Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. Albert Campion is called in by the British government to establish ownership of the tiny but oil-rich principality of Averna on the Adriatic Coast. The aristocratic but impoverished Fitton family are laying claim to it but the deeds are nowhere to be found. The Fittons live in the eccentric Suffolk village of Pontisbright where much of this lively mystery takes place. Campion is particularly taken with the young flame-haired Lady Amanda who later in the series becomes his wife. Amanda however declares she’ll marry him ‘when she’s ready.’ With the help of his loyal chums, and his sidekick, the ex-convict Magersfontein Lugg, Campion and the Fittons are up against a criminal financier and his heavies to claim ownership of Averna. With an introduction by bestselling Scottish crime writer, Val McDermid. Margery Louise Allingham is ranked among the most distinguished and beloved detective fiction writers of the Golden Age alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh. Allingham is J.K. Rowling's favourite Golden Age author and Agatha Christie said of Allingham that out of all the detective stories she remembers, Margery Allingham 'stands out like a shining light'. She was born in Ealing, London in 1904 to a very literary family; her parents were both writers, and her aunt ran a magazine, so it was natural that Margery too would begin writing at an early age. She wrote steadily through her school days, first in Colchester and later as a boarder at the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge, where she wrote, produced, and performed in a costume play. After her return to London in 1920 she enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic, where she studied drama and speech training in a successful attempt to overcome a childhood stammer. There she met Phillip Youngman Carter, who would become her husband and collaborator, designing the jackets for many of her future books. The Allingham family retained a house on Mersea Island, a few miles from Layer Breton, and it was here that Margery found the material for her first novel, the adventure story Blackkerchief Dick (1923), which was published when she was just nineteen. She went on to pen multiple novels, some of which dealt with occult themes and some with mystery, as well as writing plays and stories – her first detective story, The White Cottage Mystery , was serialized in the Daily Express in 1927. Allingham died at the age of 62, and her final novel, A Cargo of Eagles , was finished by her husband at her request and published posthumously in 1968. Val McDermid was a journalist for sixteen years and is now a full-time writer living in South Manchester. In 1995, she won the Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year for The Mermaids Singing . Her novel A Place of Execution won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel, and named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.