Crime Fiction Suspense

The Inspector Banks novel In a Dry Season was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won an Anthony Award. Cold Is the Grave won the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award. It takes the aging, solitary inspector from his cozy Yorkshire cottage into the dark underworld of London. The assignment is a favor asked by Banks' boss and greatest enemy: Chief Constable Riddle.

In the jungles of Southeast Asia, American sniper Mack Bolan honed his skills. After 12 years, with 95 confirmed hits, he returns home to Massachusetts. But it's not to reunite with his family, it's to bury them - victims in a mass murder/suicide. Even though Bolan's own father pulled the trigger, he knows the old man was no killer. He was driven to madness by Mafia thugs who have turned his idyllic hometown into a new kind of war zone.

I know all about being afraid of the dark. Like my uncle, in my thirties I found my way into my own dark forest, face-to-face with the big bad wolf. He was so close to me the whole time, I could taste the blood on his breath. Meeting him felt like a fairytale. I fact, I met him at a bar called the Wolf's Lair. A sensational trial for an historic serial murder. A missing woman with a trail of secrets. A top lawyer famous for defending notorious criminals. A retired homicide cop hunting for the truth.

In the town of Gainesville, Virginia, Cooper Fox has a special place in people’s hearts. Since the car accident that wiped his memories, Cooper has been...a little foggy. Cooper doesn’t know how to do much, but one thing he instinctively seems to know about is strength training, and with his help, Gainesville High’s football team has just won the Mid-States final. With Cooper the hero of the hour, the whole town is getting ready to celebrate in style.

In need of a good adventure, Delaney Nichols takes the leap and moves to Edinburgh, Scotland, to start a job at The Cracked Spine. She doesn't know much about what she's gotten herself into other than that the work sounds exciting and that her new boss, Edwin MacAlister, has given her the opportunity of a lifetime.

When frantic, disheveled Edie Ledwell appears in the office begging to speak to her, private detective Robin Ellacott doesn’t know quite what to make of the situation. The cocreator of a popular cartoon, The Ink Black Heart, Edie is being persecuted by a mysterious online figure who goes by the pseudonym of Anomie. Edie is desperate to uncover Anomie’s true identity.

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, but after his funeral his widow hands Bosch a murder book that Thompson took with him when he left the LAPD 20 years before - the unsolved killing of a troubled young man in an alley used for drug deals.

Chicago, 1932. Mick Oberon may look like just another private detective, but beneath the fedora and the overcoat, he's got pointy ears and he's packing a wand.

After a whirlwind romance, Taryn Young is preparing to board a plane at Houston International Airport, bound for a dream honeymoon, when a bomb decimates the terminal. Injured but still alive, she awakens to discover her husband is missing, and they're both considered prime suspects in the attack. Further, the FBI is convinced her husband isn't who he appears to be. Agent Grayson Hall's number-one priority is to catch those responsible for the day's act of terror.

Sori. Western military generals shudder when they hear the name. It is a remote, inaccessible village in Afghanistan, high up in the Hindu Kush mountains. It is where a dreaded Taliban terrorist hides and from where he conducts his murderous raids. Villagers have a special name for the mountain on which Sori is perched. Mountain of Death. Sori is also where the Taliban hold three American soldiers captive. All attempts to free them have failed. As the terrorists threaten to execute the soldiers, Zeb Carter volunteers to mount a rescue attempt. Alone.

Detective Jack Mackinnon has his work cut out trying to track down missing student, Anya Blonski. As Mackinnon follows the trail of obsession and murder to the shady owners of the Star Academy, who thrive on society's obsession with reality TV shows, he realises the fame they offer comes at a price. When a second girl goes missing, Mackinnon is forced to consider a serial killer may be stalking the city.

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald got their start in Black Mask. The urban crime stories that appeared in Black Mask helped to shape American culture.

Dave Robicheaux felt the bone-grinding pain rip through his body as the .45 did its damage. Through the agonizing haze that enveloped him, he heard an almost inhuman laugh - the hideous, victorious cackling of Jimmie Lee Boggs - a sound he would never forget. It had started out as an ordinary prisoner transfer, then turned into a blood bath when the convicted murderer got hold of a gun.

Thinking that she has been summoned by German immigrant Agnes Otto to usher a new life into the world, midwife Sarah Brandt is greeted by the news of an untimely death instead. It seems that Agnes' beautiful younger sister, Gerda, had fallen into the life of a "charity girl". Caught up in the false glamour of the city's nightlife, she would trade her company and her favors for lavish gifts. And now she was dead - victim, no doubt, of one of her "gentlemen friends".

Jack's a retired ex-cop from New York, seeking the simple life in Cherringham. Sarah's a Web designer who's moved back to the village find herself. But their lives are anything but quiet as the two team up to solve Cherringham's criminal mysteries. This compilation contains episodes 1 - 3: MURDER ON THAMES, MYSTERY AT THE MANOR and MURDER BY MOONLIGHT.

On an ordinary morning, Maria Colson takes her baby son, Dylan, to the corner store. She turns her back for only a few seconds. When she looks again, she sees his empty stroller as Dylan is being abducted into a waiting van. Maria climbs into the van but is violently thrown to the road, where she is left for dead as the vehicle vanishes without a trace. As Maria fights for her life and her anguished young husband keeps a bedside vigil, the FBI and police across metro Sea-Tac and Washington State search for Dylan.

Romance is in the air on Harrington Street, Oxford. Detective Inspector Ian Chisholm is finally showing interest in Lucy, though the members of the vampire knitting club aren't too thrilled to have the police hanging around so close to Cardinal Woolsey's yarn shop. Up the street at Frogg Books, shop assistant Alice is in love with her bookish boss, Charlie, who doesn't seem to notice.

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.

When Detective Mike West is called to investigate a murder in a Dublin graveyard, suspicion immediately falls on a local woman, Edel Johnson, whose husband disappeared some months before. But then she disappears. Evidence leads West to a small village in Cornwall, but when he arrives, he finds Edel has got there before him. Her explanation seems to make sense, but as West begins to think his suspicions of her are unfounded, she disappears again. Is she guilty? West, fighting an unsuitable attraction, doesn't want to believe it.

Forced to give up her career as a dentist, and still unemployed a year later, Valentina Knight has finally run out of options. With foreclosure looming she acts in desperation, lying to get a position as an assistant to the county medical examiner. Val's relieved. She won't be homeless. But Val didn't count on the lie trapping her in a dangerous game with a killer. Val quickly becomes involved in the case of Francine Donohue, who disappeared from her neighborhood and is discovered dead six months later. The bizarre circumstances surrounding the murder are not the first of their kind.