Innocent people are being killed via poison that has been injected into various items they picked up at their local supermarket.

Val McDermid has one of the most powerful tales with her contribution entitled 'A Wife In a Million'. Prepare your case file by printing it out, and then head online using the details provided in your pack to start your investigations. Our need for ritual is primordial, and embracing its logic can help us connect, find meaning and discover who we are. It's notable that the Father Brown story is probably the one that works as a pure murder mystery and is significantly longer than most of the others. We meet a cat that helps uncover the truth, strange “Footprints in the Sky”, a valuable unique manuscript and a thoughtful making story about “On a Christmas day in the morning.He had a old friend who got thrown into jail when there business went bust, and hasn’t been heard of for years until he starts getting letters out of the blue threatening is life. Until on Christmas Eve she gets killed and her handbag and jewelry stolen, the local police man starts his investigation, with the troublesome cat who seems to be following him around. Our investigation continues and a team of detectives are working at pace to establish what happened that resulted in a young woman losing her life,” he said. Chief Superintendent Seb Adjei-Addoh, local policing commander for Southwark, said patrols will be increased in the area over the coming days.

She is the recipient of six honorary doctorates and is an Honorary Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Though the murderer, made a mistake and left behind evidence which lead the detective to find out who it was. In Ritual, pioneering scientist Dimitris Xygalatas leads an enlightening tour through one of the most shadowy realms of human behaviour.Though there is a detective and his wife attend a murder mystery party, that has a MP who is trying to make it public who criminals, the detective clocks Santa.

Though Father Brown sees through his lies and discovered that the brother isn’t the made he says he is; he is the adopted son, and the body is of the last brother he killed earlier, and has be pretending to be him the whole time. A sad little story about a poor postman killed after doing his rounds, and a poor old lady who puts up old Christmas cards because she likes to remember. It was interesting to have Rebus pop up in his own inimitable way and the ending of that story was satisfying in a way only Rebus can. There is undoubtedly some sense of it shouldn’t happen at this time of year; from a Christmas Truce to a desire to abandon crime for profit amid the good will and peace on earth. However, just because many of the others are quite short doesn't mean that they fail as stories, just that they tend to focus on a relatively small element of the 'how could that have happened?Cecily Gayford studied English at the University of Oxford, where she wrote her thesis on the 'golden age' detective stories of the 1930s and 1940s. Several of the stories here have already seen the light of day in other collections, so it feels like a bit of a cheat.