January 30th 1649. England is not a country that wishes to execute its divinely-appointed king. Yet Charles 1 finds himself shivering on a scaffold in Whitehall, with the axe man by his side . . . In this brilliantly atmospheric novel, Simon Parke explores one of the most gripping tales in English history. He weaves together the four coinciding stories of Charles, including his extraordinary year-long imprisonment on the Isle of Wight . . . Robert Hammond, the poor man who found himself the king’s gaoler . . . Charles’ remarkable mistress (written out of the records), the super-spy Jane Whorwood . . . and of course, the brilliant and depressed Oliver Cromwell, who is working through his own demons of religion, politics, love and death.

The Stormhaven Etiquette Society, a secretive affair, unafraid to name and shame those who transgress Model Services, the town’s only brothel, a discreet but busy presence in Church Street Bybuckle Asylum, a desolate shell on the seafront that housed over seven hundred mental patients prior to ‘care in the community’ What brings these three together is a cold-blooded execution that both shocks and confounds. For lying dead in the empty asylum, tied to an old metal bed frame, is a pillar of the establishment. Or is she? Sleuthing couple DI Tamsin Shah and her remarkable cleric uncle join forces once again to solve a murder mystery that reveals dark secrets from Abbot Peter’s tempestuous student years. ‘Do we ever leave anything behind?’ he wonders as the killer swings the gun barrel towards him . . . ‘To a long list of much-loved detective pairings, which includes Holmes and Watson, Poirot and Hastings, and Morse and Lewis, we must now add Abbot Peter and Tamsin Shah’. Church Times

The Telegraph’s obituaries pages are renowned for their quality of writing and capacity to distil the essence of a life from its most extraordinary moments. A unique mix of heroism, ingenuity, infamy and the bizarre, Thinker, Failure, Soldier, Jailer collects the very best of those obituaries to present an endlessly absorbing compendium of human endeavour. Organised day by day around the calendar year, with each life presented on the date it ended, the book features hundreds of remarkable stories. World statesmen jostle with glamorous celluloid stars, pioneering boffins sit alongside chart-topping rock ’n’ rollers, while artists and their muses mingle with record-breaking sportsmen, Victoria Cross winners, spies, showgirls and captains of industry – as well as the titans of rather more esoteric fields. Here, for instance, can be found Britain’s greatest goat breeder, a hangman who campaigned to abolish the death penalty, a priest to Soho’s pimps, a cross-dressing mountaineer and a minister who preached a gospel of avarice - donations in notes only, please, as ‘change makes me nervous’. A treasure trove of human virtue, vice and trivia, Thinker, Failure, Soldier, Jailer is the perfect gift for the armchair psychologist in all of us.