English Police Mysteries

Retired policeman turned killer Jeffrey Brandt has gone underground. He is even living something like a normal life in North Wales. He killed to make society stand up and take notice. It did. His crimes are notorious. So infamous, in fact, that someone wants to emulate him. How will Brandt react to a copycat killer? Will he be flattered, or disturbed that someone wants to steal his limelight? Crucially, for investigating officer DSI Stella Johnson, the new spate of murders might offer an opportunity to finally bring Brandt to justice.

Peter Diamond, head of Bath CID, takes a city break in Vienna, where his favorite film, The Third Man, was set, but everything goes wrong, and his companion, Paloma, calls a halt to their relationship. Meanwhile, strange things are happening to jobbing musician Mel Farran, who finds himself scouted by methods closer to the spy world than the concert platform. The chance of joining a once-famous string quartet in a residency at Bath Spa University is too tempting for Mel to refuse. Then a body is found in the city canal, and the only clue to the dead woman’s identity is the tattoo of a music note on one of her teeth.

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.

Rick's fourth investigation should not have involved crime. It begins when Rick is asked by his uncle to go to Orvieto to talk some sense into his cousin Fabrizio, whose fling with a married woman is embarrassing the family. Rick agrees to give it a try and plans a short but romantic weekend in Orvieto with Betta Innocenti, the woman he met in Bassano. What could go wrong? Less than a day after their arrival, his language skills draw him into the brutal murder of an American visitor.

On a gloomy morning in Vigàta, a call from Fazio rouses Inspector Montalbano from a nightmare. A man called Giugiù Nicotra has been found dead in the skeletal workings of a construction site, a place now entombed by a sea of mud from recent days of rain and floods. Shot in the back, he had fled into a water supply system tunnel. The investigation gets off to a slow start, but all the evidence points to the world of construction and public contracts, a world just as slimy and impenetrable as mud.

Who killed Gray Mitchell? Gray Mitchell’s body is found buried under fresh snowfall in the early hours of the morning outside Stromford Cathedral. DI Jim Neal and DS Ava Merry are called in to investigate. It seems that a number of people had motives to kill him, including Mitchell's partner. Then another shocking act of violence occurs, also connected to the cathedral. Detectives Neal and Merry’s investigation reveals an intricate web of secrets connecting the crimes. But there is something the detectives have missed, the dark secret which can break open the case.

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.

In a wicked conspiracy reaching across the Mexican border, Tularosa pits a jaded ex-cop against tight-lipped Army personnel, hired thugs, and smooth-talking outlaws. Forced into retirement by a crippling gunshot wound, Santa Fe policeman Kevin Kerney seeks solitude on a small New Mexico ranch far from the nearest neighbor. But when his godson disappears without a trace into the harsh, high-security desert of the White Sands Missile Range, Kerney emerges to search for the young soldier.

On the hottest day in living memory, Richard Mallory Tindall, the owner of a patent firm, does not return home to Cleete village. When a man is found crushed to death, Tindall's case goes from missing person to homicide. In the course of solving murder cases, Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan has seen all manner of ugly death. But there's something particularly gruesome about this one, the body crushed beneath the marble and iron of an old Saxon church tower. With rubble blocking off access to the crime scene, no one can get close enough to inspect the body.

Witty and entertaining, the Montalbano novels by Andrea Camilleri—a master of the Italian detective story—have become favorites of mystery fans everywhere. In this latest installment, an unidentified corpse is found near Vigàta, a town known for its soil rich with potter’s clay. Meanwhile, a woman reports the disappearance of her husband, a Colombian man with Sicilian origins who turns out to be related to a local mobster.

Deputy Mattie Wray, formerly Mattie Cobb, is summoned to Washington’s Olympic peninsula for an urgent search and rescue mission to find a celebrity’s missing child. With only a week left before her wedding, Mattie is hesitant to leave Timber Creek, but her K-9 partner Robo’s tracking skills are needed. Dense forest, chilling rain, and unfriendly locals hamper their efforts, and soon Mattie suspects something more sinister than a lost child is at play. When one of the SAR dogs becomes ill, her fiancé Cole Walker suspects poison.

Another day, another hijacked body. And just 13 hours to solve a murder…Detective Vincent Graves has made a habit of dying. Waking up in someone else’s body isn’t pleasant, especially when it's inside a coffin with tons of dirt pressing down on it. Once he’s out, he learns his soul has 13 hours to find the borrowed body’s killer. With the help of a brilliant FBI agent, Vincent’s quest for clues leads to a looming supernatural presence. And escaping the dark threat may be impossible with his ever-ticking clock… Can Vincent close the case in time?

This is DC Smith's third investigation with the Diver and Diver Associates agency. They have been asked by a member of Norfolk's aristocracy to look into the tragic death of her younger brother, Freddie, the late Lord Thorpe of the title. The inquest verdict was of misadventure, but it isn't long before Smith begins to suspect there has been a serious miscarriage of justice.

The Terrorists is the last Martin Beck mystery, finished just a few weeks before Per Wahlöö’s death. The book is, in effect, a marvelous summing up of the series. The story centers on the visit of an American senator to Stockholm. Martin Beck tries to protect him from an international gang of terrorists, while they decide that Beck too should be removed from the scene.

He stands in the shadows. Watching them. DI Sara Ramsey's life is about to change forever. Recently moved to the area and in charge of a new team, she's tasked with finding a serial killer terrorising a rural community. Crimes as heinous as this rarely happen in picturesque rural idylls. The community is living in fear, desperate for Sara to keep them safe. When the killer changes his MO and abducts a vulnerable resident, Sara realises she is in a race against time to prevent the killer from claiming yet another victim.

Award-winning author Craig Johnson's critically acclaimed debut Western mystery takes listeners to the breathtaking mountains of Wyoming for a tale of cold-blooded vengeance. Four high-school boys were given suspended sentences for raping a Cheyenne girl. Now, two of the boys have been killed, and only Sheriff Walt Longmire can keep the other two safe.

DI Sara Ramsey is forced to tackle one of her toughest cases to date when a tragic fire turns out to be the actions of a deranged arsonist. A person set on revenge...but why? What’s his motive? He’s risking everything, striking when innocent people are asleep in their beds, leaving in his wake a trail of devastation that is harrowing for Sara and her team to unravel. Emotions are running high for all concerned: the families, the investigation team, and the murderer.

Inspector Green is coping with an office job, still eager to get back into the day-to-day fray of policing. His chance comes when an unidentified woman is drowned in the Ottawa River. In her possession is a Medal for Bravery from a peacekeeping mission. As Green and his team dig deeper into the military past, Green finds himself sucked not only into the murky past of a peacekeeping unit but into the high-stakes present of a federal election race. What crime was committed in Yugoslavia more than a decade ago? Is someone still killing to prevent that secret from coming to light?

A man is found poisoned by the deadly toxin aconite. A note found at the scene leads Detective Sergeant Jack Mackinnon to a University of Oxford laboratory, where staff and students are desperate to hide their association with the victim. As Mackinnon gets closer to the truth, he finds his own family could be at risk.

Eighteen months on from the case that nearly cost him his life, only DCI Jamie Carver knows the incredible extent of the Worshipper Killer’s network of depravity - and the storm that will hit when others learn of it. They include those who walk Whitehall's corridors of power as well as others in high office and even, maybe, the upper echelons of the Police Service itself. When former members of that network start dying, Carver suspects that someone is out to make sure that their involvement, at least, remains hidden - and will stop at nothing to do so.