University professor Gela Nathaniel must make her new master’s program in multimedia art succeed. If it doesn’t, then Royal Hastings University will cut her funding and she’ll be out of the job she loves. The six students in this inaugural course will be key to that success. But how well has she selected the team? At the end of the academic year, when the examiner arrives to grade the students’ final project, he finds himself asking what happened. Because if someone in that course isn’t in mortal danger, then they are already dead. But who, and why? He wants us to read through the students’ coursework, texts, message boards and final essays to see if we can find the answers. Only one thing is certain: nothing about this course has been left to chance, and each of these students has their own very different agenda.

Everyone knows the story of the Alperton Angels: the cult that brainwashed a teenage girl into believing her baby was the anti-Christ. When the girl came to her senses and called the police, the Angels committed suicide and mother and baby disappeared. Now, true-crime author Amanda Bailey is looking to revive her career by writing a book on the case. The Alperton baby has turned 18; finding them will be the scoop of the year. But rival author Oliver Menzies is just as smart, better connected and also on the baby’s trail. As Amanda and Oliver are forced to collaborate, they realize that the truth about the Angels is much darker and stranger than they’d ever imagined, and in pursuit of the story they risk becoming part of it.

The Christmas season has arrived in Lower Lockwood, and the Fairway Players are busy rehearsing their festive holiday production of “Jack and the Beanstalk” to raise money for a new church roof. But despite the season, goodwill is distinctly lacking among the amateur theater enthusiasts with petty rivalries, a possibly asbestos-filled beanstalk, and some perennially absent players behind the scenes. Of course, there’s also the matter of the dead body onstage. Who possibly could have had the victim on their naughty list? Join lawyers Femi and Charlotte as they investigate Christmas letters, examine emails and pore over police transcripts to identify both the victim and killer before the curtain closes on their holiday production --- for good.

Forty years ago, Steven “Smithy” Smith found a copy of a famous children’s book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. When he showed it to his remedial English teacher, Miss Iles, she believed that it was part of a secret code that ran through all of Twyford’s novels. And when she disappeared on a class field trip, Smithy became convinced that she had been right. Now, out of prison after a long stretch, Smithy decides to investigate the mystery that has haunted him for decades. But it soon becomes clear that Edith Twyford wasn’t just a writer of forgotten children’s stories. The Twyford Code holds a great secret, and Smithy may just have the key.

The Fairway Players, a local theater group, is in the midst of rehearsals when tragedy strikes the family of director Martin Hayward and his wife Helen, the play’s star. Their young granddaughter has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and with an experimental treatment costing a tremendous sum, their fellow castmates rally to raise the money to give her a chance at survival. But not everybody is convinced of the experimental treatment’s efficacy --- nor of the good intentions of those involved. As tension grows within the community, things come to a shocking head at the explosive dress rehearsal. The next day, a dead body is found, and soon an arrest is made. In the run-up to the trial, two young lawyers sift through the material with a growing suspicion that a killer may be hiding in plain sight.