When Children's Book Author Oliver Swithin finds his friend's body floating in a Trafalgar Square fountain, he can't convince the police to treat the death as a murder. But then more corpses turn up daily - on a tube station platform, in a botanical gardens hothouse, even in the middle of Piccadilly Circus - each killed in a bizarre manner. Oliver joins his uncle, Detective Superintendent Mallard, in a race to uncover the pattern behind the murders. But if they succeed, will the solution help them reach the next victim before the killer strikes again? An Embarrassment of Corpses, by first-time author Alan Beechey, is a comic mystery with a cast of British eccentrics and an ingenious plot.

When a young girl disappears from her London home, the prime suspect is cult leader Nigel Tapster, but when Tapster is poisoned during a church service, the questions and the case get more complicated

If a blackmail letter drives a man to suicide, is the sender guilty of murder? "Yes," says Oliver Swithin, author of bestselling Finsbury the Ferret children's stories and amateur sleuth, who is on holiday in an ancient village. A midnight streak with his naked girlfriend―Scotland Yard's Effie Strongitham―abruptly ends in the discovery of a corpse. Retired radiobroadcaster Dennis Breedlove has hanged himself from the old gibbet. Evidence suggests blackmail may have driven this celebrity to suicide. Irresistibly intrigued, Oliver believes discovering the dead man's secret will lead to the identity of the blackmailer. But in Britain today, when shame is a ticket to fame, why suicide? What if it wasn't? When the mystery abruptly turns inside out, black-clad strangers attack Oliver in the night. The Vicar behaves strangely. So do the village's five unmarried Bennet sisters, a mysterious monk, the persistent, self-effacing Underwood Tooth, and Oliver's Uncle Tim, Effie's superior at the Yard and a part-time Shakespearean actor. Plus Oliver's aunt and his mother. Who else might play a role in This Private Plot ? Two William Shakespeares? It's time to put the laugh back into slaughter with the long-awaited third chapter in the career of Oliver Swithin. Yet under the clever wordplay and bawdy jokes lies an inventive and, yes, scholarly plot.