International Thrillers

London, 1879. Crowds have gathered at Islington's chilly Agricultural Hall to place their bets on who will become the next world champion in a six-day, 500-mile speed-walking race, the wobble. When one of the highly favored contenders dies under suspicious circumstances, Sergeant Cribb also has a race on his hands - to pursue a ruthless murderer.

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.

A curious priest uncovers a mystifying secret - one that leads to a long-buried relic some will do anything to possess. Can he outwit adversaries who will stop at nothing to keep him from revealing an object that challenges history as we know it? Father Michael Dominic discovers a strangely constructed 13th-century puzzle hidden deep within the Vatican Secret Archives.

This December in Kilbane, if you’re planning to warm up with a cuppa tea at Naomi’s Bistro, you may have a bit of a wait - the entire O’Sullivan brood has gone off to West Cork to spend the holidays with brother James’s fiancée Elise’s family, including her grandfather, the famous orchestral conductor Enda Elliot. Siobhán is so happy for James and Elise, but she’s also quietly disappointed that she must put her own wedding to fellow garda Macdara Flannery on hold. Then a cantankerous conductor is discovered crushed under a 90-pound harp in a local concert hall.

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.

The latest audiobook in Nick Louth's bestselling DCI Craig Gillard series!

Twenty-six-year-old Maggie Barnes is someone you would never look at twice. Living alone in a month-to-month sublet in the huge city of London, with no family but an estranged sister, no boyfriend or partner, and not much in the way of friends, Maggie is just the kind of person who could vanish from the face of the earth without anyone taking notice. Or just the kind of person MI5 needs to infiltrate the establishment and thwart an international plot that puts all of Britain at risk. Now one young woman has the chance to be a hero - if she can think quickly enough to stay alive.

Tough, resourceful and ruthless, ex-SAS trooper Nick Stone is now working for British Intelligence on deniable operations. And is desperately in need of cash. When he is offered a lucrative freelance job, Stone thinks his problems are over. All he needs to do is kidnap a Russian mafia warlord. And so Stone is thrust into the grim underworld of Estonia, with unknown aggressors stalking the Arctic landscape. Russia has launched a cyber-espionage attack, hacking into the West's most sensitive military secrets. Stone must stop them.

From his early days as a Baltimore cop to his time with the Department of Military Sciences and then more recently leading Rogue Team International, these stories cover the range of the Ledger timeline bringing back old favorites and introducing new ones. The stakes are as high as ever, and Joe Ledger is there to save the day!

War crimes investigator and ex-CIA officer Joe Johnson is more than intrigued when he learns of a link between the financing for the presidential candidate's 2012 campaign, the Nazi train, and a ruthless blackmail plot. But the investigation becomes bigger and more deeply personal than Johnson expects when it turns out the SS Holocaust killer escaped his net years earlier. Soon, there are high-level intelligence agencies and criminal networks combining across three continents against Johnson and his two female colleagues.

A decade ago, Tokyo Police Detective Kyoichiro Kaga went to collect the ashes of his recently deceased mother. Years before, she ran away from her husband and son without explanation or any further contact, leaving her estranged son with many unanswered questions. Now in Tokyo, Michiko Oshitani is found dead many miles from home. Strangled to death, left in the bare apartment rented under a false name by a man who has disappeared without a trace. Oshitani lived far away in Sendai, with no known connection to Tokyo—and neither her family nor friends have any idea why she would have gone there.

Icelandic sisters Áróra and Ísafold live in different countries and aren‘t on speaking terms, but when their mother loses contact with Ísafold, Áróra reluctantly returns to Iceland to find her sister. But she soon realises that her sister isn’t avoiding her...she has disappeared. As she confronts Ísafold’s abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend Björn, and begins to probe her sister’s reclusive neighbours, Áróra is led into an ever-darker web of intrigue and manipulation.

Commissario Guido Brunetti's hopes for a refreshing family holiday in the mountains are once again dashed when a gruesome discovery is made in Marghera--a body so badly beaten the face is completely unrecognizable. Brunetti searches Venice for someone who can identify the corpse but is met with a wall of silence. He then receives a telephone call from a contact who promises some tantalizing information.

A week before Christmas, a young photographer discovers a plastic-wrapped corpse amid the sand dunes north of Cape Town. The only thing found on the corpse is a dead iPhone, but it doesn't take long for the police to identify the body as that of Ernst Richter - the tech whiz behind MyAlibi, an Internet service that provides unfaithful partners with sophisticated cover stories to hide affairs.

A man is found murdered in his Reykjavik flat. There are no obvious clues apart from a cryptic note left on the body and a photograph of a young girl's grave. Delving into the dead man's life Detective Erlendur discovers that 40 years ago he was accused of an appalling crime, but never convicted. Had his past come back to haunt him? As Erlendur struggles to build a relationship with his unhappy daughter, his investigation takes him to Iceland's Genetic Research Centre, where he uncovers disturbing secrets that are even darker than the murder of an old man.

Siglufjörður: an idyllically quiet fishing village in Northern Iceland, where no one locks their doors - accessible only via a small mountain tunnel. Ari Thór Arason: a rookie policeman on his first posting, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavik - with a past that he’s unable to leave behind.

The war is over. Bernie Gunther, our sardonic former Berlin homicide detective and unwilling SS officer, is now living on the French Riviera. It is 1956, and Bernie is the go-to guy at the Grand-Hotel du Cap-Ferrat, the man you turn to for touring tips or if you need a fourth for bridge. As it happens, a local writer needs just that - someone to fill the fourth seat in a regular game that is the usual evening diversion at the Villa Mauresque. Not just any writer. Perhaps the richest and most famous living writer in the world: W. Somerset Maugham.

This astute, entertaining literary thriller features Helena Marsh, an art authenticator hot on the trail of an extorted painting in Budapest, skirting the law to return it to its rightful heir. When wealthy octogenarian Geza Marton hires art expert Marsh to buy back his family's Titian painting, she flies to Budapest to close what she expects will be a reasonably simple sale. But nothing is ever simple in this beautiful, flawed city where corruption abounds. Helena discovers that there are multiple bidders for the painting, including some dangerous Slavs.

John Eakins returns to Greece, seemingly to pursue Byron scholarship. But his deeper concern is to find out the truth about the murder of an American newspaperman named Alexander Webb, killed during the Greek Communist rebellion seventeen years before. Eakins had been implicated in that murder. Now, his search takes him from Athens to the primitive village of Kala, where he finds Paul Stephanou, a blind man also implicated in the Webb murder.

His grandfather was a lawman too. That’s how Charles O’Farrell rationalizes his work. He keeps a picture of his ancestor by his bed, a faded sepia portrait of a short, plain-looking man made remarkable only by the long-barreled Colt strapped to his hip. His grandfather killed to make the frontier safe—O’Farrell has the faded newspaper clippings to prove it. In the service of America, O’Farrell kills too. But his killings never make the front page.