Crime Fiction Detective

Mark Randall lay dead in a field near Lowacre long before Smith had done what he had to do in Belfast. By the time he went back to work, the investigation was well underway. "It's not my case," he says more than once, and he really doesn't need it to be; he has enough to think about as it is. But going around the Norfolk countryside dotting the i's and crossing the t's, speaking to the local farmers and the Brothers of St. Francis from Abbeyfields, Smith begins to suspect that the investigation might be heading in entirely the wrong direction.

The first three crime thrillers in the Detective Sebastian Clifford series together in a single collection for the first time. This collection includes Web of Lies, Speak No Evil, and Never Too Late.

No one would ever accuse famous opera star Dame Serena Levante of lacking a flare for the dramatic. Unfortunately, it's curtains down on the dysfunctional diva when she's found dead at the bottom of a staircase in her elegant home. Solving an opera singer's murder may not be the typical hairdresser's aria of expertise. But Dame Serena was the mother of Daisy's best friend Floria, so Daisy must do-or-dye her best to get to the roots of the case.

It was summer in the mountains when five small children vanished from their nursery school picnic. The heat was stifling that day, the tinkle of an ice-cream van in the air.... Three-and-a-half years later, in the dead of winter, the children are returned to their families...one by one. All except for Ivy - the granddaughter of Homicide Detective Kate Wakeland. The other four children say Ivy is dead.

Grace Repton, a beautiful older woman, walks into the police station to tell Detective Matt Ballard she has information that could stop a murder. Her fiance, the infamous serial killer Jeremy Reader, has told her that he has a disciple who is going to kill using Reader's horrific methods. Reader murdered five women and was finally brought to justice by Detective Ballard. Reader is safely imprisoned in a high security prison, and claiming to be a reformed man who wants to help the police.

Hamish Macbeth ambles over to the nearby backwater of Drim, ostensibly to check out a posh English chap who is causing a most unusual problem. Single, wealthy, and terribly attractive, newcomer Peter Hynd has thrown the middle-aged matrons of Drim into a flutter and put their men, dour Highlanders whose feelings run deep, on a slow burn. Hamish’s instincts tell him this seemingly charming young man likes to stir up trouble, and it’s not long before the seething emotions transform the sleepy village into a hotbed of threats, domestic rows, and violent murder.

A torso in a suitcase looks like an impossible case, but Sean Duffy isn’t easily deterred, especially when his floundering love life leaves him in need of a distraction. So with detective constables McCrabban and McBride, he goes to work identifying the victim. The torso turns out to be all that’s left of an American tourist who once served in the U.S. military. What was he doing in Northern Ireland in the midst of the 1982 Troubles?

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, and John D. MacDonald all got their start in Black Mask. The urban crime stories that appeared in Black Mask helped to shape American culture. Modern computer games, films, and television are rooted in the fiction popularized by the magazine.

Bombay, 1921: Perveen Mistry, the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her father's law firm, becoming one of the first female lawyers in India. Armed with a law degree from Oxford, Perveen also has a tragic personal history that makes her especially devoted to championing and protecting women's legal rights. Mistry Law has been appointed to execute the will of Mr. Omar Farid, a wealthy Muslim mill owner who has left three widows behind. But as Perveen is going through the paperwork, she notices something strange.

It's the early 1980s in Belfast. Sean Duffy, a conflicted Catholic cop in the Protestant RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary), is recruited by MI5 to hunt down Dermot McCann, an IRA master bomber who has made a daring escape from the notorious Maze prison. In the course of his investigations Sean discovers a woman who may hold the key to Dermot's whereabouts; she herself wants justice for her daughter who died in mysterious circumstances in a pub locked from the inside.

Dieter Hess, an aged spy, is dead, and John Bachelor, his MI5 handler, is in deep, deep trouble. Death has revealed that the deceased had been keeping a secret second bank account - and there's only ever one reason a spy has a secret second bank account. The question of whether he was a double agent must be resolved, and its answer may undo an entire career's worth of spy secrets.

The corpse of a young woman is found on a golf course. Clues are few until Sussex Police discover she was a student...and a model on a pornographic website run by two of her tutors. Technically, the deviant owners of this website are doing nothing illegal.

DI Henderson is forced to face his prejudices, resulting in an explosive confrontation. University has just become a very dangerous place.

An edge-of-your-seat crime thriller starts with a vicious stabbing of a pretty teenage girl and her boyfriend on a local bus. She happens to be the mayor's niece. It's the final straw for the community. The police are desperate to get results and decide on a risky course of action involving undercover infiltration of the notorious Effingell Estate. Detective George Elms knows this hellish place extremely well, and his sharp investigative mind is put to work to solve the crime. The police are under immense media pressure and conveniently a local lowlife confesses to the attack.

Belfast, 1985. Amid the Troubles, Detective Sean Duffy, a Catholic cop in the Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary, struggles with burnout as he investigates a brutal double murder and suicide. Did Michael Kelly really shoot his parents at point-blank range and then jump off a nearby cliff? A suicide note points to this conclusion, but Duffy suspects even more sinister circumstances.

It is 1969 and Glasgow is in the grip of the worst winter in decades, yet it is something else that has Glaswegians on edge: a serial killer whose name alone is enough to make them tremble with fear. The Quaker has killed another victim, snatching a young woman from a nightclub and dumping her body like trash in the back of a cold-water tenement. He leaves no clues, and the investigation has led police down one blind alley after another.

A woman is found naked, badly beaten and barely alive in the New Mexico mountains. The shocking discovery plunges Albuquerque Detective Alyssa Wyatt into a case that will test her to the limit. It appears that Callie McCormick is the latest plaything of a shadowy psychopath that leaves a long shadow on the streets of New Mexico - an individual linked to a string of deaths but leaving no evidence. But when Alyssa makes a breakthrough that just might reveal the killer, she unknowingly puts herself in the crosshairs of a brutal maniac - one with an old score to settle.

>From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald got their start in Black Mask.

The urban crime stories that appeared in Black Mask helped to shape American culture. Modern computer games, films, and television are rooted in the fiction popularized by “the seminal and venerated mystery pulp magazine” (Booklist).

The death of Tom Bettany's estranged 26-year-old son brings him back to London. His return sparks the interest of everyone from mobsters to MI5 officers - he may have thought he left his old life as a spy behind, but nobody just walks away. Tom Bettany is working at a meat processing plant in France when he gets the voicemail from an English woman he doesn't know telling him that his estranged 26-year-old son is dead. Liam was smoking dope on his London balcony when he fell....

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Never before in audio, these vintage stories are the darkest of the dark, and the best of the best.

Crime fiction fans old and new will delight in rediscovering these taut, character-rich, heart-stopping tales, now on audio for the first time.

The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing who is intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts; or the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch. As Nicola leads her suitors towards the precipice, London--and, indeed, the whole world--seems to shamble after them in a corrosively funny novel of complexity and morality.