Red Brick Mystery 1
Autumn Term 1934
Manchester, England
Dorothea Roberts, a farmer’s daughter, leaves Derbyshire for the Victoria University of Manchester. Her academic career starts with a bang when she and her friends are drawn into investigating a spy-ring, after a chance encounter with a stranger on a train.Members of the Women’s Student Union Committee are dying unexpectedly and everything points towards there being a killer on campus.
Dorothea must infiltrate the committee, whilst dealing with essay deadlines and her increasing feelings for the enigmatic Dr Geraint Hadley-Brown, before the killer strikes again at the Christmas fancy dress ball. Worse still, Dorothea receives news that her friend’s daughter has been kidnapped, as a ploy
to entrap her. Can Dorothea unmask a murderer and prevent a spy-ring compromising national security?Some lessons may be too dangerous to learn.
Red Brick Mystery 2
Spring Term 1935
Manchester, England
Dorothea Roberts, a curious-minded first-year English student at university, and her friends find themselves investigating a murder that happened at the local museum, twenty years previously.
A killer struck at the opening of an exhibition featuring the St Boniface Psalter, an Anglo-Saxon manuscript, said to be cursed. A renowned archaeology professor, Professor Beaumaris, was found dead in a locked cabinet containing the tome. The murderer was never apprehended and the initial suspects have lived under the stigma of guilt ever since. These include Dorothea’s favourite English lecturer, Professor Aldridge and Theodora Hadley-Brown, the mother of Dr Geraint Hadley-Brown – full time academic and part-time spy.
To investigate, the friends organise an Easter house party at Geraint’s isolated family home, Mickering Priory, where the psalter was once guarded by monks. All the suspects are invited. The weather deteriorates and the party is stranded by severe flooding.
Cut off from the world, the killer strikes again.
Does the St Boniface Psalter hold a vital clue to the murderer’s identity?
Dorothea and her friends must prevent the killer from destroying the Boniface Psalter which may contain evidence of past crimes.
So much history, so much death, can Dorothea break the curse?
Red Brick Mystery 3
Autumn Term 1935
Reading, England
Dr Geraint Hadley-Brown, an academic and part-time MI5 operative, accepts a lectureship at the University of Reading.
Geraint’s sweetheart Dorothea Roberts, an English student at the University of Manchester, visits him and meets Gloria Clark, an Agriculture student, whose best friend Henia Haugen has disappeared whilst working on a farm in the nearby village of Harling Green.
Henia isn’t the first young woman to go missing in Harling Green – a skeleton was found in a pond many years previously.
Geraint purchases a cottage in the village and makes plans to ask Dorothea to marry him.
Dorothea and her new friends discover some of Harling Green’s more sordid secrets and uncover a Soviet plot to kill a famous genetics professor. But where is Henia?
Meanwhile Geraint is given a dangerous assignment by MI5 and stumbles across a body. One of his seemingly nice, new neighbours is a killer.
Can Dorothea and friends save the professor from assassination, locate Henia Haugen and expose the dark underbelly of this idyllic village?
