Books by Barry Durham

An unexpected legacy enables Valerie McKellern to buy her first house: a newly built semi-detached on an estate that is still being developed in the Lancashire countryside.Unfortunately for Val, it appears to be haunted.That does not deter her best friend Leigh however for when Val asks if she would consider a house share, Leigh jumps at the chance - especially after an encounter with her pervy landlord.After contacting Ratcliffe and Kat, a pair of private detectives who specialize in 'Unusual Investigations', they manage to discover the strange type of entity involved in the haunting.However, as work continues on the rest of the estate, suddenly body parts begin to turn up in one of the newly dug foundations.Detective Chief Inspector Stone finds himself heading up a murder investigation that has its root causes in events on the North Island of New Zealand more than a hundred years ago at the turn of the twentieth century.

On the edge of a playing field in the Lancashire town of Longridge is an abandoned railway tunnel that is reputedly haunted. It used to serve an old stone quarry that has now been given a new lease of life as a holiday park. Six eighteen-year-old friends are staying in a static caravan at the park when one night a violent storm forces them to stay indoors. One of the girls downloads a talking Ouija Board app to her laptop for 'a bit of fun', but the following morning the three boys in the group have gone missing. Detective Sergeant Pauline Pilkington is handed the job of finding out what has happened to them but has little luck until DCI Stone calls in the Unusual Investigations team of former Detective Constable Jerry Ratcliffe and his partner, the corporeal spirit of murdered witch Kat Hewitt. Their enquires lead them to an encounter with a boggart known as The Headless Woman of Longridge. Then Sergeant Pilkington disappears as well.

On one of his nightly patrols Figaro The Cat Detective bumps into a strange black cat. It seems Meow 5 have sent a secret agent to the villagebecause they have heard that robbers plan to raid the local cheese factory and steal the bombs that are made there. Agent D (the strange black cat) asks Figaro for help and he, in turn, calls on the village cats and his best human friends in all the world. But how are they going to stop two very determined robbers?(Illustrated by the pupils of Lea Endowed CE Primary School, Preston, UK)

Someone has been hanging coloured bags of dog pooh on bushes! Figaro the Cat Detective and his partner Harrison the toad set out to discover the culprit and, with the help of his two best human friends in all the world, stop it happening again.

In a tarn in a country park in the heart of the Lancashire countryside floats the murdered body of a young man. His death creates plenty of problems for Detective Chief Inspector Alf Stone because, according to the police pathologist, this is not the first time he has appeared on the autopsy slab. The investigation uncovers the age-old 'were' tradition of the county where witches were able to transform into hares to escape the law. Urged on by three ancient deities, young witch Mary Conway learns the art of the 'were' as part of a plan to bring to an end the resurgence of the illegal 'sport' of hare coursing once and for all. But her intervention uncovers a far more sinister threat: camped not far from the park are a group of renegade Romani led by a wolf-witch. They have been forced to flee from the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania and now plan to set up a colony on Wolf Fell in the hills above the village of Chipping.