P.D. James
The Murder Room

When Commander Dalgliesh is persuaded by an old friend to visit the Dupayne, a small private museum on the edge of Hampstead Heath, he can have no idea that he will return to it one week later under very different circumstances. One of the family trustees has been horribly murdered, and Dalgliesh and his team are called in to investigate a death which is fraught with complications. However, one of the museum's galleries, the Murder Room, displays exhibits from the most notorious cases of the inter-war years. And now a modern killer is at work, the crimes uncannily echoing the cases on display.

• Detective Commander Adam Dalgliesh, P. D. James's formidable and fascinating detective, returns to find himself enmeshed in a terrifying story of passion and mystery - and in love.

• A powerful work of mystery and psychological intricacy from a master of the modern novel.

Marion Babson
Not Quite A Geisha

Evangeline Sinclair and Trixie Dolan, long-time stars of stage and screen, dash down to Brighton to stand by an old friend in her hour of need. And, with an opening night looming, an unsatisfactory leading man and the sudden demise of her ancient but much-loved Pekinese, Dame Cecile Savoy needs all the support she can get. Trixie feels a bit peculiar herself when she realises the late-lamented Fleur-de-Lys is not going to be buried in a doggy cemetery, but is to be stuffed for posterity. And she feels even more unsteady when she and Evangeline enter the taxidermist's to discover the corpse of the owner.

• When a taxidermy shop explodes in an arson attack, two long-term stars of stage and screen and their friend are thrown into an intrigue of murder, with family, culinary and theatrical complications.

Melvyn Bragg
Crossing The Lines

This is the eagerly awaited third title in the sequence featuring the award-winning The Soldier's Return and the equally acclaimed A Son of War. Set in Britain during the 1950s, this absorbing story follows the intertwined fates of people crossing boundaries in their lives. As a teenager in the small northern town of Wigton, Joe falls in love with Rachel at a point when she is about to be wrenched from her roots. His parents face the frontiers of middle age, while Joe finds himself steered to new exhilarations as the world outside home beckons.

• The story of Joe from the end of A Son of War, aged 16, through to the end of his first year at Oxford, crossing the lines between childhood and adulthood as well as crossing from working class small town Wigton to cosmopolitan, rarified Oxford and all that promises for the future. Joe's rites of passage through adolescence will resonate with many, as will the example he sets of the new postwar generation - the first 'teenagers', rock and roll and Teddy Boys.

• Melvyn Bragg won the WH Smith Literary Award for The Soldier's Return.