Heathwick, September 1939. Britain has just gone to war, and Barbara Sparks, a sharp-tongued Oxford graduate, has taken over the village post office after her father's death. She expects ration books and blackout notices. Then a sealed letter turns up addressed to a man no one in the village has heard of in years. It has no stamp and no return address.

Barbara's curiosity gets the better of her. She and a mysterious newcomer follow a trail of coded files, old photographs and half-remembered rumours. It leads from midnight meetings at an abandoned railway halt, through the quiet quads of Oxford, to the smoke-filled clubs of London. Someone in Heathwick doesn't want the past dug up, and they are watching her every move.

With dry wit, a stubborn conscience and a very efficient filing system, Barbara sets out to find out what was done in the shadows before the war, and who is still protecting it.

Eleven-year-old Emma visits her great-grandmother Eleanor's old house, where the clocks have all stopped and the walls seem to breathe. Behind a tilted book in the library, she finds a heavy black iron key with strangely grown, root-like teeth. Eleanor is terrified when she sees it and orders Emma to put it back. Emma obeys, but the key keeps calling to her through whispers and nightmares, and she wakes each morning with dirt under her fingernails.

A Silence of Orchids is a colonial-era murder mystery set on a remote river outpost in early-1900s Malaya. Sergeant Lindsay Crowell, freshly posted from Sandhurst, arrives to find the jungle guarding an old secret: an abandoned plantation locals call the "ghost house," where planter Giles Henry was murdered years earlier and his wife, Nancy, vanished without a trace.