Böcker av James Warden

On holiday in Australia, Bingham and Lina come across a stranded motorist, his car hung partway up a tree, the result of avoiding a kangaroo. Their act of kindness takes them to Yulara, the staging post for the sacred rock, Uluru, where they meet Nellie Doolan, an Aboriginal of mixed race, and, eventually, her father. While there, they are told that Helen Lewis, who runs the local Aboriginal art gallery, has gone missing. Arriving in Alice Springs, they visit a similar gallery where the owner, Marjory Fink, has also disappeared. Talking with the locals, particularly the woman's son, Henry, and her former lover, Ben Evans, they find little cause for concern. Bingham, however, takes the view that coincidences are for Russian novels and he begins asking questions that leads to an investigation by him and Lina that takes them back and forth along the Stuart Highway, visiting the roadhouses as they go. Their search is marked throughout by an awareness of the strange and startling Aboriginal culture which leads Lina, alone in the region of the sacred rock, along the Pathways of the Dreaming and a simple truth. This is the sixth in the Bingham series of novels and the first in which he and his wife, Lina, are both involved in an investigation from the very beginning.

Born into a world of many races, the Black Dwarf must come to terms with his own nature if he and his companions - Gavellan the wizard, Laleef the Light Elf and Twan of the Council of Grim - are to succeed in their quest for the Runestone of Mimir and defeat the Witch of Shroud, Minerva Spindleshanks. This novel was inspired by my own sons' interest in the myths of the Norsemen, and remains true to the spirit and characters of these legends. Here is portrayed an uncompromising struggle between the cold and dark of Nifleheim and the fire and flame of Muspelheim.

At the centre of this investigation was an elderly couple - content in their own company, devoted to each other, "always locked in each other's arms" - who had disappeared without a trace and who, one way or another, needed to be found.

Samuel Warden of the Detective Police had been forewarned. He was to travel to Cloisterham, a town on the Medway, where six months before a young man, Edwin Drood, had disappeared, and find him "whether he be dead or alive".

Bingham, wondering what he was doing on a rain-swept day in Lowestoft looking for a woman who did not want to be found, changed his mind on listening to her son: he'd do all he could to find the runaway wife.

Bingham felt that little girls deserve better than to disappear at the age of six, never to be heard of again, and set out on his first case.

In the summer of 1955, two children disappear and stories emerge of strange craft in Rendlesham Forest.

Personal Memoirs

Contemporary Fiction: Family and relationships