Mark Treasure Series by David Williams
Mark Treasure #2
Treasure by Degrees
David Williams
University College, Itchendever, Hants, is long on brains, short on funds and up for grabs. It seems to be facing a take-over either by the American Funny Farms Foundation or by the calculating Crown Prince of Abu B'yat.Banker sleuth Mark Treasure tries to adjudicate but finds baffling murder on his hands.Of course the vital question is who did it, not to mention other knotty problems that have a bearing on the case. Who sent the gory sheep's head – and worse – to the eccentric American matron with millions of dollars in her gift? Was her neurotic attorney entirely to be trusted ? Was the celebrated Dr Goldstein, senior tutor and TV personality, behind the Arab bomb scare? Why did the Arabs kidnap the lecturer in English Literature?Readers of David Williams's first book, Unholy Writ, which Patrick Cosgrave in the Spectator called 'by far the best written detective story I have read for months', will not be surprised to find the college housed in a stately home with an impeccable architectural provenance and peopled by a wealth of memorable characters. A tantalizing choice of suspects and a pervasive humour make this indeed a Treasure for the connoisseur.
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Mark Treasure #3
Treasure Up in Smoke
David Williams
A delightfully offbeat murder mystery amid West Indian hi-jinks of an extraordinarily wacky natureBanker-Detective Mark Treasure’s first two adventures were related in Unholy Writ ("a first novel, educated and refreshingly traditional, involving mayhem and wickedness in the English middle classes”—Library Journal) and Treasure by Degrees (“in the best traditions of the classic British mystery”—N.Y. Times Book Review). Now, in an antic change of pace, Treasure and his actress-wife Molly visit a bizarre island that is straight out of the fantasies of Evelyn Waugh. The descendents of a 17th-century pirate named O’Hara have traditionally ruled this West Indian paradise, but their preeminence is now threatened by the ambitious industrial plans of a firebreathing parvenu. Treasure ’s role, intended to be one of financial consultation, takes a more active turn when the last surviving O’Hara is found decapitated during a traditional ceremony, and Treasure ’s junior banking colleague is seen making his escape in a state of undress. It all adds up to a colorful and wildly exuberant romp from one of Britain’s fastest rising literary stars.
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Mark Treasure #4
Copper, Gold and Treasure
David Williams
Roderick Copper (67), retired Major, and Benny Gold (70), London cabbie, apply on the same morning for residential places with the Rudyard Trust for Retired Officers and Gentlemen. But its eccentric and drunken Director tells them the Trust is technically bankrupt, its multimillion-pound assets about to be divided between the Founder's descendents—a curious, motley crew.Banker and amateur sleuth Mark Treasure is called in when Copper and Gold's bizarre scheme to preserve the charity goes wrong with terrifying consequences—kidnapping, stabbing and sudden death—involving one of the bank's clients, ex-President Cruba of Ngonga, exiled in London with his sensuous third wife, his 15-year-old son, and Gérard Opac, his handsome, ambitious aide. It is up to Mark Treasure to make sense out of all of this, which he does with his customary charm and aplomb.
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Mark Treasure #5
Murder for Treasure
David Williams
Could the takeover of Rigley’s Patent Footbalm by the giant American Hutstacker Chemical Corporation really be scuppered by Mrs. Ogmore Davies’s parrot finding a body in Panty Harbour?It looked like it, but banker sleuth Mark Treasure, British banking’s answer to Emma Lathen, took a different view when a second body was discovered the morning after he arrived in the little West Wales sailing village close to St. David’s. By then Treasure had already survived a murderous assault aboard the Fishguard Express, a pitched battle on Whitland Station, and the inexplicable disappearance of a battered Australian clergyman. And that was only the start of his exceedingly unquiet weekend. It was to involve his host, the eccentric Judge Henry Nott-Herbert, a T-shirted detective-inspector, the high-powered, lady-fancying head of Hutstacker’s and his understanding wife, a local schemer with a siren spouse, two children, an immense Irish wolfhound, a tone-deaf Welsh vicar, and a pacifist postman.It also involved the breathtakingly lovely Anna, the young German widow already promised in marriage to someone more than twice her age.As always, it’s a fast-moving, witty and baffling mystery—the first from David Williams set in his native Wales. “He goes on improving steadily,” said the late Edmund Crispin in the Sunday Times of his last novel. He does indeed.
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Mark Treasure #14
Prescription for Murder
David Williams
The Closter Drug company is going to double in value as soon as it perfects its cure for migraine: most of the directors are set to make sizeable fortunes as they float the company on the Stock Exchange.
When a group pledged to stopping experiments on animals demonstrates at a Closter news conference, the action is seen as no more than embarrassing. But the kidnap of one of the Closter directors that follows cannot be so easily ignored, especially when, instead of a ransom, the kidnappers demand that the other directors sell their company shares at a crippling loss...
No one understands what the kidnappers themselves are gaining by this, until banker Mark Treasure - the non-executive Chairman of Closter Drug - returns from an American trip and works out what's really happening. Even so, he is too late to prevent two murders and the stock market skulduggery that decimates Closter management and threatens to wipe out the company.
The fourteenth of David Williams' elegant and intelligent Mark Treasure murder mysteries, Prescription for Murder is a perfect corporate puzzle with a cast of truly unique characters.
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