English Police Mysteries

Jo told him the phone call had been about a woman who wanted to have her husband declared dead. Smith thought for a moment and then said, 'Hmm. There must be a few million women in this country who feel like that. I take it her husband's been missing for a while and she's decided it's time to move on. In the absence of a body, which is always a nuisance, she wants Diver and Diver to confirm there's no proof he's alive. And I've told Jason a dozen times I'm not getting involved in anything matrimonial. I have enough trouble sorting out my own relationships.'

Christmas is approaching, and in Québec it's a time of dazzling snowfalls, bright lights, and gatherings with friends in front of blazing hearths. But shadows are falling on the usually festive season for Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. Most of his best agents have left the Homicide Department, his old friend and lieutenant Jean-Guy Beauvoir hasn't spoken to him in months, and hostile forces are lining up against him. When Gamache receives a message from Myrna Landers that a longtime friend has failed to arrive for Christmas in the village of Three Pines, he welcomes the chance to get away.

It’s been twenty years since Detective Chelsey Calhoun’s sister vanished when they were teenagers, and ever since she’s been searching: for signs, for closure, for other missing girls. But happy endings are rare in Chelsey’s line of work. Then a glimmer: local teenager Ellie Black, who disappeared without a trace two years earlier, has been found alive in the woods of Washington State. But something is not right with Ellie. She won’t say where she’s been, or who she’s protecting, and it’s up to Chelsey to find the answers.

Adam and Sophie Warner and their three-year-old daughter are vacationing in Washington State’s Hood Canal for Memorial Day weekend. It’s the perfect getaway to unplug—and to calm an uneasy marriage. But on Adam’s first day out on the water, he sees Sophie abducted by a stranger. A hundred yards from shore, Adam can’t save her. And Sophie disappears.

While working one afternoon on the Northern Divide, a young tree-marker makes a grisly discovery: in a squatter's cabin near an old mill town, a family has been murdered. An army vet coming off a successful turn leading a task force that took down infamous biker criminals, Detective Frank Yakabuski arrives in Ragged Lake, a nearly abandoned village, to solve the family's murder. But no one is willing to talk. With a winter storm coming, Yakabuski sequesters the locals in a fishing lodge as he investigates the area with his two junior officers.

Joe Gunther and his team - the Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) - are usually called in on major cases by local Vermont enforcement whenever they need expertise and backup. But after the state is devastated by Hurricane Irene, the police from one end of the state are taxed to their limits, leaving Joe Gunther involved in an odd and seemingly unrelated series of cases. In the wake of the hurricane, a seventeen-year-old gravesite is exposed, revealing a coffin that had been filled with rocks instead of the expected remains.

Detective Sergeant Norman likes the idea of a permanent home in the small Welsh coastal town. With his reinvented career invigorating him, he finds himself enjoying working for his younger female DI. But when she asks him to investigate a puzzling seaside suicide, his first job is to find the corpse belonging to the discarded clothing left on the sand.... With the deceased man’s remains presumed lost at sea, DS Norman believes his case has run up a blind alley...until local builders dig up a female human skull.

When a torched body is found in a country lane, DI Bliss and Chandler are called in to investigate. The detectives are drawn towards recent missing person reports and believe their victim will prove to be one of them. Bliss thinks he knows which and fears the outcome if he is proven right. Soon the body is identified, and Bliss and Chandler discover evidence suggesting this murder might be a terrorist attack. Meanwhile, someone from Bliss’ past needs his help, and soon he is juggling his personal life with the demanding case.

Police officer Sebastian Clifford never planned on becoming a private investigator. But when a scandal leads to the disbandment of his London based special squad, he finds himself out of a job. That is, until his cousin calls on him to investigate her husband’s high-profile death, and prove that it wasn’t a suicide. Clifford’s reluctant to get involved, but the more he digs, the more evidence he finds. With his ability to remember everything he's ever seen, he's the perfect person to untangle the layers of deceit.

When the body of a missing tourist is discovered slain in the foothills of the Cuillin Mountain range, it falls to D.I. Duncan McAdam and his small team to discover how he came to be there and who would have a motive to kill him. The summer season is a welcome distraction following a brutal and challenging winter. The Isle of Skye is booming with a revitalised tourist trade after a tough few years, and the Misty Isle is on course for its best year for visitors on record. But one person has not received the warm greeting the islanders are famed for.

Deep in the Yukon wilderness, a town is being built. A place for people to disappear, a fresh start from a life on the run. Haven’s Rock isn’t the first town of this kind, something detective Casey Duncan and her husband, Sheriff Eric Dalton, know firsthand. They met in the original town of Rockton. But greed and deception led the couple to financing a new refuge for those in need. This time around, they get to decide which applicants are approved for residency.

When builders discover a human skeleton during a renovation of a café, they call in archeologist Dr. Ruth Galloway, who is preoccupied with the threatened closure of her department and by her ever-complicated relationship with DCI Nelson. The bones turn out to be modern—the remains of Emily Pickering, a young archaeology student who went missing in 2002. Suspicion soon falls on Emily’s Cambridge tutor and also on another archeology enthusiast who was part of the group gathered the weekend before she disappeared—Ruth’s friend Cathbad.

In North Devon, where the rivers Taw and Torridge converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his father's funeral takes place. The day Matthew turned his back on the strict evangelical community in which he grew up, he lost his family, too. Now he's back, not just to mourn his father at a distance, but to take charge of his first major case in the Two Rivers region; a complex place not quite as idyllic as tourists suppose.

When a hostage situation turns deadly, Billy loses everything - his wife, his daughter, and his career. Devastated, he heads to Key West to put down his gun and pick up a rod and reel as a fishing boat captain. But former co-worker Roscoe McAuley isn't ready to let Billy rest. When Roscoe tells Billy that someone murdered his son, Billy sends him away.

Inside the walls of Indiana’s elite Westmont Preparatory High School, expectations run high and rules are strictly enforced. But in the woods beyond the manicured campus and playing fields sits an abandoned boarding house that is infamous among Westmont’s students as a late-night hangout. Here, only one rule applies: don’t let your candle go out - unless you want the Man in the Mirror to find you....

Despite their investigative prowess, Scotland Yard's Chief Inspector Michael Sinclair, Lord Acton, and rookie detective Kathleen Doyle stir more than a few feathers at CID Headquarters when their relationship comes to light. But office politics quickly become trivial when a rash of underworld murders shatters London's normally austere façade. With a growing list of successfully solved cases to her name, the ever-dauntless Doyle shakes off the gossip and sets out to investigate the escalating turf war.

Chief Inspector Acton and Detective Sergeant Kathleen Doyle know firsthand how the administration of justice can often follow a labyrinthine path. As they pursue a self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner, Acton's own questionable methods may prove his undoing.

Just back from her second tour in Afghanistan, NYPD Detective Chiara Corelli goes undercover to expose a ring of dirty cops. But when she's ordered to kill to prove her loyalty, she aborts the operation without having identified the leaders. Now, Corelli is the one exposed. With her brothers and sisters in blue ostracizing her, can she trust Detective P. J. Parker to watch her back?

Twenty-five years ago, a schoolgirl was attacked. Ambushed by three bullies at her home where she lived alone with her granny. Now, the mother of one of those bullies is found murdered on the Hobfield housing estate. Written on the wall in the victim’s blood is the word “sorry”. Detective Tom Calladine and his partner DS Ruth Bayliss discover a link to some bones found at an old house up in the hills. It was the home of the teenage girl who was attacked. The detectives have more than this puzzling case on their hands.

When Venetian detective Commissario Guido Brunetti is called to investigate a presumed suicide in Venice's elite military academy, his inquiries are immediately met with a wall of silence. The young man is the son of a doctor and former politician, a man of an impeccable integrity all too rare in Italian politics. Dr. Moro seems devastated by his son's death, but is not eager to talk to the police.