Detective Thriller Fiction

Though he may not look the part, Madoc Rhys is a Mountie - and his keen sense of detection tells him it's time to ask Janet Wadman to marry him. They have just gotten engaged when Christmas rolls around, and Janet's boss invites them to his family estate for a last holiday fling before Janet leaves her job. After a long helicopter ride, they are at Graylings, ancestral home of the Condryckes, a family so strange that Canada's shortest Mountie fits right in. There is a psychic old woman, an erudite butler, and a family patriarch.

When a body is found on a lonely cliff top path, the angelic face of a murdered teenager lies facing the rising sun. Strangled by the hands of an unknown killer, it falls to DI Tom Janssen and his fledgling team to find out how she came to be there. Destined for a career in medicine, one to rival that of her parents, Holly Bettany’s future was as bright as it had been privileged. Seemingly, all that could threaten this promising teenager’s life was Holly herself.

Detective Billie Ann Wilde assesses the couple sitting awkwardly on plastic chairs in her interview room, certain she knows exactly what has happened to little Madison Harris. She was supposed to come home on the school bus, but her cold body was found in local marshlands, and as her mother cries desperately, her stepfather, John, barely looks up. And they found Madison’s blood in John’s car... With John arrested, Billie is certain she has put a killer behind bars, but it’s not long before she hears the heart-shattering news that another girl is missing.

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.

Casey Duncan is a homicide detective with a secret: When she was in college, she killed a man. She was never caught, but he was the grandson of a mobster, and she knows that someday this crime will catch up to her. Casey's best friend, Diana, is on the run from a violent, abusive ex-husband. When Diana's husband finds her, and Casey herself is attacked shortly after, Casey knows it's time for the two of them to disappear again. Diana has heard of a town made for people like her, a town that takes in people on the run who want to shed their old lives.

Imaginez... Vous êtes une ado de quatorze ans. Vous avez fait le mur pour la première fois. Vous rentrez en cachette la nuit. Au matin, la maison est vide. Toute votre famille a disparu sans laisser de traces. Apparitions suspectes, coups de fils anonymes, messages accusateurs : vingt-cinq ans plus tard, le passé ressurgit.

Meet Jessica Jones: retired superhero, private investigator, loner. She tried her best to be a shiny spandex crimefighter, but that life only led to unspeakable trauma. Now she avoids that world altogether and works on surviving day-to-day in Hell’s Kitchen, New York. The morning a distraught mother comes into her office, Jessica would prefer to nurse her hangover and try to forget last night’s poor choices. But something about Amber Randall’s story strikes a chord with her. Amber is adamant that something happened to her teenage twins while they were visiting their father in the UK.

The town is gripped by a big freeze, and blizzard after blizzard has engulfed the feline community, leaving shops and businesses snowbound. Hettie Bagshot and her sidekick, Tilly Jenkins, have found sanctuary by their fireside but soon they are bucketed into a terrifying nightmare, called to investigate the disappearance of the town's kittens as - one by one - they are taken in the snow. Who are the strange cats living in Wither-Fork Woods?

Edinburgh, 1869: Modern-day homicide detective Mallory Atkinson is adjusting to her new life in Victorian Scotland. Her employers know she’s not housemaid Catriona Mitchell—even though Mallory is in Catriona’s body—and Mallory is now officially an undertaker’s assistant. Dr. Duncan Gray moonlights as a medical examiner, and their latest case hits close to home. Men are dropping dead from a powerful poison, and all signs point to the grieving widows… the latest of which is Gray’s oldest sister. Poison is said to be a woman’s weapon, though Mallory has to wonder if it’s as simple as that.

Christmas Eve, and the Lee family's reunion is shattered by a deafening crash of furniture and a high-pitched wailing scream. Upstairs, the tyrannical Simeon Lee lies dead in a pool of blood, his throat slashed. When Hercule Poirot offers to assist, he finds an atmosphere not of mourning but of mutual suspicion. It seems everyone had their own reason to hate the old man....

Anthropology Professor Gideon Oliver would prefer to keep his mind on his beautiful new bride, Julie, during their English honeymoon, but one intrusive question will not stop nagging at him: Who would want to steal a 30,000-year-old parieto-occipital calvarial fragment? Yet someone has lifted this chunk of prehistoric human skull from a musty museum in Dorchester. Then, 30 miles away, an archaeology student is murdered, increasing tension and suspicion at a dig that had already seethed with suspicion, rivalry, and mistrust.

Childbirth can be dangerous even for the wealthy. So when opera singer Claire Buchanan shows Prudence and Geoffrey a postmortem cabinet photograph of her deceased twin sister and newborn niece, they express sadness but not surprise. The popular black-bordered portraits are the era's way of coping with the devastating losses that plague every family. What makes this death different is that Claire is convinced Catherine and her child were murdered.

Life on magical parole can be a real witch… I’ve got a final shot at freedom, but when my strongest ally is found murdered, everything is on the line—including my own life. With my rag-tag band of supernatural friends in tow, I have to launch my biggest—and most dangerous—investigation yet. I’ve got to stop the killer without setting off the SPA’s alarms or else I can kiss my last chance goodbye.

>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. Modern computer games, films, and television are rooted in the fiction popularized by “the seminal and venerated mystery pulp magazine” (Booklist).

The launch of a new exhibit at Bexford museum is derailed when Brock and Poole discover a body in its midst. With rumors of a lost treasure, a confusing array of suspects, and a personal stake in the case, they must focus to find their culprit. Which isn't going to be easy. Detective Sergeant Guy Poole is dreading confronting his mother with the truth and faces losing a second parent from his life. Detective Inspector Sam Brock's life is changing, and there are big decisions to make for the future. Can they untangle the web of mystery to find their killer?

Chesterton's talent as a mystery writer is displayed in this collection of detective stories, The Man Who Knew Too Much. In each story, the star detective, Horne Fisher, deals with another strange mystery: the vanishing of a priceless coin, the framing of an Irish "prince" freedom fighter, an eccentric rich man dies during an obsessive fishing trip, another vanishing during an ice skate, a statue crushing his own uncle, and a few more.

Down a quiet backstreet in Kyoto exists a very special restaurant. Run by Koishi Kamogawa and her father Nagare, the Kamogawa Diner serves up deliciously extravagant meals. But that's not the main reason customers stop by. The father-daughter duo are 'food detectives'. Through ingenious investigations, they are able to recreate dishes from a person’s treasured memories—dishes that may well hold the keys to their forgotten past and future happiness. The restaurant of lost recipes provides a link to vanished moments, creating a present full of possibility.

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.

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.

Detective Ulf Varg from the Department of Sensitive Crimes is often called upon to investigate unusual matters. But rarely is he asked to conduct an inquiry on behalf of his own family. Is such a thing ethical? Adding to Ulf's moral discomfort is the fact that he does not exactly see eye to eye with his younger brother Bjorn - a leading player in one of Sweden's right-wing parties, the Moderate Extremists. Still, family is family, so Ulf finds himself working to uncover the mole leaking secrets to a rival party, the Extreme Moderates.