Four  stories - swift, cunning murder mysteries, two of which feature the young Adam Dalgliesh.  A pedantic, respectable, censorious clerk's secret taste for pornography is only the first reason he finds for not coming forward as a witness to a murder . . . A best-selling crime novelist describes the crime she herself was involved in fifty years earlier . . . Dalgliesh's godfather implores him to reinvestigate a notorious murder that might ease the godfather's mind about an inheritance, but which will reveal a truth that even the supremely upstanding Adam Dalgliesh will keep to himself.

The Mistletoe Murder; A Very Commonplace Murder; The Boxdale Inheritance; The Twelve Clues Of Christmas.