English Mystery Thrillers

Zoe didn't meet her daughter the way most mothers do. She finds five-year-old Maddie alone and dirty on a countryside road. Frightened for Maddie's safety, she picks her up and takes her back to her father, not knowing what she's about to step into. Because Maddie wasn't just lost; she was there to lure her serial killer dad's new victim. After escaping from the clutches of Maddie's dangerous father, she bonds with the little girl. Only Maddie knows what it was like to be at that house. And when no family members come forward to claim Maddie, Zoe decides to adopt her.

When Matt Ballard was starting out his career, three boys were murdered in the same area, the remote and bleak Gibbet Fen. When the main suspect was killed in a hit-and-run, the killings stopped. But Matt was not satisfied that the real murderer had been caught. Over 25 years later, Matt gets a photo in an unmarked envelope. It's of the Gibbet Fen crime scene. And the picture was taken before the murder took place. More photos arrive, relating to the historic murders, as well as intimate pictures of Matt's very secret private life.

After the recent death of her mother and the dissolution of her marriage, 30-something Eden Elliott is seriously in need of a fresh start. At the urging of her best friend, best-selling author Ami Pederson, Eden decides to embark on an open-ended trip to the picturesque village of Glenkillen in the Scottish Highlands, to do some hands-on research for a book of her own. But almost as soon as Eden arrives in the quaint town, she gets caught up in a very real drama....

In the dark, wintry highlands of Lochdubh, Scotland, where the local Calvinist element resists the secular trimmings of Christmas, the spirit of old Saint Nick is about as welcome as a flat tire on a deserted road. Nor is crime taking a holiday, as Constable Hamish Macbeth soon finds himself protecting an unhappy girl, unlocking the secrets of a frightened old woman, and retrieving some stolen holiday goods. Now the lanky lawman must use all his Highland charm and detective skills to make things right.

Drawing strong comparisons to the work of James Lee Burke and Tony Hillerman, William Kent Krueger’s Cork O’Connor mysteries never fail to please fans. Here Cork joins the search for a country-western singer who has disappeared in the wilderness along the American/Canadian border.

England, 1919. Verity Kent's grief over the loss of her husband pierces anew when she receives a cryptic letter suggesting her beloved Sidney may have committed treason before his untimely death. Determined to dull her pain with revelry, Verity's first impulse is to dismiss the derogatory claim. But the mystery sender knows too much - including the fact that during the war Verity worked for the Secret Service, something not even Sidney knew.

In spring a young man’s fancy will turn to love, and the Honorable Phillip Petrie is no exception. Daisy’s chum is totally smitten with Miss Gloria Arbuckle, daughter of a millionaire Yank. But before the enthusiastic suitor can pop the question, his beloved is abducted. As a distraught Mr. Arbuckle begins assembling the ransom, Phillip enlists Daisy to help him recover his missing sweetheart.

Mrs. Virgil (Emily) Pollifax of New Brunswick, New Jersey, was a widow with grown children. She was tired of attending her Garden Club meetings. She wanted to do something good for her country. This first in the series sends Emily on her first case after she successfully persuades a skeptical CIA recruitment officer that she is the best person for the job.

Commissario Guido Brunetti's hopes for a refreshing family holiday in the mountains are once again dashed when a gruesome discovery is made in Marghera--a body so badly beaten the face is completely unrecognizable. Brunetti searches Venice for someone who can identify the corpse but is met with a wall of silence. He then receives a telephone call from a contact who promises some tantalizing information.

On a beautiful May morning at New York's John F. Kennedy airport, two planes have just departed for San Francisco - one a 757, another a smaller Airbus A321. At a security checkpoint, TSA agent Bernice Adams finds a postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge bearing an ambiguous - perhaps ominous - message. Her supervisor dismisses her concerns, but Bernice calls security, and soon Ben Waterman arrives. A senior Homeland Security agent, Ben too becomes suspicious. Who left the postcard behind, which flight is that person on, and what exactly does the message mean?

To save his favorite newspaper, Nero Wolfe steps into the crossfire of a tabloid war.

Attorney Deborah Knott is North Carolina's answer to V.I. Warshawski, a legal sleuth with a knack for sniffing out the most baffling crimes. Deborah has just done the unthinkable: entered the heated race for judge of old-boy-ruled Colleton County. The only female candidate, she's busy reeling in voters and giving campaign speeches. There couldn't be a worse time for Gayle Whitehead to beg Deborah to investigate the 18-year-old unsolved murder of Gayle's mother, Janie.

In Friends in High Places, Commissario Guido Brunetti is visited by a young bureaucrat investigating the lack of approval for the construction of Brunetti's apartment years before. What began as a red-tape headache ends in murder when the bureaucrat is later found dead after a mysterious fall from a scaffold. Brunetti starts an investigation that will take him into the unfamiliar and dangerous areas of drug abuse and loan-sharking, and will reveal, once again, what a difference it makes in Venice to have friends in high places.

Many who visit the valley are overwhelmed by its majesty. Some wish they never had to leave. One didn't: a hiker whose decomposing corpse is discovered by an unsuspecting tourist. But this strange, incomprehensible murder is only the edge of the darkness that hovers over a small rural village and its tight-lipped residents, who guard shattering secrets of sordid pasts and private shames. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks knows that both the grim truth and a cold-blooded killer are hiding here....

It's early September in Glenkillen, Scotland, when American expat (and romance novelist) Eden Elliott is recruited by the local inspector to act as a special constable. Fortunately it's in name only, since not much happens in Glenkillen. For now Eden has her hands full with other things: preparing for the sheepdog trial on the MacBride farm, a fundraiser for the hospice, and helping her friend Vicki with her first yarn club skein-of-the-month deliveries. Everything seems to be going well until the head of the welcoming committee is found strangled to death with a club member's yarn.

Welcome to Barton Mallet, a remote village in the Midlands that has been chosen as the unlikely location for a new feature film from Hollywood producer Max Crow. Teenagers from the local drama group are encouraged to audition for a story about the trials and tribulations of growing up. Benjamin Knot, the CEO of a well-known architecture firm, discovers that his children, Lily and Nathan, have each been offered a role. But Barton Mallet has a deep wound that has never truly healed.

Following a convention in the Scottish Highlands, eight social media influencers vanish without a trace, leaving their followers–and families–in a state of shock, and the police clueless as to their whereabouts. And then, the livestreams begin. Broadcast live from their squalid underground cells, the young influencers are forced into a sadistic battle for survival. With each livestream, their captor pits them against each other in a twisted competition for likes. The influencer with the fewest positive reactions faces a gruesome end–live on camera.

A young woman's body is found in a remote barn on the Fens. Before she was killed, one of her fingers had been cut off. Who is inflicting this violence and why? The young woman in the barn had been kept captive for some time. And the case shows strong similarities to an unsolved murder in Derbyshire. When another woman is found alive with similar injuries, the case grows even more complicated.

London, 1850: A young Charles Lenox struggles to make a name for himself as a detective...without a single case. Scotland Yard refuses to take him seriously and his friends deride him for attempting a profession at all. But when an anonymous writer sends a letter to the paper claiming to have committed the perfect crime - and promising to kill again - Lenox is convinced that this is his chance to prove himself. The writer's first victim is a young woman whose body is found in a naval trunk, caught up in the rushes of a small islets in the middle of the Thames.

Bo Tully is the sheriff of Blight County, Idaho, where law enforcement is usually pretty mundane: tracking down truants running away from school, picking up country boys who've had a few too many beers. But Tully gets a little more than the country norm when an ex-con calls with the startling news that there's a corpse draped across one of his fences.