International Police Procedurals

It’s April 2020 and Edinburgh is in lockdown, but that doesn’t mean crime takes a holiday. It would seem like a strange time for a cold case to go hot—the streets all but empty, an hour’s outdoor exercise the maximum allowed—but when a source at the National Library contacts DCI Karen Pirie’s team about documents in the archive of a recently deceased crime novelist, it seems it’s game on again. What unspools is a twisted game of betrayal and revenge, but no one quite expects how many twists it will turn out to have.

When a young woman is found brutally murdered in her own apartment with an intricate pattern of lines carved into her face, Copenhagen police detectives Jeppe Korner and Anette Werner are assigned to the case. Soon, they establish a link between the victim, Julie Stender, and her landlady, Esther de Laurenti, who’s a bit too fond of drink and the host of raucous dinner parties with her artist friends. Esther also turns out to be a budding novelist - and when Julie turns up as a murder victim in the unfinished mystery she’s writing, the link between fiction and real life grows.

It's nearly Christmas in Oxford, and Detective Inspector Bridget Hart is enjoying a rare day off at Oxford's Christmas Market. A ghost tour seems like a fun way to round off the day. Until, that is, a brutal murder brings the evening to a tragic close. Torn between work and family commitments over the festive season, Bridget soon discovers that the ghost of Christmas past is reaching out to the present with fatal consequences.

Acclaimed best-selling novelist Kunihiko Hidaka is found brutally murdered in his home on the night before he’s planning to leave Japan and relocate to Vancouver. His body is found in his office, a locked room, within his locked house, by his wife and his best friend, both of whom have rock solid alibis. Or so it seems.

On her sixtieth birthday, a woman commits suicide. When the case lands on Detective Carl Mørck’s desk, he can’t imagine what this has to do with Department Q, Copenhagen’s cold cases division since the cause of death seems to be clear. But his superior, Marcus Jacobsen, is convinced that this is not in fact a suicide, but a murder related to an unsolved case that has been plaguing him since 1988.

Seven years ago, France's top chef, Marc Fraysse, summoned the world's culinary press to his remote restaurant in central France to make an announcement that he said would cause shockwaves in the culinary community. Instead of an announcement, the reporters were shocked to find instead that the great chef had been murdered, and they left without a clue about the message the chef intended to deliver or who might have killed him.

In The Keeper of Lost Causes, Jussi Adler-Olsen introduced Detective Carl Mørck, a deeply flawed, brilliant detective newly assigned to run Department Q, the home of Copenhagen’s coldest cases. The result wasn’t what Mørck - or readers - expected, but by the opening of Adler-Olsen’s shocking, fast-paced follow-up, Mørck is satisfied with the notion of picking up long-cold leads. So he’s naturally intrigued when a closed case lands on his desk: A brother and sister were brutally murdered two decades earlier....

Forensics expert Enzo Macleod travels to a tiny island off the coast of Brittany to honor a promise he made long ago to a dead man, to investigate his 20-year-old murder. In a fascinating development, Enzo learns that the man's study - the scene of the crime - has been completely untouched ever since. In the claustrophobic environment of the island's close-knit community, where the locals have no desire to see this painful case reopened, Macleod must try to find clues in plain sight that earlier investigators missed.

DCI Whitney Walker’s in trouble. She’s threatened with demotion if she screws up another case. So, when a killer starts murdering female students, it’s a chance to redeem herself. Forensic psychologist, Dr. Georgina Cavendish, has spent her life inside the university walls, but when one of her students is murdered, she steps out from behind the text books and puts her skills to the test.

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.

When a senior Metropolitan Police officer and High Court judge die in quick succession, criminal profiler Doctor Alex Gregory is convinced their deaths are linked to the most shameful case of his career: the notorious wrongful conviction of Carl Deere, an innocent man found guilty of a series of heinous murders perpetrated by the ‘Soho Killer'. Four years later, released from prison and with his record wiped clean, Deere is an invisible spectre with a new name and a new face.

As the snow falls and a bitter wind blows, Detective Ellie Reeves is devastated to discover the bodies of two little girls, alone and frozen on an icy lake, in the isolated town of Cold Mountain. The girls are holding hands, with matching bows in their blonde curls, and when Ellie realizes they are twin sisters, her heart breaks for their mother, who must be desperately wondering where her little darlings are. But, back at the police station, she is horrified to discover that nobody has reported the sisters missing. Are their parents in danger too?

Shots ring out at a Salvation Army Christmas concert in Oslo, leaving one of the singers dead in the street. The trail will lead Harry Hole, Oslo’s best investigator and worst civil servant, deep into the darkest corners of the city and, eventually, to Croatia.

Across the country, dozens of teenage girls have vanished. Authorities are convinced they're runaways with just the bad luck of the draw to connect them. It's the job of criminal profilers Dr. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan to look for a pattern. They've spent years exploring the psyches of madmen. But sane men kill, too. And when they hide in plain sight, they can be difficult to find.

Scotland Yard’s new chief inspector Nicholas Drummond is on the first flight to New York when he learns his colleague, Elaine York, the "minder" of the Crown Jewels for the "Jewel of the Lion" exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was found murdered. Then the centerpiece of the exhibit, the infamous Koh-i-Noor Diamond, is stolen from the Queen Mother’s crown. Drummond, American-born but raised in the UK, is a dark, dangerous, fast-rising star in the Yard who never backs down. And this case is no exception.

In England's shadowy corners, from misty woods to ancient university halls, criminal psychologist and head of the Ritualistic Behavioural Crime unit Dr Harrison Lane, confronts the country’s most challenging crimes. A boy's body with cryptic messages. A man pinned down by horseshoes. A student etched with strange symbols. Each scene is a piece of a terrifying puzzle only Harrison can solve. As he unravels these ritualistic killings, Harrison digs up long-buried secrets that shake quiet towns to their core. But the deeper he delves, the more his own past threatens to engulf him.

A murder without motive. A bombing. The sins of the past revisited.... DI Nathaniel Caslin is heading up a specialist unit, an opportunity to make a real difference. Little does he know, decisions taken decades previously are about to threaten all that he holds dear.... Gangland tensions are on the rise as an uneasy peace is fractured in spectacular fashion. Two warring factions are lining up to unseat the other. Old adversaries rekindle their passion to exact revenge whilst the next generation seek to make a name for themselves.

The Chinese police have once more been forced to enlist the services of American forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell, this time to investigate a series of four horrific ritual executions in Beijing. Detective Li Yan is determined to discover just how one of the victims in particular, an American diplomat, became caught up in the slaying. And he is arguably even more determined to have nothing to do with Campbell, whom he finds simultaneously too foreign and too... familiar. The personal polarity that once attracted Yan and Campbell again strengthens their professional partnership.

A man’s body washes up on a beach on the North Yorkshire coast with a single gunshot wound to the chest. The only clue to the victim’s identity is a ring engraved with two names. DCI Tom Raven is back in his hometown of Scarborough for the first time in over 30 years. When offered the chance to lead the murder investigation, he takes it. Raven quickly discovers that the prime suspect is his once-teenage friend, now a wealthy but shady businessman. He finds an ally in Detective Sergeant Becca Shawcross, but not everyone in the team is on his side.

1955. Two young couples move to the uninhabited, isolated fjord of Hedinsfjörður. Then one of the women meets her death in mysterious circumstances. The case is never solved. Fifty years later an old photograph comes to light, and it becomes clear that the couples may not have been alone on the fjord after all. In nearby Siglufjörður, young policeman Ari Thór tries to piece together what really happened that fateful night, in a town where no one wants to know, where secrets are a way of life. Things take a sinister turn when a child goes missing in broad daylight.