Jonathan Gash
Gold From Gemini

Lovejoy, the racy, knowledgeable, irreverent antiques dealer who delighted readers of the award-winning The Judas Pair - is back. Not even a spot of baby-minding and endeavouring to instruct an assistant whose talents (non-apparent and perhaps non-existent) were never intended for the antiques trade, was going to keep body and soul together much longer. So when he learned from a woman - and who else would Lovejoy learn from? - of a skilled faker who had left a series of duplicate clues to an apparently mythical 'find' of Roman treasure, his unfailing instinct told him the find was genuine and he'd better unravel the clues.

• Jonathan Gash is a doctor of medicine, whose knowledge of antiques developed as a student when he worked as a runner between traders in the London street markets. His first novel, The Judas Pair, won the John Creasey Award for the best first crime novel of the year in 1977. The Lovejoy books were made into a popular television series.

Ethel Lina White
She Faded Into Thin Air

Viola Green is terrified. Trapped in the same strange, dark room in which Beatrice Stirling vanished before her very eyes, Viola fears it will happen again - this time to her! Accused by the Stirlings of having a hand in their daughter's disappearance, Viola sets out to match her wits against an evil and secret menace. But all the while she knows that before she can solve the dreadful mystery of the shadowy room, Viola could very well become its next victim.

• Ethel Lina White (1876-1945) was born in Abergavenny in Wales. Three of her crime novels, The Spiral Staircase, The Lady Vanishes and The Unseen were made into films.

The Devereux is a nice residential hotel which caters for a nice class of guest. But the arrival of Mrs Pargeter, an attractive widow, seems to act as a catalyst of disaster for everyone concerned with the hotel. On the morning after her arrival the corpse of one of the frailer residents is found at the foot of the main stairs, and shortly after that another death shakes the gentility of the hotel. Mrs Pargeter decides to investigate herself, discovering that more than one person in the Devereux has a motive for murder.

• Simon Brett worked as a radio and TV producer before taking up writing full-time. He is the author of the extremely popular Charles Paris and Mrs Pargeter detective series. Mrs Pargeter is a widow with an aptitude for amateur sleuthing. A Nice Class of Corpse is the first book in the series.