When Trevor Hawkins hits the open road in his beat-up old camper van with his incorrigible dog, Milly, his quest for adventure soon spirals dangerously out of control. The simple act of flushing a hotel toilet transforms his life from redundant sales assistant to fugitive from a gang of psychopathic villains, the police and MI5.

Then there’s private detective Sandra Gray, who could cheerfully throttle him for turning a well paid, piece-of-cake job into a total nightmare. Or could she?

With more twists and turns than an Escher-designed bobsleigh run, Lifting the Lid is a comic thriller about how a single, split-second decision can change someone’s life forever.

The assignment in Greece might have been the answer to Trevor and Sandra's problems except for one thing. Someone was trying to frame them for murder... with a watermelon.

'Money for old rope,' Sandra had said when they accepted the job of looking after the ageing Marcus Ingleby at his villa in Greece, but when a neighbour brings a gift for the old man, the prospect of spending most of the rest of their lives in a Greek prison becomes a terrifying reality.

Meanwhile, Ingleby has problems of his own. During his seventy-odd years, his cupboard has accumulated plenty of skeletons, one of which is about to be rattled by a couple of ex-cons and a retired police inspector from his murky past.

Heads You Lose is the sequel to Lifting the Lid and the second book in the 'Lifting the Lid' series, featuring Sandra Gray, Trevor Hawkins and his incorrigible dog, Milly.

WANTED: Gainful employment of an adventurous nature but without risk of personal physical harm. (Can supply own time travel machine if required.)

When Horace Tweed places an advertisement in a national magazine, the last thing he expects is to be commissioned to travel back through time in search of the long extinct Holey* Snail.

But this isn’t just any old snail. The helix pertusa is possessed of an extraordinary and highly desirable property, and Horace’s quest leads him and his co-adventurers to Ancient Greece and a variety of near-death encounters with beings both mythological and not so mythological.

Meanwhile, Detective Chief Inspector Harper Collins has her hands full trying to track down a secret order of fundamentalist monks whom she suspects of committing a series of murders – the same monks who are determined to thwart Horace in his...

...Quest for the Holey Snail.

Everything you never realised you wanted to know about Greece or didn’t dare to ask.

How do you avoid ordering a double tomato for your pine marten when booking a hotel room?

Should olive harvesting be registered with the Dangerous Sports Association?

After living in Greece for thirteen years, writer and reluctant olive farmer Rob Johnson has got used to most of the things that he found so bizarre at the beginning. Most, but not all.

Seeing an elderly woman crushed to death under a baby grand piano is not the best start to anyone’s day, and Max Dempsey’s is about to get a whole lot worse.

When sacked bank manager turned bank robber Max Dempsey (aka Simon Golightly) finds himself deep in debt to dodgy undertaker Danny Bishop, he’s prepared to do almost anything to pay it off and keep all of his fingers.

But he’s likely to lose a lot more than his fingers when he agrees to do a “little job” for Danny and unintentionally crosses psychopathic Greek gangster, Nikos Spiropoulos.

Meanwhile, Bernard Pemberton and his granddaughter Tess are on a road trip to scatter their beloved Dottie’s ashes on a Scottish hilltop, but is it really her ashes in the cremation urn or something else altogether?

"Cremains" is a crime caper that twists and turns its way towards a conclusion that even Max himself couldn’t have predicted.

Careless talk costs lives - and with zero chance of a refund.

Early August in Greece wasn't ideal for sitting inside a stifling hot camper van to carry out a surveillance operation, but money was tight, and Trevor and Sandra had been in no position to turn down any job that was offered to them.

But a little physical discomfort was nothing compared to what came next. Blackmail, murder and kidnapping had definitely not been on the agenda when wealthy businessman Alexandros Barkas hired them to get evidence of his wife's infidelity.

And what was the reason for freelance hitman Jimmy MacFarland's sudden appearance? Was it sheer coincidence or was he intent on wreaking the ultimate revenge on Trevor and Sandra?

Dishing the Dirt is the third book in the comedy thriller series Lifting the Lid, featuring Sandra Gray, Trevor Hawkins and his incorrigible dog, Milly.

“If business didn’t pick up soon, we’d be staring into the abyss of what economists might call ‘totally screwed’.”

But as chance would have it, Max Dempsey and Partners: Funeral Directors are about to be saved from financial ruin by a mysterious stranger with a wad of cash. It was the first time they’d been asked to collect a body from France, but what could possibly go wrong?

For a start, the body in question isn’t at all what they’d been expecting, and all of a sudden Max and his partners find themselves catapulted into a world of espionage, blackmail, kidnapping, double-dealing and Russian assassins.

The name’s Dempsey. Max Dempsey. Shaken, stirred and totally freaked out.

‘The twists and turns kept me on the edge of my seat, laughing all the time... Lovers of comedic thrillers are sure to enjoy Lifting the Lid.’ – San Francisco Review of Books

When redundant sales assistant Trevor Hawkins accidentally breaks a hotel toilet cistern, his life takes more twists and turns than he could possibly have predicted. And many of them are not the kind he would ever have wanted.

This is a set of the first three full length novels in the Lifting the Lid comedy thriller series .