Crime Fiction Police Procedural Suspense

When Agent Mercedes Ramirez finds an abused young boy on her porch, covered in blood and clutching a teddy bear, she has no idea that this is just the beginning. He tells her a chilling tale: an angel killed his parents and then brought him here so Mercedes could keep him safe. His parents weren’t just murdered. It was a slaughter - a rage kill like no one on the Crimes Against Children team had seen before. But they’re going to see it again. An avenging angel is meting out savage justice, and she’s far from through.

A leader has fallen, and Alex Cross joins the procession of mourners from Capitol Hill to the White House. Then a sniper's bullet strikes a target in the heart of DC. Alex Cross' wife, Bree Stone, newly elevated chief of DC detectives, must solve the case or lose her position. The Secret Service and the FBI deploy as well in the race to find the shooter. Alex is tasked by the new president to lead an investigation unprecedented in scale and scope. But is the sniper's strike only the beginning of a larger attack on the nation?

When a man's body is discovered crammed into the boot of an abandoned car in a remote location, DI Tom Janssen and his team must unpick his life to find out how he came to be there. The victim was a local man, popular with some although hated by others, and he had a habit of making enemies, enemies that any sane man would seek to avoid. For once, the team do not struggle to find a suspect or a motive for his murder, but with several to choose from, how can they determine who delivered the killing blows?

Hamish Macbeth, the laid-back constable of Lochdubh, Scotland, has a new Land Rover to drive and a Highland summer to savor, but as fast as rain rolls in from the loch, his happy life goes to hell in a hand basket. The trouble begins when his beloved Priscilla Halburton-Smythe returns from London - with a fiancé on her arm. His miseries multiply when clouds of midges, the diabolical Scottish mosquito, descend on the town. Then a paragon of housewifery named Trixie Thomas moves into Lochdubh with her lapdog husband in tow.

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.

DCI Harry Grimm is on the cusp of a stunning decision. Considering making his move to the scenic Yorkshire Dales permanent, he ends up reviewing details of a terrible car accident that killed a retired colonel's beloved wife. But when the panicked widower calls the police claiming the deceased woman's spirit is haunting him, the dedicated detective wades in to piece together a less implausible explanation.

The Scarecrow: Booktrack Edition adds an immersive musical soundtrack to your audiobook listening experience! Forced out of the Los Angeles Times amid the latest budget cuts, newspaperman Jack McEvoy decides to go out with a bang, using his final days at the paper to write the definitive murder story of his career. He focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old drug dealer in jail after confessing to a brutal murder. But as he delves into the story, Jack realizes that Winslow's so-called confession is bogus. The kid might actually be innocent.

In the lonely woods around Grizzly Falls, Montana, the first body is discovered, stripped naked and tied to a tree. Alvarez and Pescoli have been hoping for a career-making case, but this is a nightmare. The killer stages car accidents on icy, isolated roads and “rescues” his victims. He toys with them, heals them, earns their trust...before subjecting them to a slow, agonizing death.

The home of a family of five is now a crime scene: four of them savagely murdered, one - a sixteen-year-old girl - missing. Was she lucky to have escaped? Or is her absence evidence of something sinister? Detective D. D. Warren is on the case - but so is survivor-turned-avenger Flora Dane. Seeking different types of justice, they must make sense of the clues left behind by a young woman who, whether as victim or suspect, is silently pleading, Look for me.

"To listen is to be, but to play is to live...." So believes Gideon Davies, 28-year-old musical wunderkind, a virtuoso violinist whose talents are internationally celebrated. When Gideon finds himself center stage, unable to play, his tortured search for his music - and for the truth behind the appalling event that shaped his life - will lead him to the very heart of love's darkest manifestations.

He slowly eased back on the throttle and brought the boat to a stop on the desolate river. They zipped the large canvas bag shut and then hoisted the body over the side of the boat and watched as it slipped beneath the dark surface. Looking to the west, they could see fiery storm clouds were brewing - an eery sign of the fire storm of brutal killings and ruthless revenge to come. Detective Mac McRyan returns home to Minnesota to find the dead body of a retired police detective in the scraggly trees along the rough shores of an island in the Mississippi River.

Detective Peter Diamond, chief of the Avon and Somerset Murder Squad, is taking a short holiday in the country. His former colleague Julie Hargreaves has invited Diamond and his partner, Paloma, to visit the idyllic village of Baskerville (no relation to the Sherlock Holmes story, so he's told). It turns out Julie's invitation was not without ulterior motives. The woman who owns the village's largest dairy farm has been convicted of manslaughter following a terrible accident in her grain silo.

Weeks before NYPD Detective Michael Bennett is to marry his longtime love, Mary Catherine, an assassin announces his presence in the city with a string of grisly murders. Each victim is a young woman. And each has been killed in a manner as precise as it was gruesome. Tasked with working alongside the FBI, Bennett and his gung-ho new partner uncover multiple cold-case homicides across the country that fit the same distinctive pattern—proving the perpetrator they seek is as experienced at ending lives as he is at evading detection.

When the beautiful Kit goes to meet an anonymous stranger - who's been sending her roses - the man drops dead at her feet before she even could even get his name. Game on. Andy Broussard soon learns that the man carried a lethal pathogen similar to the deadly Ebola virus. Soon, another body turns up with the same bug. Panic is imminent as the threat of pandemic is more real than ever before.

Balford-le-Nez is a dying seatown on the coast of Essex. But when a member of the town's small but growing Asian community is found dead on its beach, his neck broken, sleepy Balford-le-Nez ignites. Working solo without her longtime partner, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, Sergeant Barbara Havers must probe not only the mind of a murderer and a case very close to her own heart, but the terrible price people pay for deceiving others...and themselves.

Stephen Berry is about to jump off a bridge until a suicide prevention counsellor stops him. A week later, Stephen is dead. Found at the bottom of a cliff, DI Luc Callanach and DCI Ava Turner are drafted in to investigate whether he jumped or whether he was pushed.... As they dig deeper, more would-be suicides roll in: a woman found dead in a bath; a man violently electrocuted. But these are carefully curated deaths – nothing like the impulsive suicide attempts they’ve been made out to be.

When the body of a man is found dead in his remote, isolated home, DI Tom Janssen and his team struggle to understand what motive there could be to murder such an inoffensive, seemingly placid local character. The man lived alone and was well known in the community, but kept his distance from others, leading a haphazard way of life almost entirely off the grid. What secrets did he hide in his private life that might be worth killing for? As the team are about to understand, even the most nondescript of people can exist in a world darker than most of us will ever see....

Some cases never leave you. For John Rebus, 40 years may have passed, but the death of beautiful, promiscuous Maria Turquand still preys on his mind. She was murdered in her hotel room on the night a famous rock star and his entourage were staying there, and Maria's killer has never been found. Meanwhile, the dark heart of Edinburgh remains up for grabs.

Her name is Clara Rinker, a Southern woman, trim, pleasant, attractive, and the best hit woman in the business. She isn't showy; she just goes quietly about her business, collects her money, and goes home. It's when she's hired for a job in Minnesota that things become complicated for her. A defense attorney wants a rival eliminated, and that's fine. But then a witness survives, the attorney starts acting weird, this big cop Davenport gets on her case, and loose ends begin popping up faster than on an unraveling sweater

Two terrible events, without obvious connection, shake Fjällbacka to its core. A famous photographer is found brutally murdered in a showroom. Henning Bauer, the Nobel prize winner in literature, suffers from a violent act on the small island where he is writing the 10th book in his world famous series. While Patrik Hedström and his colleagues at Tanumshede police station struggle to investigate the cases, Erica Falck researches a murder on a trans man in Stockholm in the 1980’s.