British Crime Thrillers

The grisly headline leaves nothing to the imagination: "Woman's torso recovered from Tokyo Bay. Believed to be missing British bartender Lily Bridges." The only suspect is Lucy Fly. Her friend is dead, her lover has disappeared, and as far as anyone is concerned, she's as good as guilty. Trapped in the interrogation room, Lucy begins to unravel two stories. One, for the police, is a spare outline, offering more questions than answers. The other - the real one, if you believe her - is a gripping dive into an obsessive mind, revealing the checkered past that brought her to Japan.

What happened while they were sleeping? A school for the deaf takes an overnight trip to the snowy woods. Five teenagers go to sleep, but only four wake up. Leon is missing, and a teacher’s body is found in the forest. Sign-Language Interpreter Paige Northwood is brought in to help with interrogations. Everyone at the school has a motive for murder - but they all have an alibi. As Paige becomes increasingly involved, she suspects there’s something sinister going on.

Virtual romance becomes a terrifying obsession in Peter James' tenth Roy Grace novel, Want You Dead.... Single girl, 29, smouldering redhead, love life that's crashed and burned. Seeks new flame to rekindle her fire. Fun, friendship and - who knows - maybe more? When Red Westwood meets handsome, charming and rich Bryce Laurent through an online dating agency, there is an instant attraction. But as their love blossoms, the truth about his past, and his dark side, begins to emerge.

Don't imagine for one moment that I'm not watching you.... The Metropole Hotel, Brighton. After a heady New Year's Eve ball, a woman is brutally raped as she returns to her room. A week later, another woman is attacked. Both victims' shoes are taken by the offender.... Detective Superintendent Roy Grace soon realises that these new cases bear remarkable similarities to an unsolved series of crimes in the city back in 1997.

A Detective Superintendent of the Nottinghamshire Police Force is found brutally murdered in the idyllic Clumber Park. The victim used to run the same Unit that DI Rob Loxley is now a part of. That was until a drug bust went badly wrong, resulting in the deaths of four officers. Corruption was suspected, and Rob is something of an expert on that. As the new DI of the unit, it falls to Rob to investigate the murder and find the killer, but this means dealing with Anti-Corruption, a worrying prospect at best.

A routine missing person enquiry takes a grisly turn when a young couple drag a box containing human remains out of a Somerset river. The victim was a surveillance expert investigating an exaggerated injury claim—a murder with an obvious motive, until a police officer is implicated and suspended. Still brooding after his recent brush with police Professional Standards, Detective Chief Inspector Nick Dixon is on extended leave, helping his pregnant fiancée, Detective Sergeant Jane Winter, fight for her place on the major investigation team.

Thomas Pitt, mainstay of Her Majesty’s Special Branch, is summoned to Connaught Square mansion, where the body of a junior diplomat lies huddled in a wheelbarrow. Nearby stands the tenant of the house, the beautiful, notorious Egyptian woman Ayesha Zakhari, who falls under the shadow of suspicion. Pitt’s orders are to protect—at all costs—the good name of the third person in the garden: senior cabinet minister Saville Ryerson. The distinguished public servant, whispered to be Ayesha’s lover, insists that she is as innocent as Pitt himself.

Georgina Drake’s job photographing beautiful Hartington Hall takes a dramatic turn when she enters the ancient ice house to find the lady of the manor dead on the floor. The second wife of the irascible owner of the hall, Karen Berry had plenty of enemies. Her death could have been an accident, but when Georgina hears how Karen had argued with her husband, alienated her two step-daughters, and fired the long-standing housekeeper for theft, she’s not convinced.

Charming film writer and director Geraint Denbigh is found lifeless in the garden of his Welsh home. It looks like he fell from a window, but eagle-eyed Detective Chief Inspector Matt Lambert soon finds irregularities in the crime scene. Before long he determines it was murder. Recently retired, the victim was writing about his eventful life and many of his former colleagues and associates could have had reason to stop him before he spilled the beans on their transgressions.

For five long years, Detective Barnes has been hunting the killer of the person he cared about the most. Now, the one man who could have revealed the truth is dead. His charred and blackened body is all that remains in his burnt-out flat. A week later, a desperate, emaciated young woman hammers on the door of a late-night convenience store. She speaks no English—but it’s clear that she’s terrified—and running for her life. It's only Barnes who connects the two events. He and his new boss, Superintendent Samson Kane, team up to uncover the truth.

The CID's Andrew Dalziel prefers simple killers. Not a crackpot who fancies himself Hamlet and taunts authorities with lofty quotes from the Bard. Dubbed the Yorkshire Choker, he's already taken three lives in four weeks and promises more tragedy to come. To help nab the serial strangler, Peter Pascoe has enlisted the help of linguistics professors, psychologists, and psychics-all of it nonsense to the grounded Dalziel.

When decades-old human bones are discovered beneath the old glasshouse behind Foxglove & Hemlock, the local florist, DS Harriet March and DI Ben Taylor find themselves digging into Raven's Edge's murky past. As a frosty wind whips down the cobblestoned lanes of the village, the two detectives feel an ominous chill that has nothing to do with the weather… The discovery coincides with the arrival of enigmatic novelist Iris Evergreen at Raven's Hollow, a gothic monstrosity of a mansion that's been sitting empty for years.

In Liverpool, a woman inexplicably leaps to her death. The following morning, two bodies are found on nearby Crosby Beach: a woman tied to a statue, and a man buried up to his neck and left to drown. When a nine-month-old murder case is reopened, DI Sheridan Holler is shocked to uncover family connections between the victim, Daniel Parks, and the three unexplained deaths. With Daniel’s body still missing and the number-one suspect cleared of the crime, Holler’s cold case suddenly becomes a major murder investigation.

Meet DCI Lesley Clarke. She’s a straight-talking city copper who doesn’t suffer fools gladly… and she’s been transferred to rural Dorset. After being injured in a bomb attack, Lesley is presented with a choice — early retirement, or a period of respite in a calmer location. But things don’t stay calm for long. Before she’s even started her new job, Lesley is dragged into investigating a murder at one of England’s most iconic landmarks, the imposing Corfe Castle.

The mayor’s brother is missing. A transit cop lies beaten and blinded, her service weapon stolen. A new series of graffiti tags are appearing, linked to an underground group calling themselves The Death of Kings. Class warfare has broken out on the streets of Vancouver, and PI Dave Wakeland finds himself on the front lines―but unsure which side he’s on. Reeling from a bad breakup, and increasingly alienated from the city he calls home, Wakeland nevertheless agrees to look for the missing gun.

In the chilly depths of a Yorkshire winter, a well-liked rector is found bludgeoned to death in her own church. With no sign of a murder weapon, local superstition quickly pins the blame on the ghost of a medieval monk believed to haunt the building. Well accustomed to unusual murder investigations, DCI Jim Oldroyd takes on the case, along with his assistant, Sergeant Andy Carter, but they are hampered at every turn by the deepening snow and the threat of the supernatural.

With his partner away on a honeymoon, Yorkshire detective Andrew Dalziel tries to beat the blues by taking a vacation of his own. But after getting caught in a torrential rain and running into a funeral procession, he winds up accompanying a crowd of upper-class mourners to a crumbling country house. Dalziel isn't known for his elegant manners, but he has bigger problems than not fitting in: The owner of the home has died under unusual circumstances, and soon more bodies are turning up.

An intruder shot dead to be seen rising from the grave, an escaped psychopath with a hidden murderous intent, and a forgotten mansion lying in the midst of an ancient Norfolk marsh.

It's a perfectly normal day for Kitt Hartley at her job at the University of the Vale of York library, until Detective Inspector Halloran arrives at her desk to tell her that her best friend, Evie Bowes, is under suspicion of murder. Evie's ex-boyfriend Owen has been found dead - with a fountain pen stabbed through his heart - and all the evidence points to her. Kitt knows there is no way Evie could murder anyone - let alone Owen, whom she adored.

Spiritualism has captured the public’s imagination. Séances are all the rage, and Detective Ian Hamilton’s otherwise sensible aunt Lillian is not immune to their allure. But for Ian, indulging her superstitions has its limits. When members of Lillian’s circle of séance friends begin turning up dead, Ian doesn’t need a medium to tell him these aren’t freak accidents.