Crime Fiction Police Procedural Suspense

In a Dry Season, winner of the Anthony Award, is an outstanding example of mystery fiction. Peter Robinson's Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks conjures up memories of classic detectives like Philip Marlowe and Sherlock Holmes. An insufferable drought ravages the Yorkshire countryside, depleting the Thornfield Reservoir, revealing the remnants of the flooded town of Hobb's End and the terrible secrets kept safe within its watery tomb. Amongst the ruins, the remains of a woman's body are discovered.

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.

Police discover the lifeless body of a young woman on an abandoned yacht. The next day, a man is found hanging in his apartment. When Detectives Joona Linna and Saga Bauer uncover a surprising connection between the two deaths, they realize they are up against a brutal killer and a ruthless business tycoon who preys on his victims’ worst nightmares to achieve his sinister ends.

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.

After a party in New York, Lieutenant Eve Dallas rides home with her billionaire husband, Roarke, happy to be done with cocktails and small talk. After another party, not far away, a woman retires to her bedroom with her husband - and walks into a brutal nightmare. Their paths are about to collide....

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.

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.

It’s been five years since Detective Amanda Steele’s life was derailed by the tragic death of her young daughter. The small community of Dumfries, Virginia, may have moved on, but Amanda cannot. When the man who killed Lindsey is found murdered, she can’t keep away from the case.

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....

John Sandford's acclaimed Prey novels featuring the brilliant Lucas Davenport have plunged millions of readers into the darkest recesses of the criminal mind.... When Lucas and his team gun down two bank robbers in the middle of a heist, Davenport falls prey to the purest and simplest criminal motivation: revenge.

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

Kay Willingham led a life as glamorous as it was public - she was a gorgeous Georgetown socialite, philanthropist, and the ex-wife of the vice president. So why was she parked in a Bentley convertible idling behind a DC private school, in the middle of the night, with the man who was the head of that school? Who shot them both, point blank, and why? The shocking double homicide is blazed across the internet, TV, newspapers - and across Alex Cross's mind. Kay had been his patient once. And maybe more.

With a glittering career, spanning several decades representing the privileged and the wealthy, behind him the focus of the investigation inevitably turns toward cases and clients past and present, but was his death linked to his work or is there another, darker and far more sinister motive at play? No matter how successful, privileged or elevated in society one person can be, one universal rule applies; we all bleed the same.

When the body of a young woman is found by the coast in Land’s End, Cornwall, Detective Lauren Pengelly and her deputy Matt Price are first on the scene. Sophie Bethany Yates was well-known around the docks – a pretty girl from up the coast, always dreaming of something more. As locals jostle the barricades for a better look, whispers go round that Sophie’s boyfriend Samuel was more than capable of murder.

A knock on the door late in the evening can only mean trouble for Detective Josie Quinn, but fear chokes her at the news that one of her own team is missing. No one has seen Denton PD’s Press Liaison Amber for days and, as she follows the message scrawled on the frosted windscreen of Amber’s car to a nearby dam, Josie hears a piercing scream that tells her she’s too late. But the body they pull from the freezing water is not Amber....