Robert Blair was about to knock off from a slow day at his law firm when the phone rang. It was Marion Sharpe on the line, a local woman of quiet disposition who lived with her mother at their decrepit country house, The Franchise. It appeared that she was in some serious trouble: Miss Sharpe and her mother were accused of brutally kidnapping a demure young woman named Betty Kane. Miss Kane's claims seemed highly unlikely, even to Inspector Alan

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Horace Rumpole, the irreverent, iconoclastic, claret-swilling, poetry-spouting barrister at law, is among the most beloved characters of English crime literature. He is not a particularly gifted attorney, nor is he particularly fond of the law by courts if it comes to that, but he'd rather be swinging at a case than bowing to his wife Hilda, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. In this first title of the popular series featuring Rumpole, all of the major characters...

This collection of seven stories begins with the horrors of Rumpole's only son Nick's recent move to America.

After Rumpole retires to Florida, he reads of the latest London murder. Homesick and bored, Rumpole returns to the Old Bailey.

In England, painter and PI Lucy Kingsley and her solicitor boyfriend attempt to unravel the death of an Anglican woman priest, at the center of a controversy on the role of women in the church. By the author of A Drink of Deadly Wine.

Included are twenty stories featuring Horace Rumpole, the claret-swilling, poetry-spouting barristor investigator.