International Police Procedurals

The body of Gil Petty, America's most celebrated wine critic, is found strung up in a French Gaillac vineyard, dressed in the ceremonial robes of the Order of the Divine Bottle and pickled in wine. For forensic expert Enzo Macleod, the key to this unsolved murder lies in decoding Petty's mysterious reviews, which could make or break a vineyard's reputation. As he digs deeper for the motivation behind the shocking crime, Macleod finds that beneath the tranquil façade of French viticulture lurks a back-stabbing community characterized by a deadly rivalry.

The cunning incendiary device that blew the roof off a Stockholm apartment not only interrupted the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, it nearly took the lives of the building's 11 occupants. And if one of Martin Beck's colleagues hadn't been on the scene, the explosion would have led to a major catastrophe because, for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain, a regulation fire truck has vanished. Was it terrorism, suicide, or simply a gas leak?

Detective Ngaire Blakes is back on the case when a skeletonized murder victim is discovered - a crime that took place during the Springbok Tours of 1981. A period that pitted father against son, town against city, and police against protesters. When the victim is identified as Sam Andie, a young African American man transplanted from the States to NZ by his family, Ngaire must investigate whether racial motives were behind the death.

Cat Kinsella overcame a troubled childhood to become a detective constable. When she’s called to the scene of a murder, not far from the pub her estranged father still runs, she discovers that Alice Lapaine is dead. Cat and her team suspect Alice’s husband, until she receives a phone call that links the victim to Maryanne Doyle, a teenage girl who went missing in Ireland 18 years earlier. The call raises uneasy memories for Cat. Though she was only a child, Cat knew that her father wasn’t telling the truth when he denied knowing anything about Maryanne or her disappearance.

Detective Carl Morck has received a bottle that holds an old and decayed message written in blood. It's a cry for help from two young brothers, tied and bound in a boathouse by the sea. After floating in the ocean for years before turning up, the bottle sat forgotten, unopened, on a police department windowsill, before the seal was cracked and the gruesome message, written in Danish, was analyzed. Could it be real? Who are these boys, and why weren't they reported missing? Could they possibly still be alive?

A year ago a boy was found murdered at a girlsʼ boarding school, and the case was never solved. Detective Stephen Moran has been waiting for his chance to join Dublin’s Murder Squad when 16-year-old Holly Mackey arrives in his office with a photo of the boy with the caption: “I know who killed him". Stephen joins with Detective Antoinette Conway to reopen the case - beneath the watchful eye of Holly’s father, fellow detective Frank Mackey. The private underworld of teenage girls turns out to be more mysterious and more dangerous than the detectives imagined.

When the brutally murdered body of a local geography teacher is discovered at Kilwinnoch’s famous beauty spot, Blood Water Falls, the community is rocked to its core. For DCI Duncan Bone, the killing appears to be an open and shut case. But it’s not long before a sinister clue unleashes dark and deadly forces, blowing the investigation wide open, and putting Bone and his team in grave danger.

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 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.

DCI Kett is back, heading Norfolk Constabulary’s brand-new Extreme Crime Task Force. And it’s just in time. The body of a woman bound in thorns has been discovered in Norwich’s historic Cow Tower. In her mouth is a severed finger wrapped in a scrap of red cloth, and the first few lines of a fairy tale. “Once upon a time, a young maiden waited to be saved from a hideous monster.” The finger belongs to another missing woman, and if Kett, Porter and Savage want to find her alive they must follow a chain of blood-drenched riddles, each victim leading to the next.

In this fifth installment in the critically acclaimed Irene Huss series, three men are found brutally executed in one of Goteborg's most fashionable neighborhoods. All three men were involved in an online poker company, but that's all they appear to have in common. The complex investigation immerses Detective Inspector Irene Huss and her colleagues into a world of expensive cars, fancy homes, and impressive castles in the air. Meanwhile, the normally peaceful atmosphere of the Huss family is disturbed by marital tension as Irene suspects her husband, Krister, of a having an affair with a younger woman.

Naples, 1932. A week before Easter, springtime offers fragrant temptations to the men and women of Naples - but evil also lurks in the sweet-smelling spring air. At the high-class brothel in the center of town known as Paradiso, Viper, the most famous prostitute of all, is found dead after being suffocated with a pillow. Her last client swears that he left her alive and well. But when her next client arrived, he found her dead. Who killed her and why?

When the murder of a woman is reported to the Shanghai police while Inspector Chen is on vacation, Sergeant Yu is forced to take charge of the investigation. The victim, Yin Lige, a novelist known for her banned book, has been found dead in her tiny, humble room off the stairwell of a converted multi-family house. It seems that only a neighbor could have committed the crime, for the building is kept locked at night. But there is no apparent motive. Sergeant Yu tries to unravel the reclusive woman's past and begins to realize it may have larger political implications.

When the partial remains of a young woman are unearthed during a violent storm, it falls to DI Tom Janssen and his team to discover her identity and what brought her there. A man is released from prison having been the apparent victim of a miscarriage of justice and returns home to rural Norfolk. Questions are being asked, not only of the police and their flawed investigation, but also of the man himself. A loner, strange and disinterested, is he truly innocent? Convicted without a body, if he didn't commit the murder he was sent to jail for, then where is she?

Sergeant Hamish Macbeth has some major problems to deal with—crimes and criminals, even law enforcement agents, that he doesn’t want anywhere near his beloved Highland village in Lochdubh. Hamish is worried about how the locals, as well as those in the wider area of his territory in Sutherland, will react to his new assistant officer. The officer is none other than the enigmatic American James Bland who is on an exchange scheme from his home city of Chicago in the United States, supposedly to study policing methods in Scotland.

In a quiet village surrounded by ancient woods and the imposing Italian Alps, a man is found naked with his eyes gouged out. It is the first in a string of gruesome murders. Superintendent Teresa Battaglia, a detective with a background in criminal profiling, is called to investigate. Battaglia is in her mid-60s, her rank and expertise hard-won from decades of battling for respect in the male-dominated Italian police force. Soon she finds that buried deep in these mountains are whispers of a dark and dangerous history, possibly tied to a group of eight-year-old children.

A psychopath is terrorizing Copenhagen. His calling card is a “chestnut man” - a handmade doll made of matchsticks and two chestnuts - which he leaves at each bloody crime scene. Examining the dolls, forensics makes a shocking discovery - a fingerprint belonging to a young girl, a government minister’s daughter who had been kidnapped and murdered a year ago. A tragic coincidence - or something more twisted? To save innocent lives, a pair of detectives must put aside their differences to piece together the Chestnut Man’s gruesome clues.

The body of a young Russian woman washes up on an Icelandic shore. After a cursory investigation, the death is declared a suicide and the case is quietly closed. Over a year later Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir of the Reykjavík police is forced into early retirement at 64. She dreads the loneliness, and the memories of her dark past that threaten to come back to haunt her. But before she leaves she is given two weeks to solve a single cold case of her choice.

When a lobster fisherman on an early morning run pulls in his traps, he finds something he wasn't expecting to catch - a body. When police discover the dead man was the brother of a senior Scottish government official who vanished without a trace, Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie takes over the investigation. At the same time, a woman in the wealthy enclave of Perth is clearing out her sister's home after a fatal road accident and finds a mysterious camper van in the garage containing a skeletonized body. But who is it?

There's nothing Ruth Galloway hates more than amateur archaeologists, but when a group of them stumble upon Bronze Age artifacts alongside a dead body, she finds herself thrust into their midst - and into the crosshairs of a string of murders circling ever closer.