Crime Fiction Police Procedural Suspense

A psychopath is terrorizing Copenhagen. His calling card is a “chestnut man” - a handmade doll made of matchsticks and two chestnuts - which he leaves at each bloody crime scene. Examining the dolls, forensics makes a shocking discovery - a fingerprint belonging to a young girl, a government minister’s daughter who had been kidnapped and murdered a year ago. A tragic coincidence - or something more twisted? To save innocent lives, a pair of detectives must put aside their differences to piece together the Chestnut Man’s gruesome clues.

Adam Dalgliesh takes on a baffling murder in the rarefied world of London book publishing in this masterful mystery from one of our finest novelists. Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team are confronted with a puzzle of impenetrable complexity. A murder has taken place in the offices of the Peverell Press, a venerable London publishing house located in a dramatic mock-Venetian palace on the Thames. The victim is Gerard Etienne, the brilliant but ruthless new managing director, who had vowed to restore the firm's fortunes.

The fourth book in this twisty, fast-paced mystery series, The Horror at Murden Cove locks you on a storm-battered island with a killer whose motive is so deranged, you'll have to listen to this audiobook twice to believe it.

Summer 1933. Fresh from the discovery that she has family living nearby, Kitty Underhay has packed her carpet bag, commandeered a chambermaid and set off on a visit to stately Enderley Hall. She’s looking forward to getting to know her relatives, as well as the assembled group of house guests. But when elderly Nanny Thoms is found dead at the bottom of the stairs after papers of national importance are stolen, Kitty quickly learns that Muffy the dog’s muddy paws on her hemline are the least of her problems.

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.

When the body of a teenager is discovered near Eilean Donan Castle several months after she disappeared, DCI Jack Logan and his team journey across the Highlands to investigate. As they start to unpick the young woman’s life, the secrets and lies they expose soon threaten to tear the small rural community apart. But when a second girl goes missing in similar circumstances, it isn’t just a murder investigation that Jack finds himself running. It’s a race against time.

Detective Carl Morck has received a bottle that holds an old and decayed message written in blood. It's a cry for help from two young brothers, tied and bound in a boathouse by the sea. After floating in the ocean for years before turning up, the bottle sat forgotten, unopened, on a police department windowsill, before the seal was cracked and the gruesome message, written in Danish, was analyzed. Could it be real? Who are these boys, and why weren't they reported missing? Could they possibly still be alive?

Years ago, Lucas Davenport almost died at the hands of Clara Rinker, a pleasant, soft-spoken, low-key Southerner, and the best hitwoman in the business. Now retired and living in Mexico, she nearly dies herself when a sniper kills her boyfriend, the son of a local druglord, and while the boy's father vows vengeance, Rinker knows something he doesn't: The boy wasn't the target, she was, and now she is going to have to disappear to find the killer herself.

As the mists roll over the fens and enigmatic lights twinkle in the distance, only the locals know their way along the hidden paths through the mysterious watery terrain of one of England's most beautiful and sometimes dangerous places. Detective Matt Ballard may have retired but there's still plenty going on in the fens to keep him busy. Someone trashes an old lady's garden and daubs her isolated cottage with hateful graffiti. Emilia Swain seems to be totally harmless, so why is she being targeted?

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.

John Rebus stands accused: on trial for a crime that could put him behind bars for the rest of his life. Although it's not the first time the legendary detective has taken the law into his own hands, it might be the last. What drove a good man to cross the line? Or have times changed, and the rules with them? Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke faces Edinburgh's most explosive case in years, as a corrupt cop goes missing after claiming to harbour secrets that could sink the city's police force.

When five colleagues are forced to go on a corporate retreat in the wilderness, they reluctantly pick up their backpacks and start walking down the muddy path. But one of the women doesn’t come out of the woods. And each of her companions tells a slightly different story about what happened. Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk has a keen interest in the whereabouts of the missing hiker. In an investigation that takes him deep into isolated forest, Falk discovers secrets lurking in the mountains, and a tangled web of personal and professional friendship, suspicion, and betrayal among the hikers.

Mickey Haller gets the text, "Call me ASAP—187," and the California penal code for murder immediately gets his attention. Murder cases have the highest stakes and the biggest paydays, and they always mean Haller has to be at the top of his game. When Mickey learns that the victim was his own former client, a prostitute he thought he had rescued and put on the straight and narrow path, he knows he is on the hook for this one. He soon finds out that she was back in LA and back in the life. Far from saving her, Mickey may have been the one who put her in danger.

Dexter Morgan is not your average serial killer. He enjoys his day job as a blood spatter analyst for the Miami Police Department . . . but he lives for his nighttime hobby of hunting other killers. Dexter is therefore not pleased to discover that someone is shadowing him, observ­ing him, and copying his methods. Dexter is not one to tol­erate displeasure . . . in fact, he has a knack for extricating himself from trouble in his own pleasurable way.

The gruesome double-murder at an Eastvale property developer’s luxury home should be an open and shut case for Superintendent Alan Banks and his team of detectives. There’s a clear link to the notoriously vicious Albanian mafia, men who left the country suspiciously soon after the murder. When Banks and his team find a cache of spy-cam videos hidden in the house, the investigation pivots to another violent crime that could cast the murders in an entirely different light.

Here is LAPD Detective Harry Bosch as we've never seen him before, in three never-before-collected stories. In "Suicide Run", the apparent suicide of a beautiful young starlet turns out to be much more sinister than it seems. In "Cielo Azul", Bosch is haunted by a long-ago closed case: the murder of a teenage girl who was never identified. In "One Dollar Jackpot", Bosch works the murder of a professional poker player whose skills have made her more than one enemy.

It all started harmlessly enough. An egged window, a deflated car tire, and a few garden gnomes knocked over. But then, the silent calls began–late nights and early mornings to landlines and mobiles, and numbers that no one should have access to.

Hollywood. The city where dreams are made. On the losing side of a bloody East Coast crime war, Danny Ryan is now on the run. The Mafia, the cops, the FBI all want him dead or in prison. With his little boy, his elderly father and the tattered remnants of his loyal crew of soldiers, he makes the classic American migration to California to start a new life. A quiet, peaceful existence. But the Feds track him down and want Danny do them a favor that could make him a fortune or kill him.

A vicious murder. A case close to home. DI Simon Fenchurch is back. Rekindling his marriage helps put their shared trauma behind him. He's finally living his life again. But on a busy London street, Fenchurch and his wife witness a young woman being attacked in broad daylight, the vicious killer leaving her bleeding to death on the pavement.

Bruno Courrèges - provincial French police chief extraordinaire - is back in another delectable tale of mystery and suspense that unfolds in the gastronomically ravishing Dordogne.