Crime Fiction Police Procedural Suspense

A woman awakes in the morning to find that someone has picked her apartment’s supposedly impregnable door lock and rearranged personal items, even sitting beside her while she slept. The intrusion, the police learn, is a message to the entire city of carnage to come. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to investigate and soon learn that the sociopathic intruder, who calls himself "the Locksmith”, can break through any lock or security system ever devised.

As an undercover police officer, Rob Langton is used to terrifying situations. But his new assignment is the most dangerous yet – to infiltrate the notorious Carter family, and bring its patriarch Geraint to justice. After gaining Geraint’s trust, Rob finds himself becoming the criminal's right-hand man. The deeper Rob gets, the more danger he’s in. Then Geraint’s horrific plan comes to light – a bomb in a public place, designed to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment. Rob is the only person who can stop the carnage, but time is running out.

When Sheriff Bree Taggert discovers the body of a young woman floating near the bank of the Scarlet River, a note in her abandoned car suggests suicide. The autopsy reveals a different story. Holly Thorpe was dead long before she dropped off the bridge and hit the water. As Bree and her investigator Matt Flynn delve into the case, secrets in Holly’s personal life complicate their efforts to solve the murder.

After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke’s steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime. But now, more than one person knows they didn’t tell the truth back then, and Luke is dead.

Felix Olliphant was found stabbed to death at a New Year's Eve costume party for the turn of the millennium. Seemingly liked by everyone, motives for his murder are hard to find. There was one suspect, but no evidence. Hillary struggles to solve this baffling case. And she has to contend with a new colleague, Jake Barnes. Young and rich, he says he wants to give something back to the community, but Hillary has her doubts. Will Hillary finally be defeated by this cold case and will she lose her boss and love interest to a new job?

FBI Agent Emmy Dockery is absolutely relentless. She's young and driven, and her unique skill at seeing connections others miss has brought her an impressive string of arrests. But a shocking new case - unfolding across the country - has left her utterly baffled. The victims all appear to have died by accident, and have seemingly nothing in common. But this many deaths can't be coincidence. And the killer is somehow one step ahead of every move Dockery makes. How? To FBI Special Agent Harrison "Books" Bookman, everyone in the FBI is a suspect - particularly Emmy Dockery.

When a series of suicides, linked to the Wellness Spirit Centre, turn out to be murder, it brings together DCI Whitney Walker and forensic psychologist Dr Georgina Cavendish for another investigation. But as they delve deeper, they come across a tangle of secrets and the very real risk that the killer will strike again. As the clock ticks down, the only way forward is to infiltrate the centre. But the outcome is disastrous, in more ways than one.

When a young woman’s body is found butchered in Brighton, Roy Grace cannot help but think of his own missing wife and her unsolved fate. Elsewhere in the city, when Tom Bryce finds a disc left on a train, he simply tries to do the right thing – return it to its owner. But this attempted act of kindness makes him the sole witness to that same vicious murder. Learning that Tom has made a statement to Grace’s team, the killers have to act. But when they plan the murder of the Bryce family, it’s not just revenge – it’s entertainment.

In the black days of a Shetland winter, torrential rain triggers a landslide that crosses the main road and sweeps down to the sea. At the burial of his old friend Magnus Tait, Jimmy Perez watches the flood of peaty water and mud smash through a croft house in its path. Everyone thinks the croft is uninhabited, but in the wreckage he finds the body of a dark-haired woman wearing a red silk dress. Perez becomes obsessed with finding out her identity and what she was doing there.

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.

Nina Landry awakens on her 40th birthday, anticipating a day filled with excitement. She, her new boyfriend, and her two children are taking a trip - leaving their home on Sandling Island, off the coast of England, for a dream vacation. As soon as her 15-year-old daughter, Charlie, returns from a sleepover, they can get ready to leave. But Charlie doesn’t come home at the expected time. As minutes and then hours tick by, Nina’s annoyance soon changes to concern, and then to a chilling certainty that something terrible has happened.

All around Albuquerque, New Mexico, young women are going missing, seemingly vanished into thin air. With no link between the victims, Detective Alyssa Wyatt is quickly plunged into a horrifying case with no obvious clues. And when Jersey Andrews, the best friend of Alyssa's teenage daughter, Holly, joins the list of vanished girls, the case becomes personal. But this investigation will lead Alyssa and partner Cord into the most sinister depths of humanity; an evil place where life is expendable and where the depraved can fulfill their darkest desires - if they have the money.

Glencoe, Illinois: A home invasion turned kidnapping at the mansion of billionaire financier Kenneth J. Druckman brings Mason “Mace” Reid and his cadaver dog, Vira, to this wealthy northern suburb of Chicago. Druckman was assaulted, left behind while his wife and young daughter were taken for ransom. Brought to the scene by the FBI, Reid specializes in human remains detection, and Vira is the star of his pack of cadaver dogs. After Vira finds the dead body of the mother, everyone is on high alert to find Druckman’s missing daughter before she disappears forever.

NYPD master homicide investigator Michael Bennett and top FBI abduction specialist Emily Parker have a history. Working case after case, each can predict the other’s next move. So when she fails to show at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, Bennett risks venturing far outside his jurisdiction. The investigation he undertakes is the most brilliant detective work of his career…and the most intensely personal.

FBI agent Rachel Walling finally gets the call she's dreaded for years: the one that tells her the Poet has returned. Years ago she worked on the famous case, tracking down the serial killer who wove lines of poetry into his hideous crimes. Rachel has never forgotten Robert Backus, the killer who called himself the Poet, and apparently he has not forgotten her either.

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".

The secret town of Rockton has seen some tough times lately; understandable considering its mix of criminals and victims fleeing society for refuge within its Yukon borders. Casey Duncan, the town's only detective on a police force of three, has already faced murder, arson, and falling in love in the several months she's lived there. When a US marshal shows up demanding the release of one of the residents - but won't say who - Casey and her boyfriend, Sheriff Eric Dalton, are skeptical. Then, hours later, the marshal is shot dead.

A small Georgia town erupts in panic when a young college professor is found brutally mutilated in the local diner. But it's only when town pediatrician and coroner Sara Linton does the autopsy that the full extent of the killer's twisted work becomes clear. Sara's ex-husband, Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver, leads the investigation - a trail of terror that grows increasingly macabre when another local woman is found crucified a few days later.

Three bodies, three different towns. Each victim was a sorority girl - pretty, privileged, and brutally murdered. There are no fingerprints, no clues. He is scrupulously careful, craving those exquisite seconds when the light fades from his victim's eyes. But the rush never lasts, and the killing won't stop - not until one special woman has been made to suffer....

Back when Harry Bosch was just a rookie homicide detective, he had an inspiring mentor who taught him to take the work personally and light the fire of relentlessness for every case. Now that mentor, John Jack Thompson, is dead, and his widow gives Bosch a murder book, one that Thompson took with him when he left the LAPD twenty years before—the unsolved killing of a troubled young man.