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Jennie Melville
Newest Release
Gwendoline Williams was born on 19 August 1922 in Blackheath, South London, England, UK, daughter of Alice (Lee) and Alfred Edward Williams, her younger twin brothers are also authors. Educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she read History, and later lectured there. On 16th October 1949, she married Dr Lionel Harry Butler (1923-1981), a professor of medieval history at University of St. Andrews and historian, Fellow of All Souls and Principal of Royal Holloway College. The marriage had a daughter, Lucilla Butler.
In 1956, she started to published John Coffin novels under her married name, Gwendoline Butler. In 1962, she decided used her grandmother's name, Jennie Melville as pseudonym to sing her Charmian Daniels novels. She was credited for inventing the "woman's police procedural". In addition to her mystery series, she also wrote romantic novels. In 1981, her novel The Red Staircase won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award by the Romantic Novelists' Association.
Full Series List in Order
Charmian Daniels Mysteries
1 - Come Home and Be Killed (1962)2 - Burning Is a Substitute for Loving (Oct-2007)
3 - Murderers' Houses (1964)
4 - There Lies Your Love (1965)
5 - Nell Alone (1966)
6 - A Different Kind of Summer (1967)
7 - New Kind of Killer (1970)
7 - A New Kind of Killer, an Old Kind of Death (Oct-1970)
8 - Murder Has a Pretty Face (1981)
9 - Murder in the Garden (1987)
9 - Death in the Garden (Mar-1987)
10 - Windsor Red (Apr-1988)
11 - A Cure for Dying (1989)
11 - Making Good Blood (Apr-1990)
12 - Witching Murder (Jul-1991)
13 - Footsteps in the Blood (Apr-1990)
14 - Dead Set (Dec-1992)
15 - Whoever Has the Heart (Apr-1994)
16 - Baby Drop (Jun-1994)
16 - A Death in the Family (Jan-1995)
17 - The Morbid Kitchen (1995)
18 - The Woman Who Was Not There (1996)
19 - Revengeful Death (1998)
20 - Stone Dead ()
21 - Dead Again ()
22 - Loving Murder (Sep-2001)
Book List in Order: 38 titles
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Come Home and Be Killed
- 1962
- / Law Enforcement
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A new addition to the mystery novel: the young policewoman Charmian Daniels, shy and determined at once. Faces on this occasion with a conundrum of domestic aspect, which seems to hide, however, more intricate and horrible. Kathy is retracted and ...
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Murderers' Houses
- 1964
- / Law Enforcement
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Two people come drifting into the prosperous and growing town of Deerham Hills, forty miles from London. One, already dead and in the river, is an unidentified woman: the other, also faceless, is a hater of women and a murderer. 'It's a classic,' say...
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There Lies Your Love
- 1965
- / Law Enforcement
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In Deerham Hills a girl is missing and another suspected of harming her. An older woman is found dead: murder or suicide? Then there are the terrifying letters sent to Tom Gilroy, another suicide case, and a Peeping Tom. Charmian Daniels, Jennie Melv...
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Nell Alone
- 1966
- / Law Enforcement
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It was a big old violent city where Nell lived, alone since her sister had married and moved away. This city was full of secrets and strange crimes. An unidentified body was discovered not far away from where Nell worked. People said it was dangerous...
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A Different Kind of Summer
- 1967
- / Law Enforcement
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The coffin arrived by train. It was labelled urgent and addressed to the 'Deerham Hills Hospital: Pathology Department', although nobody at the hospital seemed to be expecting it. So it waited. But the contents of this coffin were eventually to pr...
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New Kind of Killer
- 1970
- / Law Enforcement
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Sergeant Charmian Daniels of the Deerham Hills police force was at Midport University on a three-fold mission-to lecture to local police cadets, to keep an eye on student trouble-makers and to start a diploma in criminology. The subject of her thesis...
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A New Kind of Killer, an Old Kind of Death
- Oct-1970
- / Law Enforcement
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Sergeant Charmian Daniels of the Deerham Hills police force was at Midport University on a three-fold mission-to lecture to local police cadets, to keep an eye on student trouble-makers and to start a diploma in criminology. The subject of her thesis...
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The Summer Assassin
- Nov-1971
- / Mystery
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“What are you?” I asked. “What are you really?” “You know what I am.” She turned her head away. “Ordinary. In trouble.” “Not an ordinary woman. You’re a raider. Someone who comes in, takes what they want and disappears.” She...
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Murder Has a Pretty Face
- 1981
- / Law Enforcement
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THE CORPSE WAS MALE. No one claimed him. Nobody wanted him--least of all, Police Inspector Charmian Daniels. But why did he have her name and telephone number on a card in his pocket? Several large-scale robberies of furs and jewels and a myste...
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The Hand of Glass
- Apr-1983
- / Mystery
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Lily Bell had been brought up by her sister Merry after their parent died in a car crash. Despite their age difference, the sisters got on well and Merry held Lily spellbound by her apparent ability to move objects without touching them--a Victorian ...
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Listen to the Children
- Mar-1986
- / Mystery
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They are ordinary people to whom something extraordinary is happening. This is the theme of a complex and most sinister mystery. It is a story full of fascination and foreboding in which the solution to the mystery is approached.......
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Murder in the Garden
- 1987
- / Law Enforcement
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Original title: "Death in the Garden". The Garden is a London enclave, home to best friends and busy career women Edwina, Cassie and Alice. The trio attends the wedding of Edwina's father to his second wife, where Edwina is preoccupied with though...
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Death in the Garden
- Mar-1987
- / Law Enforcement
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The Garden is a London enclave, home to best friends and busy career women Edwina, Cassie and Alice. The trio attends the wedding of Edwina's father to his second wife, where Edwina is preoccupied with thoughts of her pregnancy by a lover recently ki...
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Windsor Red
- Apr-1988
- / Law Enforcement
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Policewoman Charmain Daniels' innate curiosity of feminist crime takes her on sabbatical from the force to research her thesis in historic Windsor. Her subjects are an odd group of six female ex-cons she's dubbed her Gang of Girls. But a series of...
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A Cure for Dying
- 1989
- / Law Enforcement
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Also edited as: "Making Good Blood". This crime novel features Chief Superintendent Charmian Daniels who finds herself caught up in the investigation of a series of murders. All the victims are female and it looks as though she may be next on the ...
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Footsteps in the Blood
- Apr-1990
- / Police Procedural
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A recently promoted--and deeply resented--Chief Superintendent Charmain Daniels is again involved in a murder investigation, and she pursues the killer of a young blackmailer. It emerges that others, including Charmain herself, when evidence begins t...
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Making Good Blood
- Apr-1990
- / General Fiction
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Original title: "A Cure for Dying". This crime novel features Chief Superintendent Charmian Daniels who finds herself caught up in the investigation of a series of murders. All the victims are female and it looks as though she may be next on the k...
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Witching Murder
- Jul-1991
- / Law Enforcement
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Charmian Daniels, chief metropolitan police superintendent of Central London, interrupts a medical leave when beautiful Vivien Charles, member of a witches' coven, is found fatally stabbed in her home, her corpse surrounded by cult objects. An autops...
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Whoever Has the Heart
- Apr-1994
- / Law Enforcement
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As a refuge from her job, police inspector Charmian Daniels buys a restful weekend country cottage in the picturesque village of Bridewell. Charmian retreats for a well-earned rest, but uncovers a host of demons from the village's past when finds a ...
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A Death in the Family
- Jan-1995
- / Police Procedural
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Original title: Baby Drop. Policewoman Charmian Daniels drove home from Slough to Windsor on the day the castle burned. Windsor may look picturesque and old-fashioned, but Charmian knows all too well that the charming village is not immune to the ...
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The Morbid Kitchen
- 1995
- / Law Enforcement
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High-ranking policewoman Charmain Daniels had not been in Windsor at the time but she had heard all the details of the murder at Miss Bailey’s Nursey School, a murder which had shocked the local community to the core. Ten years ago, just as the sum...
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The Woman Who Was Not There
- 1996
- / Law Enforcement
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Peculiar events are happening in Windsor. A rundown brothel stands empty except for erotic wax models which move taking on a life of their own. A London prostitute goes missing. A boy finds a shoe containing a women's severed foot. An apparently dead...
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Revengeful Death
- 1998
- / Law Enforcement
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In the recently abandoned home of her neighbour, Alice Hardy, Mary discovers a horrific scene -- a young boy cowering in a cupboard and the body of a young man, stabbed to death, his face painted red, white and blue and his thymus gland expertly cut ...
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Complicity
- Mar-2001
- / Romantic Suspense
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Up till now Stella's memories have been clouded by grief: for ten years she has mourned the death of her husband. And yet she is so young, so beautiful, so full of curiosity... Which is why she can't resist the enigmatic figure who appears one night,...
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Loving Murder
- Sep-2001
- / Law Enforcement
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Charmian Daniels heads the investigation of a man murdered within sight of Windsor castle. Then things get closer to home when another man is murdered in the tower-block where Daniels works . . ....
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Burning Is a Substitute for Loving
- Oct-2007
- / Law Enforcement
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Charmian Daniels, the tenacious and attractive policewoman detective, keeps a card index on the inhabitants of Deerham Hills, a village forty miles from London which has little petty crime: when things break out there they are serious. Jennie Melv...
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Raven's Forge
- Mar-2009
- / Gothic
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Gilda Reynolds had come to her ancestral beginnings. Raven's Forge was only the ghost of a once proud industrial town. But Reynolds House was still habitable. It would do as a home for her and Maggie, her actress mother. Gilda was happy here---until ...
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Dragon's Eye
I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD WHEN I FIRST SAW MARKABY. I NEVER FORGOT. I WANTED IT DESPERATELY. NOW TEN YEARS LATER IT WAS MINE. When Kate Melrose first fell in love with the strange old mansion on Dragon's Eye, an island off the North Sea coast, she fe...
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Hunter in the Shadows
Pawn in a Game of Terror Her name was Stella. She was a widow, still young, still lovely, but with her memory clouded by grief. She did not know that a dark conspiracy was stripping her of friends, relatives, protectors. She did not know the stran...
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Ironwood
I stood there, frozen quite unable to say a word. A window on a new world had opened to me. All the time I had been going about my life, cooking, choosing clothes, getting my hair washed, this wall of suspicion had been building up all around me. Wit...
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Nun's Castle
“I DON’T WANT YOU TO GO BACK TO NUN’S CASTLE, “ TED SAID, “ I DON’T THINK IT’S SAFE FOR YOU THERE.” But Selina had to go back. The mysteries that began to surround her childhood home drew her there again. Selina could not belie...
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Tarot's Tower
Christabel Warwick has taken over her family's ancient observatory in the English countryside, ostensibly to watch a comet, actually to keep a long-standing (six years!) rendezvous with her childhood sweetheart Piers. Alas, Piers turns out to have be...
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Dead Again
Joan Dingham is coming out of prison, and only one person is missing from her old gang, Diana King, who died years ago. But before Joan is out, there is another spate of murders, each corpse bearing the same markings as Joan's victims. Could Joan...
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Stone Dead
Chief Superintendent Charmian Daniels is expecting a pleasant evening at the opening of her friend's new bookshop, until a gruesome discovery is made. A stone coffin is found in the garden containing the body of a woman. Winifred Eagle and Bir...
