English Detective Mysteries

A naked body is found floating in the Thames. Its head and hands have been clumsily hacked off. The murder rocks the affluent, influential residents of riverside Kings Richington. They band together to keep such savage goings-on out of the headlines and demand a discreet police cover-up. Detective Inspector Jack Dawes is on the case, but his investigation keeps hitting dead-ends. Jack is left scrambling to find a crack in the town’s facade. Then another body is found in a skip, a bullet lodged between the eyes.

Second day back at work. Detective Chief Inspector Janine Lewis drops off her seven-year-old son at school. As she drives off, a car breaks fiercely with a squealing sound. Janine sees the child flung to one side, the small body flying limp like a puppet, then landing hard. With a sickening feeling, Janine recognizes her as Tom’s classmate—Ann-Marie Chinley. Janine gives chase, but the hit-and-run driver gets away. When she finally gets to work she hears a body has been fished out of the river. The victim is in her early twenties, newly pregnant, malnourished as a child.

Even as a child, Katlyn Lundquist was drop-dead gorgeous. She also was willful. In her teens, perhaps out of spite, she created her own name and persona. As she grew up, she readily accepted money and gifts from her parents but thumbed her nose at society and her parent's way of life. A seeming infatuation with Tommie Lupinacci, head of a major crime-infested cartage association based in Brooklyn, led her to move east with the mobster. But when she showed up dead with a bullet in the back of her head, NYPD Detectives Louis Martelli and Sean O'Keeffe were stumped.

When the mayor of New York City’s grandson and the grandson’s wife are murdered execution style in their Tribeca apartment, NYPD Detective Louis Martelli and his partner, Detective Sean O’Keeffe, are left completely in the dark. Months go by without any actionable leads until a meeting with the wife’s doctor and the bizarre torching of Stephanie Martelli’s car turn the investigation upside down and land Martelli and O’Keeffe in the hot seat.

When a man dressed in a long priest’s robe and wearing a black ecclesiastical hat walked into a Catholic church just prior to a funeral service, stuffed garlic into the deceased’s mouth, and pumped a bullet into the corpse, NYPD Homicide Detective Louis Martelli was as puzzled as he’s ever been on a case. No stranger to the macabre, Martelli is even more mystified by Deputy Coroner Michael Antonetti’s findings, which confirm that the deceased, far from having died of respiratory failure and a possible heart attack, was murdered by someone who injected him with a lethal dose of Philippine cobra venom.

The head of one of the largest investment banking and securities firms in the United States has been assassinated in Times Square in the middle of New York City’s annual celebration of Halloween, the Festival of the Dead. Louis Martelli, NYPD, is one of the first detectives on the scene.

Retired Chicago homicide detective Jack Starkey is living his retirement dream in Fort Myers Beach, a little town on Florida’s Southwest Gulf Coast, where he owns a bar called the Drunken Parrot and resides on a houseboat named Phoenix. But, every now and then, life in paradise can get a bit boring, so Jack agrees to help local police departments with murder investigations. When Henry Wilberforce, an 82-year-old Chicago billionaire, is murdered execution-style in his winter home in nearby Naples, Jack takes on the case.

Eric Slater returns from the Navy to find that his childhood friend may have been murdered. Angela Jeffries begs him to investigate, and Maggie, the little sister he barely remembers, wants to help. It turns out, the stunning redhead is one hell of an investigator. As their feelings turn romantic, Maggie and Slater follow a trail of deception and murder, hoping to prove their dead friend innocent of what they fear most. No one is safe, and the men involved will stop at nothing to cover their tracks.

The time of The Circles of Odin is early September, 1929, after Skeen's case of the Daedàlus Society in July and before he discovers in November a Nazi Bund in Palo Alto, south of San Francisco, Skeen's main venue of his adventures.

Eddie Evers was at the top of his game, working for the FBI, tracking missing children and the scum who took them. But after his wife and child are killed in a car crash, he becomes a hard-drinking PI. While in pursuit of a phantom criminal, he is hit by lightning.The bolt super-charges the biophotons in his brain, enabling him to see into other dimensions.

Having been the victim of a hit-and-run accident, and despite being black and blue, DI Munro wastes no time in trying to find out the identity of the perpetrator. In the meantime, a junior detective receives a call from a concerned member of the public, worried that a recently deceased friend’s will had been unlawfully changed. What connects these two events will be crucial to the detective’s investigation. But when prime witnesses turn up dead, they’ll discover they have a more serious case on their hands.

Rancour is the eighth Scottish murder mystery to feature Detectives James Munro and Charlie West. The conditions were terrible for a hike up Goat Fell, so why did a group of schoolgirls attempt it? One of the girls presses on when the others turn back; inappropriately dressed and unprepared, she meets her death. After mountain rescue retrieves the body, various questions start to be raised. Inconsistencies in her companions’ accounts of events are exposed, and it turns out the victim may have been drugged.

In this new case, Skeen confronts a new kind of nemesis that has been gestating in the Middle East for centuries and is now being enabled by oil companies and careless foreign policies: Islam. While investigating three murders whose savagery is unprecedented in the annals of San Francisco crime, he begins to understand that nemesis and the threat it holds.

Hidden in the shadows, Ava and Carol witness a kidnapping and discover a sinister plot that could change the course of history. On this second book of the Ava and Carol Detective Agency series, Ava and Carol were about to take a stroll through Italy, when an old man is chased down and then thrown into the back of a car. At the last second, using sign language he sends a secret message to the girls. The girls hide in the shadows as the car races away. Fearing for the man’s life, the girls begin to track down clues.

After having some breathing room from his last case, which brought him up against Islamic operatives in San Francisco in The Black Stone, Cyrus Skeen and his wife take a short vacation on a luxury bus, the Pickwick Stage. But the bus is held up by gangsters. Skeen goes into action and foils the hijacking. But his heroism engenders even more problems and perils.

Jason and Vanessa are called out to a robbery where political connections are complicating an already tense situation. The case quickly takes an ominous turn, and they must find a missing girl before it's too late.

Called out to the scene of a house fire, Jason and Vanessa begin the task of solving their biggest case yet. Starting with little to go on, soon, one shocking clue after another has them playing catch-up to a sinister killer. Their new case will change everything and everyone around them, as Jason and Vanessa attempt to sort through the destruction of a killer whose life is burning down.

While at the beach, Amelia is approached by a woman who is concerned about the son she gave up for adoption 16 years ago. Millie has been having nightmares that make her fear he is in danger. She petitioned the court to view the sealed records but was refused. Will Amelia and Rick be able to convince the courts to help them? If her son is in danger, will they get there in time?

Realtor Hannah Barry recently discovered her boyfriend cheating and hasn’t sold a house in far too long. In a desire to cheer her up Hannah’s cousin Niles asks her to foster a recently injured police dog. Mazie is a sweet beagle but Hannah isn’t really keen on taking on a dog. However, she agrees to keep Mazie while Niles is out of town. Hannah is under pressure from her latest client Pricilla Bryant. Ms. Bryant wants her presumed dead brother’s property sold immediately. However, Hannah is hitting roadblocks at every turn and when blood is discovered in the basement, she is suspicious.

It is a serendipitous encounter for the hapless DI Greg Byrne when retired sleuth James Munro stumbles upon his crime scene. And perhaps also for Munro himself, who, his protégé Charlie West having firmly snapped his apron strings, needs other lambs to wean. The day is far less auspicious for the victim in the affair, the unfortunate property developer Rebecca Barlow, who has been trussed up like a scarecrow in her yard. Though occurring off DI West’s Ayrshire patch, the investigation will soon intertwine with one of her own.