Adventurous Quests Series

Can people learn to leave the past behind them, and move on? Flora has tried hard to do this but her wartime past as a secret agent just won't let go of her. The spymaster she knew then seems to be pulling the strings again as an old adversary reappears in her life. Meanwhile her friendship with Oliver Quest goes through a difficult patch after a silly argument. He takes on the task of looking after a very special painting belonging to an important industrialist and she looks for a job as a typist. Soon they are both working on different aspects of the 1951 Festival of Britain, and they unexpectedly find themselves in the middle of a murder mystery. Even after a last-minute crisis in the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion is apparently resolved, they find their investigations have to continue. For a while it's as if the pieces from two jigsaw puzzles have got mixed up and will never be sorted out again.

Is Aunt Caroline’s murder just an isolated incident or could it be part of a much larger web of crime and intrigue? The case spawns secrets of its own which threaten to separate Flora and Oliver almost as soon as they get engaged. Flora’s wartime past still hasn’t quite let go of her, but in this novel it becomes clear that there are dark secrets in Oliver Quest’s family too. The action in this mystery/thriller ranges over the length and breadth of Britain and all the seasons of the year. ‘The Four Seasons Quest’ is a sequel to ‘The Lion and Unicorn Quest’ and is set in 1952.

'The Coronation Quest' is the third in the 'Adventurous Quest' series of historical mystery novels. It is set in 1953 in Britain, mostly in London at the time when everyone was preparing for the Coronation. On a stormy night, Clemency Quest picks up a hitch-hiker on the Norfolk coast road. She doesn't realise at the time that this simple act of good-will is just the start of a sequence of events that will drag her brother, Oliver, and his fiancée, Flora, back into the complicated world of espionage and conspiracy that they have fought so hard to leave behind. As the Coronation and Oliver and Flora's wedding approach, they are never quite sure which side of the law they are on.

'A Quest for Clemency' is the fourth in a series of mystery / thriller novels by Cecilia Peartree. It is set in 1950s Britain, mostly in Cambridge. Clemency, Oliver Quest's younger sister, gets her own story after playing a supporting rôle in the previous novels in the series. After Clemency has an unsettling encounter with a stranger on a train on her way back to Cambridge, a series of unexpected events begins. Clemency and her colleague Dr Andrew Neville, a mathematician specialising in the new field of computers, are the targets of apparently random attacks from several directions. Andrew is reluctant to use the skills he acquired in a previous life to help solve the problem. while Clemency will employ anything that comes to hand - her shoes, a coal shovel, her sharp mathematical brain - to fight her way out of trouble.

This is the 5th novel in the 'Quest' series of mystery / thrillers set in the world of the 1950s. 'A Quest in Berlin' plunges Andrew and Clemency into peril as they arrive in a city that still bears the scars of war and is now at the centre of the Cold War. It's a place and a situation in which they don't know who to trust. An old friend and colleague appears in Andrew's life and persuades him to travel to Berlin with her to help with a personal crisis. Clemency certainly isn't supposed to follow them into danger, but of course she can't resist it, despite dire warnings of the dangers involved from others in the family.

This is the 6th book in the 'Adventurous Quests' series of thriller novels set in the world of the 1950s, when people hadn't quite recovered from the war and were on the brink of being plunged into a cold war stand-off with Russia. 'Quest for a Father' takes Clemency and Andrew to Spain, at a time when recovery from a different kind of war was even slower, and there were secrets and dangers round every corner. One of those secrets has a close connection with Andrew's family.