Crime Detective

One August afternoon, eight-year-old Grace Lennard skips into the garden of the childcare center she attends and vanishes into thin air. Rushing to the scene of Grace’s disappearance, Detective Kim Stone finds a chilling piece of evidence: the engraved heart bracelet belonging to Melody Jones - the little girl who was taken from a playground exactly 25 years ago. Hours before, Steven Harte had walked into Halesowen police station and confessed to having information that would lead Kim to Melody. And he told Kim she’d have a more urgent problem to deal with first.

In the title work in this collection of novellas, Poirot and Inspector Japp collaborate on the investigation of a suspicious suicide. The supernatural is said to play in the disappearance of top secret military plans in The Incredible Theft—an incredible claim, indeed, as Poirot will prove. The bullet that kills Gervase Chevenix-Gore shatters a mirror in Dead Man's Mirror—just the clue Poirot needs to solve the crime.

On its surface, life in Houston in the 1950s is as you'd expect: stoic fathers, restless teens, drive-in movies, and souped-up Cadillacs. But underneath lies a world shifting under high school junior Aaron Broussard's feet. There's a class war between the "haves" and the "have-nots" as well as a real war, Korea, happening on the other side of the world. It is against this backdrop that Aaron comes of age, trying to understand how first loves, friendship, violence, and power can alter what "traditional America" means for the people trying to find their way in a changing world.

The poison was cyanide, slipped into the sacred wine of ecstasy just before it was presented to Miss Cara Quayne at the House of the Sacred Flame. The victim was a deeply religious initiate who had trained for a month for her last ceremony. She was also a very beautiful woman.... The suspects were the other initiates and the high priest. All claimed they were above earthly passions. But Cara Quayne had provoked lust, jealousy - and murder.

Unconventional Detective Declan Miller has a problem. Still desperate to solve the murder of his wife, a young man has just appeared on his doorstep with a briefcase...containing a pair of severed hands. Miller knows this case is proof of a contract killing commissioned by local ne'er do well Wayne Cutler - a man he suspects might also be responsible for his wife's death. Now Miller has leverage, but unfortunately he also has something that both Cutler and a villainous fast-food kingpin are desperate to get hold of.

In Lisa Gardner’s first-ever short story following 13 best-selling novels, "The 7th Month" takes listeners between the books and into a day in the life of Boston Detective D. D. Warren.

In her seventh month of pregnancy, D.D. should be taking it easy. Instead, she accepts a small consulting role on the set of a serial-killer film shooting in Boston. D.D. figures she’ll be useful to someone for at least one night, serving as a police expert and making a little extra money in the bargain. It seems like a simple task—until the previous film consultant, a former Boston cop, is found beaten to death.

Thomas Fool is an Information Man, an investigator tasked with cataloging and filing reports on the endless stream of violence and brutality that flows through Hell. His job holds no reward or satisfaction, because Hell has rules but no justice. Each new crime is stamped "Do Not Investigate" and dutifully filed away in the depths of the Bureaucracy. But when an important political delegation arrives and a human is found murdered in a horrific manner - extravagant even by Hell's standards - everything changes.

For all its old-fashioned charm, Forbes Abbot is far from the close-knit community that ex-Londoners Mallory and Kate Lawson expected. In this village, everyday squabbles can quickly turn to murder. As the couple begins to settle into their new life away from the big city, it isn't long until they're thrown into the horror and mayhem of a true Midsomer Murders mystery. Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby has encountered many intriguing cases in his years on the force, but soon he will discover that the incident of the ghost in the machine is the most challenging of them all.

In The Blue Last, Richard Jury finally faces the last thing in the world he wants to deal with - the war that killed his mother, his father, his childhood. Mickey Haggerty, a DCI with the London City police, has asked for Jury's help. Two skeletons have been unearthed in the City during the excavation of London's last bombsite, where once a pub stood called the The Blue Last. Mickey believes that a child who survived the bombing has been posing for over 50 years as a child who didn't.

Inspector Hemingway has his work cut out for him when a seemingly civilized card game ends in a double murder. The two crimes appear identical, but were they carried out by the same hand? When Timothy Harte's young fiancé - a put-upon secretary and suspected gold digger - becomes the inspector's prime suspect, Harte is determined to prove her innocence.

He's your perfect date. You're his next victim. When the tortured body of a young woman is found in a dumpster, her eyes swollen shut and her clothes soaked with blood, detective Erika Foster is one of the first at the crime scene. The trouble is, this time it's not her case.

Late one night, a distraught young man knocks on the door of retired and recently widowed Ally Bright’s remote home on the Cornish coast. But before she can make sense of his confused words, he’s gone—not to be seen again until he’s found the next morning at the foot of the nearby cliffs.

Adopted as a child into a privileged family, Philippa Palfrey fantasizes that she is the daughter of an aristocrat and a parlor maid. The terrifying truth about her parents and a long-ago murder is only the first in a series of shocking betrayals. Philippa quickly learns that those who delve into the secrets of the past must be on guard when long-buried horrors begin to stir.

On the fourth floor of Chaucer House, two teenagers are found chained to a radiator. The boy is dead but the girl is alive. For Detective Kim Stone every detail of the scene mirrors her own terrifying experience with her brother Mikey, when they lived in the same tower block 30 years ago. When the bodies of a middle-aged couple are discovered in a burnt-out car, Kim can’t ignore the chilling similarity to the deaths of Erica and Keith - the only loving parents Kim had ever known.

Now that Madison Reynolds has agreed to be part of a reality-television home remodeling show, she barely recognizes her own life. The show is an instant success, bringing cameras and reporters right to her doorstep, eager to chronicle her every move in the small Texas town. With In a Pinch Temporary Services hovering on the thin line between prosperity and extinction, Madison takes on another quirky case, this one concerning a property dispute. Complications turn a simple mission into all-out danger, and once again Madison finds herself embroiled in an intriguing mystery.

This latest installment of the beloved No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series finds Botswana's premier detective agency as busy as ever, with no shortage of sensitive situations requiring Mma Ramotswe's keen eye and discerning input. Through it all, Mma Ramotswe will demonstrate that there are solutions to all manner of difficulties, there to be discovered as long as one is led by kindness, grace, and logic, and can rely on the wise counsel of close friends and loved ones.

Inspector Witherspoon has been assigned another tough case. The latest murder victim has possibly swindled his shareholders out of a huge sum of money. When the businessman is found with a bullet through is chest, all of them are suspects - but no one is telling the truth. It is up to Mrs. Jeffries and the household staff at Upper Edmonton Gardens to crack the case.

As Sheriff Clayton Burroughs tries to juggle fatherhood, his job, and his recovery from being shot in the confrontation that killed his two criminally inclined brothers last year, he’s doing all he can just to survive. Yet after years of carefully toeing the line between his life in law enforcement and his family, he finally has to make a choice. When a rival organization makes a first foray into Burroughs' territory, leaving a trail of bodies and a whiff of fear in its wake, Clayton is pulled back into the life he so desperately wants to leave behind.

Detective Kay Sharp vows to get to the bottom of a heartbreaking murder that has rocked Mount Chester. A single mother has been brutally killed in front of her three daughters. The youngest, three-year-old Erin, is lying inches from the body, her pigtails loose, her face tear-stained. Eight-year-old Heather is discovered hiding under her bed. Sixteen-year-old Julie is nowhere to be found.

A taunting letter, claiming violence and death to the vile people of Washburn County, puts Sergeant Jade Monroe and her staff of detectives on high-alert. The letter states they will see the author's work soon, but, without forensic evidence, Jade has no way of knowing who wrote the letter or its validity. When the first victim is discovered, the carnage promised in the letter is realized, and as the body count escalates, so does the depravity of the murders.