English Police Mysteries

Kit Kenyon is a first-rate hostage negotiator. Noah Lambert is a good detective with excellent instincts. These new partners have hardly had time to get used to each other when they are thrown into a grisly murder case. As evidence mounts up and more victims are found, Kit and Noah realize that they are on the hunt for a serial killer. The problem is he may be hunting one of them, too.

Wayne Castine was found brutally murdered and the murderer remains at large. Castine, a suspected child predator, was killed in Brattleboro where he was involved with a tangled network of an extended family living in a local trailer park. Any member of the clan would have had the opportunity to kill him, and, as he was involved with both the mother and her 12 year old daughter, reason to commit the murder.

In the wake of a devastating hurricane, Special Agent Meg Jennings and her Labrador, Hawk - invaluable members of the FBI’s Human Scent Evidence Team - have been deployed to Virginia Beach. They have their work cut out for them. Amid graveyards of debris, and the buried cries for help, the search and rescue operation begins. The most alarming discovery is yet to come - a teenage girl hiding in the Great Dismal Swamp. Shaken by the storm, she has reason to be scared. But this young survivor is terrified of so much more.

In a Dry Season, winner of the Anthony Award, is an outstanding example of mystery fiction. Peter Robinson's Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks conjures up memories of classic detectives like Philip Marlowe and Sherlock Holmes. An insufferable drought ravages the Yorkshire countryside, depleting the Thornfield Reservoir, revealing the remnants of the flooded town of Hobb's End and the terrible secrets kept safe within its watery tomb. Amongst the ruins, the remains of a woman's body are discovered.

The Inspector Banks novel In a Dry Season was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won an Anthony Award. Cold Is the Grave won the Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award. It takes the aging, solitary inspector from his cozy Yorkshire cottage into the dark underworld of London. The assignment is a favor asked by Banks' boss and greatest enemy: Chief Constable Riddle.

A dedicated man is dead in the Yorkshire dales---a former university professor, wealthy historian, and archaeologist who loved his adopted village. It is a particularly heinous slaying, considering the esteem in which the victim, Harry Steadman, was held by his neighbors and colleagues---by everyone, it seems, except the one person who bludgeoned the life out of the respected scholar and left him half-buried in a farmer's field.

At a summons from Detective Sergeant Frank Malloy, midwife Sarah Brandt arrives at the elegant home of famed magnetic healer Edmund Blackwell to find his wife in labor - and the good doctor dead from an apparent suicide. Only Malloy sees what no one else wants to: that Blackwell was murdered in his own home. After a successful delivery, the Blackwell baby falls mysteriously ill.

Peter Diamond is tasked to run security for a wedding. Seems a bit beneath his extraordinary detective talents, as well as his title as head of Bath's CID, but this isn't your run-of-the-mill ceremony: the bride and groom belong to families on opposite ends of the law - and someone is trying to sabotage the nuptials by taking out a hit on the father of the bride.

Gold Dagger-winner and best-selling author in the United Kingdom, Ian Rankin crafts absorbing crime novels with solidly drawn characters and first-rate plotting. In Strip Jack, he portrays a shocking murder investigation that exposes the sordid side of Edinburgh politics and society. Detective John Rebus suspects a set-up when a respected Member of Parliament is caught in a police raid on a brothel—and his flamboyant wife suddenly disappears.

A strange group of people have descended on the small island of West Uist. Camped out in the grounds of the Castle, they are preparing to celebrate the summer solstice. Museum curator Finley McNab becomes suspicious of the cult-like group, and when he challenges them it seems his investigations could be deadly....Inspector Torquil McKinnon is called in to keep an eye on the group. Are they innocent pagan worshippers? Or is something more sinister going on behind the scenes? As the day of the solstice draws ever nearer, whispers of murder are on the horizon....

In the 17th installment in Peter Lovesey's timeless British detective series, Peter Diamond digs deep into Bath history to ferret out the secrets of one of its most famous (and scandalous) icons: Richard "Beau" Nash, who might have been the victim of a centuries-old murder.

Just graduated from the police academy, Linda Wallander returns to Skane to join the police force, and she already shows all the hallmarks of her father - the maverick approach, the flaring temper. Before she even starts work she becomes embroiled in the case of her childhood friend, Anna, who has inexplicably disappeared.

A British journalist is invited to Malmö to interview an old university friend who is now one of Sweden's leading film directors. When he discovers the director's glamorous film-star wife dead in her apartment, the Skåne County Police are called in to solve the high-profile case.

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.

Detective Sara Hirst has moved from London to Norfolk Police's Serious Crimes Unit. She wants to know the truth about her father, who has connections to the area. Her mother won't tell her the real story. A new job. A new place. Same old problems. Sara's first call-out is to a decomposing body discovered in a ditch on a local farm. How does the murder relate to a recent spate of thefts? Who wanted the victim dead? Then the case grows very personal.

Peter Robinson is the critically acclaimed New York Times and London Sunday Times best-selling author of the Inspector Alan Banks series, as well as a winner of the 2001 Anthony and 2001 Ellis Awards. Close to Home traverses the difficult landscapes of a painful past, and an uncertain future for Inspector Banks. Two 15-year-old boys are lost, and the circumstances of their disappearances seem oddly parallel save one detail. The first boy disappeared and was presumed dead 35 years ago.

One time police detective Peter Diamond loses his job as a security guard when he fails to spot a small Japanese child hiding in the furniture department of Harrods. Weeks later, she's still unclaimed; Diamond is unable to forget the frightened eyes of the silent little girl and takes on the challenge of uncovering her identity.

His holiday with his family has just begun, but a phone call sends Martin Beck packing off to Budapest, where a boorish journalist has vanished without a trace. With the aid of the coolly efficient local police, who do business while soaking at the public baths, Beck must troll about in the Eastern Europe underworld for a man nobody knows - while he is at the risk of vanishing along with his quarry.

K-9 search and rescue handler Jamie Flint and her team - both human and canine - are called in when a group vanishes during a dogsledding expedition for battered women in the Mahoosuc Mountains of Maine. When it's learned a rogue gunman was involved in the disappearance, authorities look to the abusive partners of the women now lost for answers. Meanwhile, a voice from Jamie's past begins to haunt her, echoing the words of the shooter now in pursuit of a target Jamie alone can save.

The harrowing call comes from the NYPD: Willy's ex-wife Mary has been found dead in her Lower East Side apartment, and Willy is asked to identify the body. Torn from his beloved Vermont, Willy returns to the city of his hard-drinking youth with misgivings that deepen when he sees Mary's sad corpse on a gurney. Because of a fresh puncture mark in her arm, the police think she overdosed. But Willy has doubts. Driven by loss and guilt, Willy searches deeper and deeper into his past, to a long-ago Vietnam where he was a merciless loner known as the Sniper.