"Ingrid works on a gargantuan cruise ship where she spends her days reorganizing the gift shop shelves and waiting for long-term guests to drop dead in the aisles. On her days off, she disembarks from the ship, wasting the hours aimlessly following tourists around, drinking the local alcohol, and buying clothes she never intends to wear. It's not a bad life. At least it distracts her from thinking about the other life--the other person--she left behind...

Los Angeles police detective Peter Decker had grown very close to Rina Lazarus' young sons, as he had to their mother, and he looked forward to spending a day of his vacation camping with the boys. When one of the boys stumbles on two human skeletons, charred beyond recognition but identified by a forensic dentist as teenage girls, vacation time is over for Decker. The father of a teenage daughter himself, Decker throws himself into the murder case,...

Banished! is how twelve-year-old Flavia de Luce laments her predicament when her father and Aunt Felicity ship her off to Miss Bodycote's Female Academy, the boarding school that her mother attended across the sea in Canada. Yet the sun has not yet risen on Flavia's first day in captivity when a gift lands at her feet. And Flavia being Flavia, a budding chemist and sleuth, that gift is a charred and mummified body which tumbles out of a bedroom chimney....