Julia Wallis Martin Ordre des livres (chronologique)

La malédiction semble, une nouvelle fois, s'abattre sur la ville de Manchester: après Joseph Coyne, cinq ans plus tôt, c'est au tour de Gary,12 ans, de disparaître dans des conditions mystérieuses. Pour le commissaire Parker, chargé d'élucider les deux affaires, le suspect idéal est bien évidemment Roly : un squatter asocial niché au cœur d'un quartier en friches et dont la gigantesque volière d'oiseaux exotiques a toujours attiré les enfants du voisinage. Mais Parker ne dispose d'aucune preuve tangible. Jusqu'à ce triste jour où la police découvre, dans un bois privé aux abords de la ville, le squelette d'un jeune garçon enchaîné à un échafaud de fortune. Comble du sadisme, il aurait été démembré vivant! Comme un oisillon dont on aurait délibérément arraché les ailes...

Parapsychologist Audrah Sidow is convinced that there is nothing on earth for which there is not a rational explanation. But she knows there is more to the collection of fractured people gathered at Lyndle Hall in the heart of Northumberland's National Park than is apparent.

When Robbie McLaughlan, a Flying Squad officer with London's Metropolitan Police, shoots and kills a robber during a bank raid, his private and professional life begin to fall apart. The family of the dead man discovers McLaughlan's identity, and abducts his young son with the intention of luring McLaughlan to his death. But McLaughlan is a man with a secret and, long estranged from his own father, he ultimately has no option but to turn to the man he despises, for only he can possibly help him.

When 12-year-old Joseph Coyne is missing and is assumed to have been abducted, Detective Parker makes a promise to the boy's mother: We'll get him back, alive. It proves to be a promise that Parker cannot keep. When another young boy is missing under similar circumstances, the evidence leads Parker to an aviary or bird yard attached to an abandoned house. While the finches imprisoned in the aviary exert a magical appeal to the young boys who surreptitiously come to watch them, its owner is a shadowy figure whose hold over his young visitors seems far more sinister. Convinced that the killer is stalking his third victim, a child Parker knows, he enlists the help of a child psychologist to unravel a dark secret.

In the spellbinding tradition of Minette Walters and Ruth Rendell, author Julia Wallis Martin crafts an intelligent, atmospheric British suspense novel as engrossing as it is original. An entire house, long submerged in the dark waters of a reservoir, unearths a starting find: the corpse of Helena Warner, an Oxford college student who disappeared twenty years earlier. For former homicide detective Bill Driver, it means the reopening of a case that, in his mind, was never really closed. And Driver thinks he knows who did it. But three of Helena's friends-her cold former lover Ian Gilmore, her jealous best friend Joan Poole, and talented but institutionalized artist Richard Wachmann-conspire to keep a decades-old, deadly secret from seeing the light of day...all the wile, a killer continues to strike again and again.