The Way of All Flesh

Parish and Richards are holding the fort. In DCI D'Aramitz's absence, the Chief Constable gives them the case of an emaciated body found in Hatfield Forest and sends DCI Lester to take over as the Senior Investigating Officer, because Parish hasn't been accredited as a PIP3. The trouble is, Lester is a micromanager and wants to control everything they do. And then Toadstone tells Parish about the noises coming from the apartment next door and his problem sleeping, so Parish offers to have a word with the neighbours. And then there's the Ellen Gold case from ten years ago, but has Richards found the missing link?

DCI Mira D'Aramitz gets word from her brother Giuseppe that her father is dying, so after twenty years away she decides to travel back to Agropoli in Italy to say goodbye to him, but it becomes a lot more complicated than a simple goodbye when her father, brother and sister-in-law are all murdered. Commissioner Marco Righi takes charge of the case, and between them they must stay one step ahead of the killers to unravel a thirty year-old mystery.

Stick takes leave, because he's been invited to the reading of the will in Poole, Dorset of a half-brother he never knew he had. Xena returns from the Cayman Islands and invites herself along. What should be a simple inheritance turns into the hunt for a mechanical combination safe in a designer house where they become prisoners. Then, they have to go to No Man's Fort in the Solent near Portsmouth to find a message from Stick's dead father.


Genre: Mystery