Madeleine Newbury

Lady Caroline Faye meets Lord Vane Brecon and is attracted to him. When she finds out that he is being accused of a murder he did not commit, she sets out to prove him innocent

A young local girl is murdered by a mentally disturbed youth, but the villagers blame a stranger, an Italian traveling showman and his bear, rather than see the rot in their own camp.

The lives of Bodie and Doyle, top agents for Britain's CI5 (Criminal Intelligence 5), and their controller, George Cowley. The mandate of CI5 was to fight terrorism and similar high-profile crimes. Cowley, a hard ex-MI5 operative, hand-picked each of his men. Bodie is a cynical ex-SAS paratrooper and mercenary whose nature ran to controlled violence, while his partner, Doyle, comes to CI5 from the regular police force, and is more of an open minded liberal. Their relationship is often contentious, but they are the top men in their field, and the ones to whom Cowley always assigned to the toughest cases.