Crime Fiction Police Procedural Suspense

When Scotland Yard superintendent Duncan Kincaid takes Gemma, Kit, and Toby for a holiday visit to his family in Cheshire, Gemma is soon entranced with Nantwich's pretty buildings and the historic winding canal, and young Kit is instantly smitten with his cousin Lally. But their visit is marred by family tensions exacerbated by the unraveling of Duncan's sister Juliet's marriage. And tensions are brought to the breaking point on Christmas Eve with Juliet's discovery of a mummified infant's body interred in the wall of an old dairy barn.

This is DC Smith's third investigation with the Diver and Diver Associates agency. They have been asked by a member of Norfolk's aristocracy to look into the tragic death of her younger brother, Freddie, the late Lord Thorpe of the title. The inquest verdict was of misadventure, but it isn't long before Smith begins to suspect there has been a serious miscarriage of justice.

In a secluded farm house in the Pacific Northwest, a family has been slaughtered - and a teenage son has disappeared. Single mother and cop Emily Kenyon spearheads a dark hunt for a killer. But Emily's teenage daughter, Jenna, is one step ahead of her. Then another family is butchered, and another. As Emily fits the puzzle pieces together, she makes a chilling discovery: The killer is coming after her and her daughter....

Detective Garda Sergeant Mike West and his partner answer an emergency call from St Monica’s church and discover a dead body suspended from the beams in front of the altar. The victim’s fingerprints show that the man is Ian Moore, recently released from prison after serving time for rape. Revenge seems like the obvious motive for his murder, but the list of suspects grows as the case takes an unexpected twist. Is the killer someone who believes they are doing God’s work?

On the tree-lined banks of Surrey’s River Wey, a decaying corpse is dug up by workmen in the middle of an Anglo-Saxon burial site. His modern dental fillings show that this is no Dark Age corpse. DCI Craig Gillard is called in, but the body’s condition makes identification difficult. One man, however, seems to fit the bill: Ozzy Blanchard, a contractor employed by the same water firm doing the digging who disappeared six months ago. But then an X-ray of the corpse throws the investigation into turmoil. The deeper Gillard digs, the more shocking truths he will uncover.

A body is found at an ATM, the apparent victim a of heart attack. Then two teenage girls are arrested for the brutal murder of a cab driver. The girls confess to the crime, showing no remorse whatsoever. Two open-and-shut cases. At first these two incidents seem to have nothing in common, but as Wallander delves deeper into the mystery of why the girls murdered the cab driver, he begins to unravel a plot much more complicated than he initially suspected.

Hard-boiled detective Sam Spade is hired to locate a client's sister by tailing the sister's companion. Spade's partner Miles Archer takes on the assignment, and quickly both Archer and the man he was shadowing are murdered. As Spade pursues the mystery of his partner's death, he is drawn into a circle of colorful characters, and they are all after a legendary statuette of a falcon that had long ago been made for King Charles of Spain. Encrusted with jewels, it is worth a fortune.

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.

Mike and Callie Simpkins moved north to restart their lives and get their finances back on track. Their son Braxton immerses himself in an online game-world of crime and gangs. When he decides to meet some of the players in the real world, tragedy strikes. Detective John Swift must untangle a web of virtual and real crimes in order to solve this complex mystery. And as the family copes with unimaginable grief, even Braxton’s stepfather, Mike, comes under suspicion.

Rebecca Heilshorn lies stabbed to death in her bed in a remote upstate New York farmhouse. Rookie detective Brendan Healy is called in to investigate. All hell breaks loose when her brother bursts onto the scene. Rebecca turns out to have many secrets and connections to a sordid network mixing power, wealth, and sex. Detective Brendan Healy, trying to put his demons behind him, pursues a dangerous investigation that will risk both his life and his sanity.

New York Times best-selling author James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux novels began with this first hard-hitting entry in the series. In The Neon Rain, Detective Robicheaux fishes a prostitute's corpse from a New Orleans bayou and finds that no one, not even the law, cares about a dead hooker.

In 1919, Delano, Georgia, appoints its first chief of police. Honest and hardworking, the new chief is puzzled when young men start to disappear. But his investigation is ended by the fatal blast from a shotgun. Delano's second chief-of-police is no hero, yet he is also disturbed by what he sees in the missing-persons bulletins. In 1969, when Delano's third chief takes over, the unsolved disappearances still haunt the police files.

It starts with the body of a Hollywood producer in the trunk of a Rolls-Royce, shot twice in the head at close range - what looks like "trunk music", a Mafia hit. But the LAPD's organized crime unit is curiously uninterested, and when Harry follows a trail of gambling debts to Las Vegas, the case suddenly becomes more complex - and much more personal.

When a beautiful, wealthy student is found dead in her room in Oxford's most prestigious college, Detective Inspector Bridget Hart is called to investigate. The murdered girl appeared to have no enemies, yet was killed in a brutal and bloody assault. Haunted and driven by her own personal tragedy, newly promoted DI Bridget Hart has a lot to prove as she leads her first murder case. Her investigation uncovers a tangled web of lies, lust and ambition, and brings her into conflict with powerful interests.

DI James Walker is ready for a quiet family Christmas in the sleepy village of Kirkby Abbey. But when he opens an early Christmas present left on his doorstep, he soon realises it is no gift. Inside is a gruesome surprise and a promise - 12 days, 12 murders. Not long after, the first body is found, half frozen in the snow. As the blizzards descend, panic spreads through the remote Cumbrian village - there’s a killer amongst them, and with 11 more victims to go, anyone could be next.... Can James stop the killer before they strike again?

Detective Harry Bosch has retired from the LAPD, but his half-brother, defense attorney Mickey Haller, needs his help. The murder rap against his client seems ironclad, but Mickey is sure it's a setup. Though it goes against all his instincts, Bosch takes the case. With the secret help of his former LAPD partner, Lucia Soto, he turns the investigation inside the police department. But as Bosch gets closer to discovering the truth, he makes himself a target.

Commissario Guido Brunetti's career is under threat when his professional and personal lives unexpectedly intersect. In the chill of the Venetian dawn, a sudden act of vandalism shatters the quiet of the deserted city, and Brunetti is shocked to find that the culprit waiting to be apprehended at the scene is a member of his own family. Meanwhile, he is also under pressure from his superiors to solve a daring robbery with connections to a suspicious accidental death. Could the two crimes be connected? And will Brunetti be able to prove his family's innocence before it's too late?

A young woman is dumped, injured and unconscious, in a private hospital's parking lot. She is an amnesiac with no memory prior to her discovery by hospital personnel. Detective Inspector Peter Diamond of the Bath homicide squad is unwilling to become involved. He has other, more important cases to solve: a woman has plunged to her death from the roof of a local landmark while half the young people of Bath partied below, and an elderly farmer has shot himself.

Former London policeman Alan Banks relocated to Yorkshire seeking some small measure of peace. But depravity and violence are unfortunately not unique to large cities. His new venue, the quaint little village of Eastvale, seems to have more than its fair share of malefactors---among them a brazen Peeping Tom who hides in night's shadows spying on attractive, unsuspecting ladies as they prepare for bed.

George Arrow, a good-looking, independently wealthym and single man of 36, has just been diagnosed with a weak heart. A heart so weak, his doctor tells him, he must go to extraordinary lengths to avoid putting the slightest strain upon it. On his doctor's advice, George packs up his life in Dublin and boards a train to the Bay of Galway where he intends to live quietly in a hotel and await the inevitable end. On the train, he meets John Burden, and as they chat, George realizes that his new acquaintance is an odious man.