Crime Fiction Police Procedural Suspense

Naples, 1931. A bitter wind stalks the city streets, and murder lies at its chilled heart. When Maestro Vezzi, one of the world's greatest tenors, is found brutally murdered in his dressing room at Naples' famous San Carlo theater, the enigmatic and aloof Commissario Ricciardi is called to investigate. Arrogant and bad-tempered, Vezzi was hated by many. But with the livelihoods of the opera at stake, who would have committed such a callous act?

When fire crews are called to a blaze at the home of a Kilwinnoch GP they make a grisly discovery: the charred remains of the doctor and his entire family. But is this a tragic accident or an horrific, calculated murder? DCI Duncan Bone's worst fears are confirmed when a cryptic message is found at the scene hinting at a grudge against the medical profession.

When a digital marketer is found murdered in his backyard—hands bound and face smothered by plastic wrap—Sheriff Bree Taggert and criminal investigator Matt Flynn respond to the call. Their investigation focuses on the man’s dating-app profile and the word liar carved into his forehead. One day later, the killer strikes again. Both victims are players in the internet dating scene. In their wake, they leave a trail of hurt—and angry—women. But Bree and Matt aren’t convinced the motive is as simple as it appears.

Slamming the door on the hellscape of 1980s Belfast, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy hopes that the 1990s are going to be better for him and the people of Northern Ireland. As a Catholic cop in the mainly Protestant RUC he still has a target on his back, and with a steady girlfriend and a child the stakes couldn’t be higher. After handling a mercurial triple agent and surviving the riots and bombings and assassination attempts, all Duffy wants to do now is live. But in his final days in charge of Carrickfergus CID, a missing persons report captures his attention.

In this prequel to the international best seller The Ruin, set 10 years prior, bright-eyed Carrie Ryan is at the very start of her career. When she has a hunch about an ongoing murder investigation, she knows it could be her only chance to prove herself and truly break into the “boys' club” of Dublin’s police force.

DI Vera Stanhope is not one to make friends easily, but when one of her neighbours goes missing, she feels duty-bound to find out what happened. It’s an easy job to track the young woman down to the Writers’ House, a country retreat where aspiring authors gather to work on their novels. But things get complicated when a body is discovered and Vera’s neighbour is found with a knife in her hand. Vera knows that she should hand the case over to someone else. But the investigation is too tempting and she’s never been one to follow the rules.

Lincoln Rhyme was once a brilliant criminologist, a genius in the field of forensics - until an accident left him physically and emotionally shattered. But now a diabolical killer is challenging Rhyme to a terrifying and ingenious duel of wits. With police detective Amelia Sachs by his side, Rhyme must follow a labyrinth of clues that reaches back to a dark chapter in New York City’s past - and reach further into the darkness of the mind of a madman who won’t stop until he has stripped life down to the bone.

A man waits at a London airport for Ingrid Ostermann, the love of his life, to arrive. Across the Atlantic, a retired NYPD cop waits in a bar in Florida’s Key West for his first date with the lady who is, without question, his soulmate. The two men are about to discover they’ve been scammed out of almost every penny they have in the world – and that neither women exist.

Into Keldale's pastoral web of old houses and older secrets comes Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton. Along with the redoubtable Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, Lynley has been sent to solve a savage murder that has stunned the peaceful countryside. For fat, unlovely Roberta Teys has been found in her best dress, an ax in her lap, seated in the old stone barn beside her father's headless corpse. Her first and last words were "I did it. And I'm not sorry".

Five figures gather 'round a shallow grave. They had all taken turns to dig. An adult-sized hole would have taken longer. An innocent life had been taken, but the pact had been made. Their secrets would be buried, bound in blood. Years later a headmistress is found brutally strangled, the first in a spate of gruesome murders that shock the Black Country.

I Let You Go follows Jenna Gray as she moves to a ramshackle cottage on the remote Welsh coast, trying to escape the memory of the car accident that plays again and again in her mind and desperate to heal from the loss of her child and the rest of her painful past. At the same time, the novel tracks the pair of Bristol police investigators trying to get to the bottom of this hit-and-run.

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.

Carl Mørck used to be one of Denmark’s best homicide detectives. Then a hail of bullets destroyed the lives of two fellow cops, and Carl - who didn’t draw his weapon - blames himself. So a promotion is the last thing he expects. But Department Q is a department of one, and Carl’s got only a stack of cold cases for company. His colleagues snicker, but Carl may have the last laugh, because one file keeps nagging at him: A liberal politician vanished five years earlier and is presumed dead. But she isn’t dead...yet.

A young detective is out for a jog on a snowy winter morning. Then she sees something terrible: a murder in the park, sudden and inexplicable. A woman has been killed by a passing hooded cyclist. It’s just DCI Craig Gillard’s luck that he’s on duty. The body is that of Tanvi Roy, one of the richest women in Britain and matriarch of a food empire. With a tangled web of family and business contacts and jealousies, Gillard’s job just got even more complex. As he delves deeper into the Roy family, it’s clear that everything is not as it seems.

Accident or suicide? That's the simple question put to Inspector Michael Green when a derelict stranger falls to his death from an abandoned church tower in a quiet river village at the edge of his jurisdiction. But when the victim turns out be a long-lost son of a local farm family cursed in recent years by tragedy, madness, and death, Green begins to suspect something far more sinister is at work. Probing the family's past, he uncovers a toxic mix of rigid fundamentalism, teenage rebellion, and a family secret so horrific that 20 years later, someone is still desperate to prevent the truth from coming to light.

From the moment he sees the young woman's body in her hotel bathtub, homicide detective Jack Murphy knows he's looking at a truly demented but brilliantly designed puzzle. She's been drained of blood. Missing her left hand - and the killer left a special message just for him. Hours later, he sees her severed hand arranged on a second victim's body. The newspaper has the gruesome details. The FBI has a theory.

On a bitterly cold winter's night, Liverpool is left stunned by a brutal murder in the grounds of the city's Anglican Cathedral. A killer is on the loose, driven by a chilling rage. Put on the case, DS Nathan Cody is quickly stumped. Wherever he digs, the victim seems to be almost angelic - no one has a bad word to say, let alone a motive for such a violent murder. And Cody has other things on his mind, too.

Struggling in his new role, where he feels nowhere near worthy of following his predecessor, DCI Simon Fenchurch is called to a hipster brewery's basement. A dead body has been found in a pool of blood... With two pairs of shoes at the scene. Does the second pair belong to the killer? Or another victim? As the case veers off in an unexpected direction, Fenchurch comes to face-to-face with someone from his past, someone intent on causing havoc by revealing case secrets to the public. Secrets even Fenchurch doesn’t know.

Detective Ulf Varg from the Department of Sensitive Crimes is often called upon to investigate unusual matters. But rarely is he asked to conduct an inquiry on behalf of his own family. Is such a thing ethical? Adding to Ulf's moral discomfort is the fact that he does not exactly see eye to eye with his younger brother Bjorn - a leading player in one of Sweden's right-wing parties, the Moderate Extremists. Still, family is family, so Ulf finds himself working to uncover the mole leaking secrets to a rival party, the Extreme Moderates.

In Eyes of Prey, Bekker, an insane pathologist who experiments with his patients’ pain thresholds, is finally brought down by an unrelenting Lucas Davenport, who brutally maims the doctor’s beautiful face but leaves him alive. “You should have killed me,” were Bekker’s parting and prophetic words.

In this sequel to Eyes of Prey, Bekker endures the indignities and horrors of imprisonment, taking comfort in the fact that it is only a matter of time before he will make Lucas Davenport pay.