Detective Thriller Fiction

Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass-and-cedar palace on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, a hooded figure scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core.

Once, the Lamartine Hotel was a quiet refuge for New York’s stuffy fashionable set. But by the 1890s, fashion has moved uptown, and the lobby of the Lamartine has been overtaken by natty young sports, who pass their afternoons with billiards or shows of noisy derring-do. Their preferred damsel is Lila Williams, a delicate young telegraph operator whose shyness so charms them that they resolve to defend her against any ill-behaved characters. They are about to face their fiercest challenger, who rides in the gleaming armor of a millionaire.

On their first night in Paris, the Gamaches gather as a family for a bistro dinner with Armand’s godfather, the billionaire Stephen Horowitz. But an attempt on the elderly man’s life sends Armand, his wife, Reine-Marie, and his former second-in-command at the Sûreté, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, from the top of the Tour d’Eiffel, to the bowels of the Paris Archives, from luxury hotels to odd, coded works of art. It sends them deep into the secrets Armand’s godfather has kept for decades.

When a Western star is gunned down at a rodeo, Ellery Queen saddles up to solve the mystery.

Buck Horne has roped thousands of cattle, slugged his way out of dozens of saloons, and shot plenty of men dead in the street - but always on the back lot. He's a celluloid cowboy, and his career is nearly kaput. The real box-office draw is his daughter, Kit, a brawling beauty who can out shoot any rascal the studio has to offer. Desperate for a comeback, Buck joins Wild Bill Grant's traveling rodeo for a show in New York, hoping to land one last movie contract.

Two young women are missing in Oslo. Strangers to each other, but last seen at the same party. When the body of one of them is found with fresh stitches along her hairline, the hunt is on to find a murderer with singular compulsions. Catching this criminal calls for a detective with a singular mind: Harry Hole. But Harry is gone: fired from the police force and down and out in Los Angeles. It seems like nothing can entice him back home—until someone close to him comes under threat. Now the clock is ticking, for Harry's friend and for the missing woman.

Photography student Toby Unsworth has found the location for the perfect night-time shoot. A cobbled street in the old part of Fenfleet. Later, when he looks at the images on his laptop, he thinks he sees a woman's face in the window of an old, disused building. He asks his housemate Alex to come and take a look . . . Two days later, Toby and Alex are dead. Carbon monoxide poisoning. An unfortunate accident. But Alex's mother doesn't believe it. She hires Matt and Liz to find out the truth.

To inherit billions, all Avery Kylie Grambs has to do is survive a few more weeks living in Hawthorne House. The paparazzi are dogging her every step. Financial pressures are building. Danger is a fact of life. And the only thing getting Avery through it all is the Hawthorne brothers. Her life is intertwined with theirs. She knows their secrets, and they know her. But as the clock ticks down to the moment when Avery will become the richest teenager on the planet, trouble arrives in the form of a visitor who needs her help—and whose presence in Hawthorne House could change everything.

It's the time of year when the immortal army of the ancient king rides Watling Street and the dead become uneasy in their graves. Indeed, in the far north of Warwickshire, the villagers insist that one dead man returned to kill his only son. Now it's up to Sir Faucon de Ramis, the shire's new Crowner, to run the walking corpse to ground and put him back where he belongs.

This lush and haunting novel tells of a city steeped in decadent pleasures and of a man, proud and defiant, caught in a web of murder and betrayal. It is 1833. In the midst of Mardi Gras, Benjamin January, a Creole physician and music teacher, is playing piano at the Salle d'Orleans when the evening's festivities are interrupted - by murder. The ravishing Angelique Crozat, a notorious octoroon who travels in the city's finest company, has been strangled to death.

Lord Rosemorran has purchased a wax figure of a beautiful reclining woman and asks Stoker to incorporate a clockwork mechanism to give the Rosemorran Collection its own Sleeping Beauty in the style of Madame Tussaud’s. But when Stoker goes to cut the mannequin open to insert the mechanism, he makes a gruesome discovery: this is no wax figure. The mannequin is the beautifully preserved body of a young woman who was once very much alive. But who would do such a dreadful thing, and why?

Arnold Landon finds himself drawn into another bitter dispute over land—in which a defenseless old woman pays the ultimate price. To the casual observer, Penbrook Farm might seem like a ramshackle hovel, buried deep in the woods of Northumberland. But to fragile old Sarah Ellis, it’s home. And the developers can have the place over her dead body. Of course, no one ever expected it to come to that.

Despite the dismal Broadway season, Gunplay continues to draw crowds. A gangland spectacle, it's packed to the gills with action, explosions, and gunfire. In fact, Gunplay is so loud that no one notices the killing of Monte Field. In a sold-out theater, Field is found dead partway through the second act, surrounded by empty seats. The police hold the crowd and call for the one man who can untangle this daring murder: Inspector Richard Queen.

Grayson Hawthorne was raised as the heir apparent to his billionaire grandfather, taught from the cradle to put family first. Now the great Tobias Hawthorne is dead and his family disinherited, but some lessons linger. When Grayson’s half-sisters find themselves in trouble, he swoops in to do what he does best: take care of the problem—efficiently, effectively, mercilessly. And without getting bogged down in emotional entanglements.

But now Lillian herself is dead. Found among the bleeding hearts and lilacs of Clara Morrow's garden in Three Pines, shattering the celebrations of Clara's solo show at the famed Musée in Montreal. Chief Inspector Gamache, the head of homicide at the Sûreté du Québec, is called to the tiny Quebec village and there he finds the art world gathered, and with it a world of shading and nuance, a world of shadow and light. Where nothing is as it seems. Behind every smile there lurks a sneer. Inside every sweet relationship there hides a broken heart.

Kit Darling is a maid with a snooping problem. She’s the “invisible girl,” compelled to poke into her wealthy clients’ closely guarded lives. It’s a harmless hobby until Kit sees something she can’t unsee in the home of her brand-new clients: a secret so dark it could destroy the privileged couple expecting their first child. This makes Kit dangerous to the couple. In turn, it makes the couple—who might kill to keep their secret—dangerous to Kit.

When the body of forty-four-year-old Karen Simmons is found abandoned in remote woodland, journalist Kiki Nunn hopes this will be the big break she so desperately needs. Because she has a head start on all the other reporters. Just a week before Karen was killed, Kiki interviewed her about the highs and lows of midlife romance. Karen told her all about kissing strangers under the stars, expensive meals, roses. About the scammers and the creeps . . . While the police appear to be focusing on local suspects, Kiki sets out to write the definitive piece on one woman's fatal search for love.

A secret worth dying for is a secret worth killing...When a violent storm uncovers the remains of an unknown young woman, long buried among the sand dunes, DI Tom Janssen must piece together fragmentary evidence to determine how she came to be there. In the years she lay undiscovered, several young women have disappeared, and as the team works through the possibilities, they come to an uncomfortable conclusion...Is a serial killer stalking coastal Norfolk? Each missing person had a story. Each of them had enemies. Some were more dangerous than others...

Collected here are the second 3 stories in the Detective Jimmy Delaney series.

DI Kelly Porter is about to discover just how dark things can get in the Lake District. When a young woman is found unclothed, unspeaking at an ancient stone circle it's not clear if any crime has been committed. DI Kelly Porter and her team start looking into the circumstances, but the mystery girl disappears. Soon after, a brutal murder is committed and sinister markings at the scene indicate that the killer had a message.

Uncertain Voyage is certain to hold you spellbound with its tale of a timid young American woman who finds herself in situations that would test anyone’s courage. Melissa Aubrey is touring Europe alone as part of her quest to establish her self-reliance. Still recovering from a nervous breakdown brought on by a disastrous marriage, Melissa is fragile, to say the least. When one of her fellow travelers makes an urgent plea that she deliver a small package to an address in Majorca, Melissa is thrown into a dizzying whirlwind of romance, mystery, and danger.