International Police Procedurals

After what seems like several lifetimes as a policeman, Commissario Trotti can't wait to retire to the villa he jointly owns with his cousin, where his biggest concern will be keeping track of his chickens. But things keep getting in the way of his plans. Like Fabrizio Bassi, for instance.

The British-based Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company finds itself in hot water its engineer, Alan Ottershaw, hits and kills a pedestrian while driving in a foreign country - a nation with thick veins of the strategically important mineral querremitte. This country has draconian laws about killings, so Ottershaw is relieved when he's whisked back to Calleshire. Bur the Lassertan government threatens to strip the company of its most valuable contract, and poor Mr. Ottershaw dies suddenly, a very convenient solution. A little too convenient, if you ask Calleshire detective C. D. Sloan.

The first victim is a horse: its headless, flayed body hangs suspended from the edge of a frozen cliff. On the same day as the gruesome discovery takes place, Diane Berg, a young psychiatrist starts her first job at a high security asylum for the criminally insane, just a few miles away. She is baffled by the slightly unorthodox methods the asylums' director uses, and then greatly alarmed when she realizes that drugs are disappearing.

Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov is an honest policeman in a very dishonest post-Soviet Union. He and his team are searching for a serial killer who has claimed at least 40 victims. And then there is the problem of protecting a visiting British journalist who is working on a story about a Moscow prostitution ring. In doing so Rostnikov and his team uncover a chain of murders that lead to a source too high to be held accountable if the police want to keep their jobs - or their lives.

In a hidden studio in Rome, an art expert is found dead in front of one of the most beautiful paintings Nic Costa has ever seen - an unknown Caravaggio masterpiece. But before long, tragedy will strike Nic far closer to home. The main suspect's identity is known, but he remains untouchable, protected by a fleet of lawyers and a sinister cult known as the Ekstasists. If Costa can crack the reasons for the cult's existence, he may well stand a chance of nailing his wife's killer. But the mystery will take him right back to Caravaggio himself and the reasons he had to flee Rome.

There's no rest for Paris's top criminal investigation division, La Crim'. Who is preying on women in the French capital? How can he kill again and again without leaving any clues? A serial killer is taking pleasure in a macabre ritual that leaves the police on tenterhooks. Chief of Police Nico Sirsky - a super cop with a modern-day real life, including an ex-wife, a teenage son and a budding love story - races against the clock to solve the murders as they get closer and closer to his inner circle. Will he resist the pressure?

Thirty nine steps rose from the busy road of Tuborgvej into Mindelunden, with its quiet graves and abiding bitter memories. Lennart Brix, head of the Copenhagen homicide team, felt he’d been walking those most of his life. Beneath the entrance arch, sheltering from the icy rain, he couldn’t help but recall that first visit almost fifty years before. A five-year-old boy, clutching the hand of his father, barely able to imagine what he was about see…

Detective Inspector Tony McLean is on the case when the search for a missing journalist uncovers the scene of a carefully staged murder. In a sealed chamber, deep in the heart of Gilmerton Cove, a mysterious network of caves and passages sprawling beneath Edinburgh, the body is discovered in a seemingly macabre ritual of purification. But McLean knew the dead man and can't shake off the suspicion that there is far more to this case than meets the eye.

Jan Reyna is a murder squad detective, British by adoption and choice, Faroese by birth and history. Called back to the remote Danish Faroe Islands when his father suffers a paralysing stroke, Reyna is forced to reexamine his decades-long rejection of the past and of his father in particular. But in this now-foreign country, whose language and customs he no longer understands, Reyna is also drawn into a rare Faroese murder case.

All eyes are on famous prosecutor Teodor Szacki when he investigates a skeleton discovered at a construction site in the idyllic Polish city of Olsztyn. Old bones come as no shock to anyone in this part of Poland, but it turns out these remains are fresh, the flesh chemically removed. Szacki questions the dead man's wife, only to be left with a suspicion she's hiding something. Then another victim surfaces - a violent husband, alive but maimed - giving rise to a theory: someone's targeting domestic abusers.

Blood has always been thicker than water for two Northern Irish brothers caught in the Belfast foster system, but a debt of past violence will be paid not just by them but also by those they left behind. Ciaran Devine, who made Belfast headlines seven years ago as the "schoolboy killer", is about to walk free. At the age of 12, he confessed to the brutal murder of his foster father; his testimony mitigated the sentence of his older brother, Thomas, who was also found at the crime scene, covered in blood.

From the author of the best seller Bangkok 8, a head-spinning new novel that puts us back in the company of the inimitable Royal Thai Police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep.

Former FBI profiler Hugo Marston has just become head of security at the US Embassy in London. He's asked to protect a famous movie-star couple, Dayton Harper and Ginny Ferro, who, while filming a movie in rural England, killed a local man in a hit-and-run. The task turns from routine to disastrous almost immediately. Before Hugo even meets them, he finds out that Ferro has disappeared, and her body has been found hanging from an oak tree in a London cemetery. Hours later a distraught Harper gives Hugo the slip, and Hugo has no idea where he's run off to.

A hay barn is set on fire at Low Dale Farm. It seems that an arsonist is targeting isolated barns. Arnold Merryweather’s ancient bus helps catch a car thief. And when Nick arrests not only a pig thief but also the expectant pig, the police station cleaner is not very pleased. But it’s not all crime. A glider crashes into a romance in a thatched cottage, and then Constable Nick is involved in a plot to force a penny-pincher to spend money. In the beautiful North Yorkshire countryside of the 1960s, Constable Nick’s roles are as varied as the eccentric villagers.

A pregnant woman has been murdered in a brutal, ritualistic way: burned, hung, and then placed upside down in a Bronze Age cauldron. When Unai “Kraken” Lopez de Ayala discovers the victim is his first love, Ana Belén Liaño, memories of their time together come flooding back, and with them reminders of a dark secret long buried.

The first three thrillers in the Amazon best-selling Lt. Kate Gazzara series: Jasmine, Cassandra, and Saffron. Brutal murders. Impossible crimes. A detective that can't let go. Have you met Lt. Kate Gazzara? If you love police procedurals, realism, fast-paced nonstop action, and strong women detectives, it's time you met Kate Gazzara, a dedicated female detective in a world dominated by men. Kate's addictive. You can't listen to just one.

Reykjavík Detective Gunnhildur Gísladóttir tries not to believe in ghosts. But when Helgi, one of her team, is certain he's seen a man who had been declared dead more than 15 years ago, she reluctantly gives him some unofficial leeway to look into it. Has the not-so-dead man returned from the grave to settle old scores, or has he just decided to take a last look around his old haunts?

Dinge ontrafel vinnig wanneer iemand speuradjudant Storm van der Merwe se ma voor ’n trein op Paddington-stasie instamp. Storm moet Londen toe, al is sy tot oor haar ore met ’n moordsaak: Beebee Bukelwa Babu, befaamde Suid-Afrikaanse modeontwerper, lê leweloos in ’n luukse hotel op Hermanus. Hande om Storm te help met die ondersoek ná Beebee se dood is min, want protesaksie lê die dorp lam. Boonop sweep ’n charismatiese profeet die skare tot ’n histerie op.

Shortly after a young mother mysteriously disappears, a serial killer begins leaving corpses and clues across the Texas Hill Country. Texas Ranger Faith McClellan and her mentor, veteran Ranger Archie Baxter, are assigned to the case. This killer is more clever - and sadistic - than any they’ve ever encountered, and the list of seemingly unrelated female victims is growing by the day - an attorney, a pastor, a stay-at-home mom. The murders feature similar injuries, with a cryptic message carved into each corpse.

Iceland, midwinter: the days are fleeting, the nights endless and Sergeant Magnus Jonson has been sent to an isolated fishing village in the West Fjords to investigate the possible homicide of a road construction worker. Ringed by steep mountains, this bleak village is cut off from the rest of Iceland and from the modern world. The locals are adamant that Iceland's legendary huldufólk - hidden people - had a hand in the death.