Friendship, love, and misplaced hope drive the characters who populate a new collection of Maeve Binchy stories.

Lottie just knows her boyfriend is going to propose to her during lunch at one of London's fanciest restaurants. What he does propose is a trip abroad and not a trip down the aisle. When an old flame of Lottie's calls her out of the blue and reminds her that they had a pact that at age thirty, if each as still unmarried, they would marry each other, Lottie jumps at the chance. No dating, just a quick trip down the aisle and a honeymoon on the Greek...

Poppy Wyatt has never felt luckier. She is about to marry her ideal man, Magnus Tavish, but in one afternoon her "happily ever after" begins to fall apart. Not only has she lost her engagement ring in a hotel fire drill but in the panic that follows, her phone is stolen. As she paces shakily around the lobby, she spots an abandoned phone in a trash can. Finders keepers! Now she can leave a number for the hotel to contact her when they find her ring....

Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce is an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. In the summer of 1950, a series of inexplicable events strikes Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that her family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp pinned to its beak. Later, Flavia finds a man dying in the cucumber patch. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw.

Camped in her horse-drawn caravan at Buckshaw, a young Gypsy woman is charged with the abduction-and then the murder - of a local child, and Flavia must draw upon her encyclopaedic knowledge of poisons - and Gypsy lore - to prevent a grave miscarriage of justice.

"Detective Elise King investigates a man's disappearance in a seaside town where the locals and weekenders are at odds with each other in this rich and captivating new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow. Elise King is a successful and ambitious detective--or she was before a medical leave left her unsure if she'd ever return to work. She now spends most days watching the growing tensions in her small seaside town of Ebbing--the...

Mrs. Braithwaite, the self-appointed queen of her English village, finds herself dethroned, despised, and dismissed at the age of fifty following her husband's selfish divorce petition. And, to make matters worse, a family secret is now at risk of being revealed. Undeterred, she sets off hotfoot to London to find the only person she has left: her clever daughter, Betty, who took work there at the first rumbles of war. But when she arrives, Betty's...

"Colonel de Luce, in desperate need of funds, rents his beloved estate of Buckshaw over to a film company. They will be shooting a movie over the Christmas holidays, filming scenes in the stately manse with a famous and reclusive star. She is widely despised, so it is to no one's surprise when she turns up murdered, strangled by a length of film from her own movies! With the snow raging outside and Buckshaw locked in, the house is full of suspects....

"On a spring morning in 1951, eleven-year-old chemist and aspiring detective Flavia de Luce gathers with her family at the railway station, awaiting the return of her long-lost mother, Harriet. Yet upon the train's arrival in the English village of Bishop's Lacey, Flavia is approached by a tall stranger who whispers a cryptic message into her ear. Moments later, he is dead, mysteriously pushed under the train by someone in the crowd. Who was this...

When the tomb of St. Tancred is opened at a village church in Bishop's Lacey, its shocking contents lead to another case for Flavia de Luce, where greed, pride, and murder result in old secrets coming to light.