Crime Fiction Police Procedural Suspense

As the sun sets into the sea over the pretty Cornish town of St Ives, a young woman, Freya Kempston, hasn’t returned home after a day out in the mall at St Austell. Panicking, her husband begs Detective Lauren Pengelly and her team to find her. Has Freya run out on her stable, loving marriage, or has something more sinister taken place? Grainy security footage from the mall provides the first break in the case—capturing Freya talking intently with a well-known local mechanic on the day she disappeared. But when cornered, the mechanic denies even knowing her.

When Transom Shultz goes missing shortly after returning to his sleepy hometown of Fallen Mountains, Pennsylvania, his secrets are not the only secrets that threaten to emerge. Red, the sheriff, is haunted by the possibility that a crime Transom was involved in 17 years earlier - a crime Red secretly helped cover up - may somehow be linked to his disappearance.

As the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, DI James Walker receives a phone call that puts paid to his Christmas break. During the wedding of the year at a lakeside hotel, the bride’s sister has vanished. When Rachel left the wedding breakfast before her speech, newly-wed Libby was furious. But as the night went on with no sign of her maid-of-honour, Libby started to realise something was very, very wrong. Before the wedding night is out, the lake is being searched for a body.

With the lovely Priscilla Halburton-Smythe away in London, Hamish Macbeth, the constable of the small Scottish town of Lochdubh, pines for company during the long Scottish winter. He gets his wish - and more - when a troupe of flashy, urbane filmmakers clamors into the nearby town of Drim. Before long bedlam erupts around their make-believe mystery - and culminates in the sudden appearance of one very real corpse.

A young Australian woman turns up dead after a party thrown by her new boss. The initial investigation of Naomi Lockhart's murder points to Joseph Madden, the owner of a coffee shop around the corner from police headquarters. Madden insists he’s innocent, that he was home with his wife, Rachel, at the time of the murder. When police question her, Rachel contradicts his alibi, swearing that she was home alone.

As Chicago PD’s special-ops leader, Detective Billy Harney knows well that money is not the only valuable currency. The filthy rich man he’s investigating is down to his last twenty million. He’s also being held in jail. For now. Billy’s unit is called in when an escape plan results in officers down and inmates vanished.

When Sienna Walker is nearly fired from the NYPD, the last thing she expects is a second chance in the one place she vowed never to return to. But she can’t afford to turn down the job offer, even if a painful familial past and a broken engagement hardly make Reno, Nevada, home sweet home. It’s made even less sweet by Sienna’s first case—a serial killer with a curious fixation on her. Along with his victims, the killer leaves perplexing clues and chilling journal entries addressed to Sienna detailing the murders he claims his mother committed.

She calls herself Lady Justice. And once she has chosen a man as her target, she turns herself into a tall blonde or a curvaceous redhead, makes herself as alluring and seductive as possible to them. Once they are in her grasp, they are powerless. The first victim is wealthy businessman Nigel McEnroy. His company’s human resources department has already paid out settlements to a couple of his young victims - but they don’t know that his crimes go far beyond workplace harassment. Lady Justice knows. And in one shocking night of brutality, she makes him pay a much steeper price.

Detective Megan Carpenter is no stranger to evil. Escaping the horrors of her old life, she’s vowed never to let anyone hurt her or those she loves ever again. Joining the small police force in Jefferson County’s Port Townsend, Megan is determined to get every victim of a crime the justice they deserve. So when Ruth Turner walks into the Sheriff’s office claiming her sister Ida Watson has been missing for over a month, Megan’s instincts tell her that she needs to do more than just file a report.

The “Prey” novels by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist John Sandford consistently make the best-seller lists, but they are not for the faint of heart. Featuring Minneapolis Lieutenant Lucas Davenport, these thrillers are raw, graphic, and impossible to put down. In Eyes of Prey, a depressed and unfocused Davenport takes on a macabre case, tracking down a serial killer who maims the eyes of his victims after he has murdered them.

After a long week lobbying on Capitol Hill, all Karina Cardinal wants to do is chill with Netflix and her boyfriend, Patrick Dunne. Instead, she's slipping her aching feet into red stilettos for his parent's annual holiday bash. When she accidentally interrupts Patrick's father in his study, her embarrassment is tempered by suspicion that Martin Dunne and his dapper, secretive guest are hiding something. Maybe the painting she barely glimpses right before it disappears behind a secret panel.

It was a glittering event full of A-listers, hosted by Eliza Lane and Brant Fitzhugh, a celebrity couple who’d conquered both Hollywood and Broadway. And now Eve Dallas has made her entrance—but not as a guest. After raising a toast, Fitzhugh fell to the floor and died, with physical symptoms pointing to cyanide, and the police have crashed the party. From all accounts, he wasn’t the kind of star who made enemies. Everyone loved him—even his ex-wife. And since the champagne cocktail that killed him was originally intended for Eliza, it’s possible she was the real target.

Detective Inspector Logan McRae is finally getting back on his feet after the events of the last few years. Putting things behind him. Getting better.… But it was never going to last. A body turns up on the outskirts of Aberdeen: burned from the neck up, hands chained behind the back. More murders follow - all gruesome, and with only one obvious connection. The similarities between the real-life killings and the plot of a best-selling novel about witchcraft seem more than coincidental, but the more Logan digs the more dangerous and blurred the line between fact and fiction becomes.

In a case that spans 20 years, Harry Bosch links the bullet from a recent crime to a file from 1992, the killing of a young female photographer during the L.A. riots. Harry originally investigated the murder, but it was then handed off to the Riot Crimes Task Force and never solved. Now Bosch's ballistics match indicates that her death was not random violence, but something more personal, and connected to a deeper intrigue. Like an investigator combing through the wreckage after a plane crash, Bosch searches for the "black box", the one piece of evidence that will pull the case together.

Raised off the grid by survivalists, Mercy Kilpatrick believed in no greater safeguard than the backwoods of Oregon. Unforgiven by her father for abandoning the fold for the FBI, Mercy still holds to her past convictions. They’re in her blood. They’re her secrets—as guarded as her private survival retreat hidden away in the foothills. In a cabin near her hideaway, Mercy encounters a young girl whose grandmother is dying from multiple knife wounds.

When Harry left Oslo again for Hong Kong - fleeing the traumas of life as a cop - he thought he was there for good. But then the unthinkable happened. The son of the woman he loved, lost, and still loves is arrested for murder: Oleg, the boy Harry helped raise but couldn't help deserting when he fled. Harry has come back to prove that Oleg is not a killer. Barred from rejoining the police force, he sets out on a solitary, increasingly dangerous investigation that takes him deep into the world of the most virulent drug to ever hit the streets.

Raised by preppers, survivalist and FBI agent Mercy Kilpatrick has a deep-rooted need for a safe place. Her getaway in the Cascade Foothills is her secret. But when skeletal remains are unearthed - those of a murdered man linked to a notorious heist - Mercy realizes she isn’t the only one with something to hide. Thirty years ago, an armored-car robbery turned deadly. The mastermind was captured. Four conspirators vanished with a fortune. One of them, it appears, never made it out of the woods alive.

Innocent scapegoat or monster manipulator? Matthew Fraser was an idealistic young teacher accused of molesting a young schoolgirl and acquitted in a sensational case that left the truth hidden and the young teacher's life in tatters. Ten years later, his distraught confidante walks into Ottawa Police Inspector Michael Green's office insisting that Fraser has vanished. Green's curiosity is piqued when he discovers that Fraser left behind his beloved dog, a half-eaten dinner and an apartment crammed with research related to his case. Has Fraser fled to escape the wrath of victims, new or old?

Fifty years ago, a group of teenagers spent a weekend on Holy Island, forging a bond that has lasted a lifetime. Now, they still return every five years to celebrate their friendship and remember the friend they lost to the rising waters of the causeway at the first reunion. Now, when one of them is found hanged, Vera is called in. Learning that the dead man had recently been fired after misconduct allegations, Vera knows she must discover what the friends are hiding and whether the events of many years before could have led to murder then, and now.

A man is dead, shot three times in his home office. But his computer has been shot twelve times, and when the cops arrive, his pregnant wife is holding the gun. D. D. Warren arrives on the scene and recognizes the woman - Evie Carter - from a case many years back. Evie's father was killed in a shooting that was ruled an accident. But for D.D., two coincidental murders is too many. Flora Dane sees the murder of Conrad Carter on the TV news and immediately knows his face. She remembers a night when she was still a victim - a hostage - and her captor knew this man.