The Readiness is All · A Tom Musgrave Omnibus

"The grimmer aspects of Elizabethan London come alive in Peter Tonkin's . . . Master of Defence series" **Publishers Weekly**

Peter Tonkin’s bestselling Elizabethan murder mystery novels *The Point of Death* , *A Head for Murder* , *A Midwinter Murder* and *The Silent Murder* featuring sleuth and sword master Tom Musgrave are collected together in a single volume.

**The Point of Death**

London, 1594. The opening night of ‘Romeo and Juliet’.

Mercutio is found murdered in the middle of the play - but it is real, not stage, blood that flows from his body.

Tom Musgrove, is hired by the theatre owners to solve the murder case as quickly and quietly as possible.

As Tom plunges into the mean streets of Elizabethan London he soon realises he has jumped blindly into a web of murderous intrigue, which has already claimed the lives of Kit Marlowe and Francis Walsingham.

**A Head for Murder**

London 1594.

Tom Musgrave rescues a beautiful girl from under the feet of a mob playing football on London Bridge.

But her breathless thanks are drowned by horrified screams. The football has vanished.

In its place, a severed head is rolling down into Southwark, into the jurisdiction of Tom's old friend, the Bishop's Bailiff Talbot Law.

The skull has fallen from the Great Stone Gateway, where the heads of recently executed traitors are displayed. But the decapitated victim was no traitor and her head, like her sex, is markedly different from the others up there.

Tom and Talbot begin their investigation with a search down-river. All too swiftly they discover a woman's headless body....But this body does not match the head.

A killer is at work. And no one knows where they will strike next.

**A Midwinter Murder**

Christmas 1594.

Tom is called away from the dress rehearsal of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' to receive terrible news: his brother John has been found dead, frozen with terror in the branches of a tree.

Rumour has it that the Barguest, a mythical monstrous hound, is loose on the Scottish Borders . . .

Tom rides north to investigate – only to find himself embroiled in a dark, deadly political conspiracy, where even his swordsmanship and logic may not help him…

**The Silent Murder**

London, 1595.

The Master of Defence Tom Musgrave rushes to the aid of a young messenger, the victim of a sudden, apparently unprovoked attack in the street outside his house.

In the dead boy’s possession Tom finds a bloodied letter intended for his eyes only.

And he manages to piece together a worrying message.

The missive contains a desperate cry for help from the beautiful Countess Cotehel, who is mute as a result of a terrible trauma.

Then a second body is found – belonging to another of the Countess’s servants.