Jill McGown books in order

Alan Blake's dead body is discovered at the bottom of a quarry. Above him, a group of people gather in the gloom near his abandoned Mercedes. They're all people whose lives he has touched, but only one of them knows that they're free at last from his blackmailing and bullying now.

Or are they? It seems that from the grave Alan Blake’s influence is still real enough. Real enough to frighten Frankie, who was never afraid of him in life – real enough to set at each other’s throats people who love each other. And it's red-headed, fighting Frankie, at odds with the world, who takes it all on her insubstantial shoulders, determined that Alan will hurt no-one else.

But the eighth deadly sin, that of omission, is one shared by each of the people in the little frightened group at the edge of the pit.

No one was more stunned than Annie Maddox when they found the body of Gerald Culver MP. Because Annie, the manager of the Wellington Hotel, Amblesea, was Culver’s mistress.

Enter Harry Lambert, ex-policeman-turned-reluctant-private-eye, who's hired by Culver's wife to find her husband's killer.

Annie's world is now filled with menace, because somewhere out there, along the edge of a wintry sea, a killer stalks…

Sixteen years ago, Bill Holt was jailed for the murder of two people: Alison, his lifelong friend whom once people had assumed he’d marry, and a private detective. He knew he was innocent, but jury, judge and all his friends declared him guilty.

Now he's out on parole, and his first journey is back to the scene of the crime, the town where he worked and lived and where he had shares in Greystone, his grandfather’s firm.

He finds that fashion has changed, the currency has changed, even the railway station is different. But the people are all still there; Alison’s husband, Bryant, Jeff and Thelma Spencer, his cousin Cassie Stone, smooth Charles Cartwright and Holt’s ex-wife, Wendy.

One of them is a manipulative killer – one of them framed him, and he’s spent sixteen years behind bars while the murderer grew fat and sleek on the profits of his company.

Frank Derwent, known in the business as FD, the multibillion-dollar director and Hollywood hotshot, has come to western Scotland to shoot a simple movie of love gone wrong. But most of the real action here happens off-screen. If you could put secrets in a box, the things this cast are hiding would be too large to carry.

Still, the show must go on. Unless someone is murdered, of course – and that someone is Barbara, the budding starlet, who also happens to be FD’s nineteen-year-old mistress. Not quite as sweet as she seemed, she knew how to blackmail like a professional.

Although talented Detective Patterson is on call to lend the local police a hand, he can’t prevent a second murder. And when a third dead body makes everyone suspect one another, even Patterson discovers that no one is safe from their past.

That the Banthams’ long marriage was basically unhappy wasn’t at all news, or unusual…

What was wholly unexpected was Susan Bantham’s more than one-million-pound win in the pools.

For her lawyer husband Jeremy, the money is an answer to a prayer, giving him the comforts of a Rolls Royce and a new mistress.

Susan’s reaction is more profound…more sinister.

She has the chance to have a new image, different friends, an unexpected lover – and the opportunity to avenge herself for twenty years of frustration with Jeremy.

All she has to do is concoct a plan to trap her husband in a noose of his own making.

Unfortunately for them both, by the time he took a good look at his wife and her anger, someone had to die.

But no one could have guessed who, when and why…

NB: Jill McGown writing as Elizabeth Chaplin.

After twenty-six years of marriage, Donald and Helen seek their pleasures elsewhere. But affairs turn decidedly insidious, when Donald's mistress, a rich widow, turns up murdered in a boating park, and Helen's missing young lover is the last to be seen with her, although the two had never met. It would appear that the perfect crime has been committed at last. Leave it to Detective Inspector Lloyd and his charming young detective Seargent Judy Hill to sort it out--if anyone can. Guilt is in the details, they know, and in the details is where to find the murderer.

Snow began to isolate the village and by the time the body in the vicarage was discovered, Byford was cut off altogether. A domestic murder - Chief Inspector Lloyd thought it would be an open and shut case but it turned out to be much more complicated.

NB: This book is also known as Murder At the Old Vicarage.

When Diana Hamlyn's bludgeoned body is found on the playing field at the English school where her husband is deputy headmaster, detecting duo Inspecter Lloyd and Detective Judy Hill find a classroom full of suspects, including her grieving husband, his motley colleagues, and even the vice-hiding head master. Unfortunately, this fatal episode is not to be quickly resolved--until one small, sinister clue clicks into place.'

NB: This book is also known as Death of a Dancer.

Both victims were dishy, but that's all murder victims Leonora Austin, struggling artist, and Rosemary Beale, ex-call girl had in common. It's a disturbing case for newly promoted Detective Inspector Judy Hill, who knew Leonora, but also for her boyfriend, Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd. But when investigating the complicated romantic lives of Mrs. Austin and Mrs. Beale, including their husbands' past and present lovers, Hill and Lloyd uncover cold-hearted greed and calculated ambition--and a killer (or killers?) wanting to finish the job....

When reporter Melissa Whitworth places an ad seeking to interview women whose men belong to someone else for a feature article, she never dreams that she will find herself face to face with her own husband's mistress. Nor that the young woman, Sharon Smith, will be murdered within hours of their interview. Now Chief Inspector Lloyd and his partner, Judy Hill, find that murder is just one thread in a web of police brutality, blackmail, rape, fraud and more murder.

If ever anyone deserved to die, it was millionaire Victor Holyoak.

Holyoak's favorite tactic was to kick people when they were down, then pick them up and kick them again. Now the great man himself was down -- brutally stabbed to death in his penthouse apartment.

Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd felt a creepy sense of deja vu. For though certain he'd never seen Holyoak's scarred and bearded face before, he remembered one very like it -- somewhere in the past. Hunting for answers drew Lloyd and his lover, Inspector Judy Hill, deep into the lives of those in the dead man's dangerous orbit: his terrified stepdaughter, her playboy husband, a broken cop, an ambitious hooker, all desperate souls with plausible motives. Yet in the end, Lloyd and Hill would solve two baffling mysteries -- one now, one then, both deadly....

When the body of fifteen-year-old Natalie Ouspensky is found strangled near a public park in Stansfield, England, Detective Inspector Judy Hill and Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd have their work cut out for them. For Natalie wasn't quite the innocent her mother believes, and her classmates at Oakland School guard Natalie's secrets--and their own--like life itself. Then a shred of evidence points Hill and Lloyd in the right--and decidedly deadly--direction....

Detective Inspector Judy Hill anxiously watched the trial of serial rapist Colin Arthur Drummond from the public gallery--never forgetting his chilling threat that she would be his next victim. The prosecution should have an open-and-shut case.

But sixteen months later Drummond is back on the streets, threatening Judy once more. And as Judy sets out to prove Drummond's guilt for the second time, Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd is called to a horrifying scene. It appears Colin Drummond has struck again. . . .

East Midlands farmer Bernard Bailey, a violent man with a brutal temper, stands to pocket a hefty inheritance if he fathers a male child. After destroying one wife to achieve this end, Bailey turns his next marriage into a twisted business arrangement. If his new spouse produces a son, she will be paid handsomely for her trouble. But the real trouble is just beginning.

After six months of receiving highly publicized death threats, Bailey becomes just another statistic--a bloodied corpse discarded on his secluded farm. But the unusual question for Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd and Detective Inspector Judy Hill is, Why wasn't the monster killed sooner? For Bailey aroused murderous passions in just about everyone, from the abused daughter of his first marriage to his second wife's clandestine lover. Beneath the obvious lies a labyrinth of deceit--and the shocking truth lies deeper still....

When the owners of a struggling detective agency are found asphyxiated in their car, Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd rejects the majority opinion that they committed suicide. And his theory--that they were murdered--becomes even more likely when the doomed couple's one client, wealthy Mrs. Angela Esterbrook, is found shot to death.

Why would someone with her sort of money employ an untried agency to carry out an investigation? The super-rich Esterbrook family is a puzzle that Lloyd and his partner, Judy Hill, must solve before it's too late. For the curtain is rising on a tragedy of Shakespearean grandeur. But no one, not even the cunning killer, anticipates how the plot will take on a lethal life of its own-- beyond everyone's control...

Real-life crime has engulfed the domestic life of the Riverside Theatre players. For starters, there’s the violent death of Estelle Bignall, the beautiful, neurotic wife of a well-to-do doctor (and aspiring resident playwright). In truth, suicide seemed more Estelle’s line—especially during the Christmas holidays—but a thief saved her the trouble, stealing all the presents and leaving her bound, gagged, and suffocated.

Instinct tells Detective Chief Inspectors Lloyd and Judy Hill that Estelle’s murder is far more complicated. At the crime scene there are too many footprints, too many fingerprints, too much conflicting evidence—and too many suspects: an elusive burglar, a sinister next-door neighbor, the victim’s secret lover, a scared kid with fresh bruises on his face. But which of them was desperate enough to commit murder?

Dean Fletcher had spent virtually all his twenty-four years doing things practically guaranteed to land him in trouble. But not until he fell for a blonde nymphet named Kayleigh Scott did he manage to totally ruin his life. Kayleigh had told him she was eighteen. In truth, she was not quite thirteen, and poor Dean was soon off to prison, a convicted sex offender, still smitten with his adolescent lover.

Now he’s finally free again, only to be ensnared by two crimes that have Lloyd pulling out what’s left of his hair. One is an infant kidnapping (the child was born within hours of Lloyd’s and Judy’s own baby, Charlotte); the other is the murder of Kayleigh’s mother, Lesley, on the very eve of the family’s sudden move to Australia.

Fortunately, Lloyd thinks he hears the ring of truth in Dean’s protestations of innocence. He is extremely curious about Lesley’s new lover, Ian, who has jumped headfirst into another relationship, and her old lover, Phil, whose world she had destroyed. And for all her air of placid innocence, Kayleigh herself isn’t above suspicion.

NB: This book is also known as Births, Deaths and Marriages.

Michael Waterman is a self-made millionaire. His casinos and nightclubs ensure a constant flow of cash, and Waterman knows what he needs to do to keep it that way. So far, it seems, he has stayed on the right side of the law. Certainly, no one seriously suspects him of murdering bingo player Wilma Fenton, who was struck down while walking home with a purse crammed full of winnings. Her murder looks like an ordinary mugging except for one oddity: The killer had left Wilma’s money neatly fanned out across her body.

The motive behind the bafflingly violent act dogs Lloyd and Hill– now married and the harried parents of a two-year-old daughter. The stakes are raised with a second murder, modeled on the first . . . and then a third. A cold-blooded killer is challenging not only the police but the one witness to the first slaying: England’s premier expert on serial crime, well-known journalist and TV personality, Tony Baker. It has now become a twisted game of madness and logic–in which failure to outwit the murderer means more senseless deaths.