, when Professor Mackenzie’s dog...

  • Mother's Boys

    Lill Hodsden was a monster. She rode roughshod over her daughter, wiped her feet on her husband, blackmailed her lovers and smothered her sons with a mother love that left them screaming out for freedom. Lill set the hackles rising all over Todmarsh,...

  • Death of a Perfect Mother

    Lill Hodsden was a monster. She rode roughshod over her daughter, wiped her feet on her husband, blackmailed her lovers, and smothered her sons with a mother’s love that left them screaming out for freedom. Lill set the hackles rising all over Todm...

  • Death by Sheer Torture

    Perry Trethowan - 1

    Inspector Perry Trethowan reads in the obituaries that his estranged father has died under peculiar circumstances: he was fooling around with a form of self-torture called strappado. At the request of his supervisor, Peter returns to his ancestral ho...

  • Death and the Princess

    Perry Trethowan - 2

    THE QUEEN WAS NOT AMUSED. Murder and royalty didn't mix. Princess Helena had only a distant claim to the throne, but when her friends and lovers began turning up dead, Buckingham Palace demanded to know why. The princess appeared to have a wildly wi...

  • School for Murder

    The Burleigh School, a private day academy for boys, has little to recommend it. Under the myopic and inept leadership of its headmaster, Edwin Crumwallis, its days may in fact be numbered. Especially when he chooses as his next headboy the particula...



  • The Case of the Missing Bronte

    Perry Trethowan - 3

    MURDER BY THE BOOK Meeting an elderly spinster in a cozy Yorkshire pub seemed a harmless bit of serendipity for vacationing Scotland Yard Superintendent Perry Trethowan. But what Miss Edith Wing carried about in her large blue leather handbag turn...

  • Corpse in a Gilded Cage

    MURDER IS ALWAYS RELATIVE. Not every man wants his home to be his castle. Such were the sentiments of Perce Spender when he found himself in the draughty drawing room of Chetton Hall. The sudden demise of a distant relative had transformed Perce f...

  • Death on the High C's

    Opera singers are often described as being larger than life, and certainly this is true of Gaylene Ffrench. Her appetites for men, for food, for attention are gargantuan, and her ability to irritate is similarly outsized. So when someone electrocutes...

  • Out of the Blackout

    LITTLE BOY LOST He called himself Simon Thorn. He arrived in the village of Yeasdon with the other children evacuated to escape the London blitz. But his name appeared on no list. The address he gave didn't exist. His sparse belongings revealed no ...

  • Fete Fatale

    AN OCCASION FOR MURDER Father Battersby, the new vicar, was scandalously High Church. Worse still, he was celibate...a condition totally unacceptable to the women of Hexton. Their minds made up, an unwelcoming committee had already formed. The town'...

  • Bodies

    Perry Trethowan - 4

    FATAL PHOTOS Police superintendent Percy Trethowan found London's Soho as colorful and full of life as ever--except for the four corpses in a seedy photography studio. Shot doing a layout for Bodies, a soft-porn "health and fitness" magazine, the ...

  • The Cherry Blossom Corpse

    Perry Trethowan - 5

    ROMANCE IS MURDER Passionate, inflamed, searing -- the vocabulary of the trade. But the words also described the irritation felt by Scotland Yard's Perry Trethowan when he was persuaded to attend the World Association of Romantic Novelists' conventi...

  • A Talent to Deceive

  • Political Suicide

    CANDIDATE FOR MURDER Bootham was a dreary Yorkshire town, without wealth, beauty, and especially class. But it did have a Member of Parliament ... until the Honorable James Partridge sinned against both God and Bootham by throwing himself into the...

  • The Skeleton in the Grass

    A KILLING PEACE It was 1936. The clouds of war gathered over Europe. But in the small English village, new governess Sarah Causeley was enchanted with the Hallams of Hallam House: the cucumber sandwiches at teatime, the charming conversation, the pa...



  • At Death's Door

    GRANDE DAME ... GRANDE DEATH The king of novelists, Benedict Cotterel, was in his bedroom, dictating how to leave his money. The queen of the theater, Dame Myra Mason, was in the local inn, eating crow and honey. Years ago their brief affair had r...

  • Death and the Chaste Apprentice

    Charlie Peace - 1

    Des Capper, landlord of Saracen's Head, a splendid Elizabethan inn, had been called a bore, a snoop, and other things not fit to print. Currently he was provoking his newest arrivals, the performers of the Ketterick Arts Festival--as rowdy a group as...

  • Death of a Salesperson

    Mystery and black comedy collide in this collection of sixteen stories with crime, wit, and twists to spare....

  • City of Strangers

    DEADLY NEIGHBORS Wynton Lane, with its imposing Victorian houses, is a bastion of respectability. Belfield Grove Estate is not. Belfield Grove harbors families like the infamous Phelans. Led by their foul-mouthed, beer-swilling patriarch, Jack, they...

  • Death of an Old Goat

    Professor Belville-Smith had bored university audiences in England with the same lecture for fifty years. Now he was crossing the Australian continent, doing precisely the same. Never before had the reaction been so extreme, however, for shortly afte...

  • A Scandal in Belgravia

    AN INCONVENIENT CORPSE They met in the early 1950s, fledgling diplomats in the Foreign Office. Naive Peter Proctor was possessed by middle-class morality and ambition. Witty, reckless Timothy Wycliffe was an aristocrat whose shocking sexual appetite...

  • A Suit of Diamonds

  • Blood Brotherhood

    Old church meets new with a vengeance when a monk is brutally murdered at St. Botolph’s....

  • A Fatal Attachment

    Charlie Peace - 2

    A celebrity scholar in a small village tears her nephews from their immediate family and raises them in an atmosphere of cruelty. As old Lydia Perceval plans to destroy yet another group of impressionable young children’s love for their parents, th...

  • A Hovering of Vultures

    Charlie Peace - 3

    Reclusive brother and sister authors Joshua and Susannah Sneddon seemed happy enough to grind out their dreary literary tomes in their cozy Yorkshire cottage -- until Joshua took a fatal ax to his unfortunate sibling before putting a bullet into his ...



  • The Masters of the House

    In the late winter of 1979, Leeds housewife Ellen Heenan dies in childbirth -- abandoning a guilt-stricken husband to insanity's grasp and leaving four young children to fend for themselves. Thirteen-year-old Matthew and Annie, age twelve, know wh...

  • The Bad Samaritan

    Charlie Peace - 4

    When British policemen Charlie Pearce and Mike Oddie investigate the unsurprising murder of the village parish Lothario, they question Rosemary Sheffield, the vicar’s wife. Rosemary, who has recently “lost” her faith and been accused of immoral...

  • Too Many Notes, Mr. Mozart

  • The Habit of Widowhood

    Prize-winning author Robert Barnard presents seventeen witty mystery stories featuring everyday characters who discover their potential for murder, including a young woman who weds a string of old men and develops a penchant for widowhood....

  • No Place of Safety

    Fifteen-year-old Katy Bourne and sixteen-year-old Alan Coughlan are missing. Though they are students at the same school, they hardly know each other, so it's strange that they should disappear together. Katy's mother, self-centered and unloving, doe...

  • Sense and Sensuality

    in Crime Through Time II

    A GOOD MYSTERY IS TIMELESS Crime Through Time was the remarkable first collection. Now, bestselling mystery authors Miriam Grace Monfredo and Sharan Newman present Crime Through Time II -- featuring even more never-before-published historical myster...

  • The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori

    Charlie Peace - 6

    The body of a young man, almost naked, found in the car park behind a Haworth restaurant marks the beginning of the case, and it is his identity that is the first puzzle for DC Charlie Peace and his superior, Detective Superintendent Oddie. But befor...

  • A Murder in Mayfair

    Can the rich get away with murder, or is there always a price? Two days in May bring Colin Pinnock’s career to a peak. His party wins a stunning election victory and he wins a new government office. What a pity that among the congratulations pourin...

  • Unholy Dying

    Charlie Peace - 5

    England's celebrated, multiple-award-winning master crime novelist returns with a witty and poignant chiller about the evil of gossip and the sin of indifference. Father Christopher Pardoe is a good priest. He cares about his parishioners. He is als...

  • The Bones in the Attic

    Charlie Peace - 7

    Matt Harper, a television and radio personality and a former professional soccer player, has just bought Elderholm, an old stone house in Leeds in the north of England. It's ideal for him, his partner Aileen, and her three children. Even the attic sp...



  • Everybody's Girl

    in Mysterious Pleasures
    Charlie Peace - 8

    'Show me a man or woman who cannot stand mysteries and I will show you a fool. A clever fool -- perhaps -- but a fool just the same' RAYMOND CHANDLER Ever since its creation in 1953, the Crime Writers' Association has celebrated and champione...

  • The Mistress of Alderley

    Well-known actress Caroline Fawley has given up a successful stage and television career for love and life in the country. International business titan Marius Fleetwood can't marry her. He already has a wife, though he claims they are "just friends."...

  • A Cry from the Dark

    Bettina Whitelaw has come a long way from her childhood in the little outback town of Bundaroo, Australia. Many years have passed, a lifetime really, but she's never forgotten what happened there on the evening that changed her life forever. How c...

  • The Graveyard Position

    Meet the Cantelos of Leeds, England. To call the Cantelos dysfunctional is actually a wild understatement. But is one of them also a killer? Clarissa Cantelo, a skilled clairvoyant, apparently thought so. Believing that her sixteen-year-old nephe...

  • Dying Flames

    Some memories are better left buried in the past. Well-known author Graham Broadbent has managed to repress one particularly dangerous memory for many years, but a trip home to a school reunion brings back the shocking reality of a desperate youthful...

  • A Fall from Grace

    Charlie Peace

    Detective Inspector Charlie Peace and his wife, Felicity, are shocked when Felicity's difficult dad, Rupert Coggenhoe, suddenly announces that he's moving north to their Yorkshire village. Felicity has never much liked her father, and to have him as ...

  • Last Post

    A mysterious envelope arrives on Eve McNabb's doorstep soon after she has buried her mother, a woman who kept many secrets. The puzzling letter inside this envelope hints at an illicit passion between the letter writer and Eve's mother, May McNabb. ...

  • Sins Of Scarlet

    in Penguin Book of Crime Stories

    International bestselling author Peter Robinson turns his razor-sharp instinct for crime writing to this unique anthology featuring the cream of crime fiction. With a selection of 15 stories featuring established bestsellers and new voices, The Pengu...

  • The Killings on Jubilee Terrace

    Charlie Peace

    Vernon Watts may have been beloved by the millions of faithful viewers of the long-running soap opera Jubilee Terrace but his fellow cast members knew him for what he was -- an egotistical former music-hall performer whose untimely death in a pedestr...

  • A Stranger in the Family

    Kit Philipson has always felt like something of a stranger in his family. Growing up as the only child of professional parents in Glasgow, Scotland, he had every advantage. His mother was a teacher; his father, a journalist, escaped from Nazi Germany...



  • A Charitable Body

    Charlie Peace - 10

    Robert Barnard, the internationally acclaimed Diamond Dagger -- winning crime writer, dissects family bonds at their best and worst in this stunning novel of suspense. What an honor -- to become trustee of an English stately home museum. Yorkshire...

  • The Disposal of the Living

    Hexton-upon-Weir was ruled by its women: they set the tone, they made the decisions, they called the tune. When they decided to band together to block the appointment of a new vicar who was not only unacceptably High Church but - of all ugly things -...

  • Little Victims

    The Burleigh school was dying. It would be called a mercy killing were it not for the little band of inept, eccentric, or otherwise unemployable teachers who depended on this absolutely awful English boys' academy for their meagre livelihoods. A lack...

  • Posthumous Papers

    There were two Mrs Machins, relicts of the talented working-class writer Walter Machin, who was just about to be immortalised by the literary establishment. Viola was large, overbearing and, even in her seventies, still voluptuous. Hilda, the first (...

  • Touched by the Dead

    Those two days in May seem to be a highpoint in Colin Pinnock's life: a stunning election victory, a new government, and junior office for himself. But among the many congratulations he receives is one hostile message, a grubby card asking, 'Who do y...

  • Death in Purple Prose

    Norway in cherry blossom time seemed exactly the right place to hold a conference of the World Association of Romantic Novelists (WARN for short). Superintendent Perry Trethowan wondered at times how he had allowed his sister to 'con' him into accomp...

  • The Missing Bronte

    Superintendent Perry Trethowan was enjoying a peaceful motoring holiday in North Yorkshire when he and his wife, Jan, had a strange encounter in a country pub. The seemingly unremarkable elderly spinster who introduced herself as Miss Edith Wing, a r...

  • Unruly Son

    First published in 1979, Unruly Son received an Edgar Award nomination for Best Novel of the year. Sir Oliver Fairleigh-Stubbs, overweight and overbearing, collapses and dies at his birthday party while indulging his taste for rare liquors. He ha...

  • Hour 23

    In the suburb of East Violet, New York, something horrible has happened. A virus is on the loose, leaving nothing but death and destruction in its wake. Those who are infected transform into bloodthirsty monsters. Those who are spared are left to fen...

  • Phantasos

    A mysterious new game has appeared in arcades across the Pacific Northwest. It’s called Phantasos, and it promises a state-of-the-art virtual reality experience. There’s only one problem: everyone who plays Phantasos inevitably falls victim to bi...

  • Vega

    Vega Rowland is smart, beautiful, and flirtatious. But as first year law student Nathaniel Shaw soon discovers, she is just as mysterious as she is charming.When the two meet in an early morning lecture, they form an unlikely bond that will unravel a...

  • A Mansion and Its Murder

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Sarah Jane Fearing, the sole offspring of a father who desperately wants a male heir, has grown up in the imposing rural mansion of one of England's most influential banking families. At the centre of Sarah's world stands her charming, generous uncle...

  • Sheer torture

    • / General Fiction
    • Buy Buy

    Meet the Trethowan family, an eccentric clan that prides itself on nonconformity. Perry, a young police inspector, is the only family member to have broken the tradition. Although the Trethowans disdain his normal lifestyle, they find his services he...

Award-Winning Books by Robert Barnard

A Scandal in Belgravia
1992 Nero Wolfe Award -- Novel


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Robert Barnard has published 62 books.

Robert Barnard does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Vega, was published in January 2020.

The first book by Robert Barnard, A Little Local Murder, was published in January 1976.

Yes. Robert Barnard has 2 series.
Author Series
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