English Police Mysteries

Michael Lobb has just been found dead on the floor of his family’s tin & pewter workshop. It’s suspicious enough that his body was found by a representative of EcoMining, a company keen on acquiring his family’s land, and it’s made even worse when he’s revealed to have been the majority owner of the business and the sole obstacle preventing a deal from being made. But it doesn’t take long for Detective Beatrice Hannaford to unearth the layers of estrangement that surrounded Michael in his final days, pointing suspicions elsewhere.

There's more than blood and bone beneath the skin... The victim, a nondescript "numbers cruncher," died horribly just yards away from his terrified wife and daughter, murdered by men who clearly enjoyed their work.

DCI Evan Warlow believes that murder is a cardinal sin. Even when the victim is a drug dealing, money-laundering criminal. But when a police officer is shot in the same incident at a tranquil beach near Tenby in South Pembrokeshire… Suddenly it’s personal. What appears, on the surface, to be a falling out between partners in crime soon spirals into an operation involving gang warfare and a great deal of money. But even Warlow is not prepared for what lurks beneath the surface of this most terrible of crimes.

DI Sally Parker has a serial killer on her patch. One thing that sets this killer apart from the others she's hunted before: his willingness to leave DNA at each of the crime scenes. It's up to Sally and her partner, DS Jack Blackman, to find out why before the body count rises to double figures. While Sally is engrossed in the investigation, her ex-husband, Darryl, pays a surprise visit to her new home.

During intermission at the famed La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy, a notoriously difficult and widely disliked German conductor is poisoned—and suspects abound. Guido Brunetti, a native Venetian, sets out to unravel the mystery behind the high-profile murder. To do so, he calls on his knowledge of Venice, its culture, and its dirty politics. Along the way, he finds the crime may have roots going back decades—and that revenge, corruption, and even Italian cuisine may play a role.

New York Times best-selling author Carla Neggers introduces Lizzie Rush in this gripping tale where nothing and no one is as they seem. Utilizing skills her ex-spy father taught her, Lizzie brings down an international crime kingpin. But now this outlaw has her targeted for revenge. Her only hope may be intelligence man Will Davenport - but can he be trusted?

Aleksander Granovsky has dedicated his life to exposing the brutality of the Russian penal system. In two days, he will be tried for the crime of smuggling essays to the West. It is a show trial, and there is no doubt he will be convicted and executed, yet before he dies, he intends to tell the truth one more time. But this is Moscow, where death is never heroic. While writing his final speech in his government flat, Granovsky is surprised by an assassin, who pierces his heart with the point of a rusty scythe.

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.

Together with his gorgeous sidekick, psychologist Kit Franklyn, the two make a powerful, although improbable, mystery-solving duo. Among the dead collected in The Big Easy floodwaters after Hurricane Katrina are three nude female bodies, all caught in the same brush tangle, none with water in their lungs. Broussard knows in his ample gut that this was not an act of God, and not the work of Katrina. But Broussard has perhaps the biggest challenge of his colorful career.

Set in rural South Carolina in 1995, a veteran detective is forced to reconcile the errors of a past case when a woman she convicted of murder is exonerated after 10 years in prison. Meanwhile, a series of grisly and ritualistic murders rock their decaying town, and our heroine is put at odds against her ambitious partner as they race to put the pieces together.

The village of Badger's Drift is the essence of tranquillity. But when resident and well-loved spinster Miss Simpson takes a stroll in the nearby woods, she stumbles across something she was never meant to see, and there's only one way to keep her quiet. Miss Simpson's death is not suspicious, say the villagers. But Miss Lucy Bellringer refuses to rest: her friend has been murdered. She is sure of it.

John Rebus spent his life as a detective putting Edinburgh's most deadly criminals behind bars. Now, he's going to join them... In this tense, gripping game of cat and mouse, 'The King of Crime' (Express) returns to his much-loved creation, the inimitable John Rebus, as he faces a case unlike any other...

Buried ceremoniously, high in a cave on the Rock of Gibraltar, lies the skeleton of a human woman, clutching the skeleton of a part-human, part-Neanderthal child. Fascinated, Professor Oliver jumps at the chance to visit the site. But two deaths, possibly murders, have rocked Gibraltar. As Oliver tries to piece things together, he's about to fall for some deadly tricks. After all, unlike the Gibraltar Boy, he's only human.

Nine physicists are dead. The medical examiner has determined that the victims died from drinking coffee laced with rat poison. The owner of the house, Professor Thaddeus Huntgardner, isn't suspected, but his claim that a piece of the debris from Roswell's 1947 UFO crash was hidden in Flagler might be true. Enter Luther "Luke" Stephens McWhorter, a Yale Divinity School-educated West Texas sheriff with all the right questions. Is the fragment real? If so, who's trying to locate it? And what has fueled the byzantine activities of Abbot County's two secret societies for the past 70 years?

Under a promising morning sky, police captain Walter Alaka'i makes a tragic discovery: the body of a teenage surfer bobbing among the lava rocks of Maui's southeastern shore. It appears to be an ill-fated accident, but closer inspection reveals something far more sinister than the results of a savage wave gone wrong. Now that Alaka'i is looking at a homicide, he solicits the help of his niece, Detective Kali Mahoe.

Strange lesions found in the brain of a dead man have forensic pathologist Broussard stumped. Even more baffling are the corpse’s fingerprints. They belong to Ronald Cicero, a lifer at Angola State Prison - an inmate the warden insists is still there. Broussard sends psychologist Kit Franklyn to find out who is locked up in Cicero's cell. But an astonishing discovery at the jail and an attempt on her life almost has Kit sleeping with the crawfish in a bayou swamp.

In Berkeley, people don't just disagree; they make careers out of it. And in a city where anything goes, where burned-out '60s hippies haunt the shadows along Telegraph Avenue, no one can outrun the past. Now police detective Jill Smith is plunged into a case that's pure Berkeley: a tangled tale of sins and retribution that has led to one man's disappearance, and another man's murder.

New Orleans Requiem is written in Donaldson's unique style: A hard-hitting, punchy, action-packed prose that’s dripping with a folksy, decidedly southern, sense of irony. Add in Donaldson's brilliant first-hand knowledge of forensics and the sultry flavor of New Orleans, and the result is first class forensic procedural within an irresistibly delectable mystery.

Big secrets run deep. Former FBI agent Jack McBride took the job as chief of police for Stillwater, Texas, to start a new life with his teenage son, Ethan, away from the suspicions that surrounded his wife's disappearance a year earlier. With a low crime rate and a five-man police force, he expected it to be a nice, easy gig; hot checks, traffic violations, some drugs, occasional domestic disturbances, and petty theft. Instead, within a week he is investigating a staged murder-suicide.

When Philip Drem, the most feared and hated IRS auditor, is murdered, junk food junkie Jill Smith finds a long list of suspects among Berkeley's eclectic community.