The Complete Detective Henry Johnstone Historical Mysteries, Books 1-10 (Henry Johnstone Mystery #1-10)

Ten historical mysteries. Two chalk-and-cheese detectives.

Lincolnshire, England, 1928. Builders lift the flagstones in a narrow yard and uncover three bodies in shallow graves. A woman, a young man and a seven-year-old girl.

The local police are out of their depth. Scotland Yard sends Chief Inspector Henry Johnstone and Sergeant Mickey Hitchens north with the famous murder bag.

Henry came back from the trenches changed. Precise, contained, hard to read. He works a crime scene like a scientist: fingerprints, photographs, bloodstains, fibres, every detail copied into the black-bound murder book he keeps in his own hand.

Mickey is his opposite: a proper East End copper. Henry reads evidence. Mickey reads people. Between them, very little stays buried.

But the bodies in the yard are only the beginning.
Across ten atmospheric cases, the investigations move from hard-up terraced streets and Lincolnshire market towns to south-coast sands, smoke-blackened factory districts, country houses and the glittering world of the bright young things.

This is England between the wars: uneasy, divided, still haunted by the trenches, where the old order and the fast new set both have secrets worth killing for.

Classic British detection in the Golden Age tradition.

THE DETECTIVES
Chief Inspector Henry Johnstone
A Scotland Yard murder specialist: tall, thin, austere, from his dark broadcloth coat to his cold, watchful gaze. Raised in a loveless household and hardened further by war, Henry is controlled, exact and slow to show warmth, a detective of the new forensic school, in the years when evidence first began to outrank confession.

Sergeant Mickey Hitchens
Henry’s sergeant. Cheerful, and quick with a broad smile. Where Henry is austere and forensic, Mickey works the people, pubs and streets.

THE SETTING
The cases range across England in the late 1920s and early 1930s: Lincolnshire towns and lonely Wolds, south-coast beaches at Shoreham and Bournemouth, smoke-blackened streets, and country-house drawing rooms where money and reputation are guarded far more carefully than any alibi.