English Private Detectives

A perfectly plotted crime is foiled by a runaway bank clerk as Inspector Littlejohn navigates impersonation, forgery, embezzlement...and a murder. It was meant to be a fool-proof scheme. The victim was a recluse, cut off from the world after the death of his wife. Nobody would think it strange when they didn't see him. Nobody would make inquiries. Yet, even the most meticulous of criminals can be caught out, especially if they don't leave room for human error.

A cold case dating from the 1960s draws forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver to the Channel Islands decades later to shine a light on the mysterious connection between two men who died there on the same night.

1950s Staffordshire. Within the clay tanks at the pottery company Shentall's, a body has been found. Amid cries of industrial espionage and sabotage of this leader of the pottery industry, there is a case of bitter murder to solve for Inspector Hedley Nicholson. Kelly's mystery won the CWA Gold Dagger Award in 1961 for its impeccable sense of place and detail, and for the emotional weight of its central crime. The novel is part of a shift from the cosiness of crime novels before to mysteries characterised by their psychological interest and affecting realism. An influential classic.

Battle and burial are built into the history of Lansdown Hill, so it is no great shock when part of a skeleton is unearthed there. But Peter Diamond, Bath's Head of CID, can't ignore the fresh corpse found close to the folly known as Beckford's Tower. The hill becomes the setting for one of the most puzzling cases he has investigated, involving golf, horseracing, Civil War re-enactment and the Cyrillic alphabet.

When the body of a child is found in Paris, Interpol involvement is resented by Inspector Le Fur - a proud French man who believes that the inquiry should be carried out on French soil. However, when Jobin explains the case's history to him. Le Fur is more accepting of the way the inquiry progresses. With child trafficking becoming more and more common, Interpol are involved in the case. With victims under the age of nine years old, concern is mounting as the killer leaves his calling card.

It is London in the early 1960s and Teddy Bean is making a name for himself as a private detective. However, his personal problems are taking over, with his brother, John, only slowly recovering from a heart attack and his wife, Pearl, dying in a car accident. Added to this, he takes on a difficult case involving a woman presumably drowned at sea by her husband. Teddy needs help while his brother is incapacitated and finds it in his friend, ex-Detective Inspector Tony Halliday. With the added support of their secretary Muriel, the Bean Detective Agency is open for business once more!

After six long months with no new cases for her Edge of the World Detective Agency, Donna ‘Deadly’ Nightshade jumps at the chance to spend a weekend undercover on St Michael’s Mount. With seven high profile attendees – including the Home Secretary – Donna doesn’t expect much tension. But as a storm descends on the tidal island, and they’re cut off from the rest of the world, friends turn to enemies and before the rain has ceased it’s not just one murder Donna has to worry about – it’s two.

From stolen washing to inheritance investigations, Bruncliffe’s Dales Detective Agency is being inundated with cases. But with Samson O’Brien still in London helping the Met Police clear his name, and the newly appointed member of the investigations team, Ida Capstick, distracted by her brother George’s insistence that their farm is haunted, Delilah Metcalfe is struggling to meet the mounting demands for the agency’s services. So when the mother of a local estate agent arrives at the offices insisting her son is missing, Delilah is relieved to have Samson return to help.

Ten-year-old Ethan Clarke's disappearance gripped the nation. Just as his parents are starting to piece together a life 'after Ethan', their world is ripped apart once more when their daughter, Robin, disappears in almost identical circumstances. They've lost two children within a decade...and now doubts about their innocence are setting in.

His Last Bow: The War Service of Sherlock Holmes, later titled His Last Bow: An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes, is one of 56 short stories about Sherlock Holmes written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It was first published in September 1917 in Strand Magazine, and, amongst six other stories, was collected in an anthology titled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes. The narration is in the third person, instead of the first person narration usually provided by the character of Dr. Watson, and it is a spy story, rather than a detective mystery.

The Adventure of the Red Circle is one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. It is included in the anthology His Last Bow. Mrs. Warren, a landlady, comes to 221B Baker Street with some questions about her lodger. A youngish, heavily bearded man, who spoke good but accented English who came to her and offered double her usual rent on the condition that he get the room on his own terms. He went out the first night that he was there, and came back after midnight when the rest of the household had gone to bed.

The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton is one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is one of 13 stories in the cycle collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes and was published in 1904. Holmes is hired by the débutante Lady Eva Blackwell to retrieve compromising letters from a blackmailer: Milverton, who causes Holmes more revulsion than any of the 50-odd murderers in his career. Milverton is "the king of blackmailers".

C.T. Ferguson spent years as a hacker. He lived in Hong Kong, working against the Chinese government. Then they found him, threw him in jail, and eventually kicked him out. In Baltimore, C.T. sets himself up as a private investigator. Then, Alice walks in. She’s sure her husband is cheating on her. C.T. looks into it, but isn’t convinced. He soon discovers Alice has serious problems of her own. When Alice’s troubles get even worse, C.T. finds his own life in danger. With a liar for a client and enforcers hounding him, can C.T. prevent his first case from becoming his last?

After narrowly surviving a near-fatal shooting, Portland detective Myron Vale wakes with a bullet still lodged in his brain, a headache to end all headaches, and a terrible side effect that radically transforms his world for the worse: he sees ghosts. Lots of them.

There are around 40 murders per day in the United States. It's not often that they are related. On a cold night in the suburbs of Philadelphia, an attorney returns home from a long day at work only to be gunned down getting out of his car. Two hours later and 20 miles away in southern New Jersey, a truck driver is shot while making a late night delivery. When the sun rises the next morning, many more unexplained homicides plague the Tri-State area.

Hours after throwing a third birthday party for their twins Kathy and Kelly in their Connecticut home, Margaret and Steve Frawley return home from a dinner in New York to discover the police in the house, their daughters missing, and an eight million dollar ransom note. The Frawleys meet the kidnapper's demands, but the abandoned car they're led to contains only Kelly, the body of the driver, and a suicide note, saying he had inadvertently killed Kathy and dumped her body in the ocean.

Stella Darnell is a cleaner. But when she isn't tackling dust and dirt and restoring order to chaos, Stella solves murders. Her latest case concerns a man convicted of killing his mistress. His daughter thinks he's innocent, and needs Stella to prove it. As Stella sifts through piles of evidence and interview suspects, she discovers a link between the recent murder and a famous case from forty years ago: the shocking death of six-year-old Sarah Ferris, killed in the shadows of an empty playground. Stella knows that dredging up the past can be dangerous.

A military-trained PI struggles to protect a beautiful woman from the Russian mob while plotting revenge on the killer who murdered his army brother and two children. Connor Marin and five team members had been part of a Ranger squad fighting the cartels in South America when their communications got hacked. That meant that Sanchez, Connor's closest friend, a man he had laughed and drank with, had been butchered by the cartels. The army brass never suspected the murders were more than simple executions. But Connor found a trail back to the real killers. How could this have happened?

Arthur Nakai, now armed with his newly minted private investigator license, has visitors at his doorstep on White Mesa. Melanie Manygoats and her young son arrive on a cold winter’s day asking him to locate her missing daughter, whom she fears has become one of the stolen. Arthur accepts and soon finds himself wading through the world of teenage prostitution where he discovers April has already been sold into the darker, more horrifying world of human trafficking and sexual slavery.

Freedom’s Detective reveals the untold story of the Reconstruction-era US Secret Service and their battle against the Ku Klux Klan, through the career of its controversial chief, Hiram C. Whitle.