International Thrillers

A professional pickpocket and accomplished thief ignores his wife's warnings and embarks on an adventure that will change his life - perhaps for the better. A technological marvel of a sports car kills a pedestrian, but no one was at the wheel. A local lunatic admits to murder, but is he crazy - or crazy smart? The life of a researcher with ties to a British spy agency is thrown into chaos when his research goes missing. Injury Time delivers captivating tales of intrigue wrapped in Catherine Aird's tightly woven logic, sealed with the bow of enigma.

Almost a decade ago, Prescott, an ex-special forces Green Beret, was boots on the ground in his new role with the FBI's Critical Incidence Response Group, searching for his childhood friend Kaylie after she disappeared from her research camp in Nigeria without a trace. Now, the NSA thinks they've identified Kaylie's image in Syria. Prescott turns to Iniquus Puzzler, Lynx, to help him prove that the picture and the missing scientist are one and the same. If the NSA is right, this woman has days to live. The clock is ticking.

Max - an elderly Paris bookstall owner - is abducted at gunpoint. His friend Hugo Marston, head of security at the U.S. embassy, launches a search. His investigation reveals that Max was a Holocaust survivor and later became a Nazi hunter. Is his disappearance somehow tied to his grim history, or even to the mysterious old books he sold? Before long, other booksellers start to disappear, their bodies found floating in the Seine. Then Marston himself becomes a target of the unknown assassins.

Amos Decker is a former professional football player whose career was ended by a terrible hit. Now a police detective, Amos is still haunted by a side effect from the accident he can never forget. One night Decker comes home from a stakeout to find his wife, young daughter, and brother-in-law horrifically murdered. Obviously scarred and nearly broken, Decker has to use his skills as a detective and his unusual brain capacity to try to catch the monster who killed his family.

Court Gentry's flight on a CIA transport plane is interrupted when a security team brings a hooded man aboard. They want to kick Gentry off the flight but are overruled by CIA headquarters. The mystery man is being transported to England where a joint CIA/MI6 team will interrogate him about a mole in Langley. When they land in an isolated airbase in the UK, they are attacked by a hostile force who kidnaps the prisoner. Only Gentry escapes. His handlers send him after the attackers, but what can one operative do against a trained team of assassins?

On a cold and rainy Stockholm night, nine bus riders are gunned down by an unknown assassin. The press, anxious for an explanation for the seemingly random crime, quickly dubs him a madman. But Superintendent Martin Beck of the Stockholm Homicide Squad suspects otherwise. This apparently motiveless killer has managed to target one of Beck's best detectives - and he, surely, would not have been riding that lethal bus without a reason.

In late summer of 1994, Jack Noble, a former All-American quarterback, is in the middle of the toughest event he's ever taken part in: marine corps recruit training. After eight weeks he's managed to make enemies of every drill instructor and every recruit in his platoon. Then on one particularly humid South Carolina day, an odd sequence of events changes everything. Contains an excerpt of Noble Intentions: Episode 1.

Set once again in Sicily, The Patience of the Spider pits Inspector Montalbano against his greatest foe yet: the weight of his own years. Still recovering from the gunshot wound he suffered in Rounding the Mark, he must overcome self-imposed seclusion and waxing self-doubt to penetrate a web of hatred and secrets in pursuit of the strangest culprit he’s ever hunted.

After three years working as a private investigator, newly reinstated Detective Inspector Will Foster still holds himself responsible for the death of an officer under his command. But he's returned to the Met bent on redeeming himself and that means bringing down gangland boss Joey Clarkson. Will's prepared to put in long hours and make sacrifices for his work, even if it comes at a cost to his nascent romance with international model, Tom Gray. After all, Tom has a history of wandering but crime is a constant in London. And Will has committed himself to the Met.

To survive the notorious prison IK-2 and assassinate Russian President Vladimir Petrov, John Dempsey had to become rosomakha, the wolverine. Now, back home in America, he’s trying to put the pieces of his life at Ember back together. But which man returned from Russia—Dempsey, or the wolverine? From the way his teammates look at him, it’s obvious they’re not sure, and neither is he. Meanwhile, Vice President Kelso Jarvis has barely had time to mourn the death of his mentor before a devastating attack reveals a new threat.

Two years ago, a hostile Prime Minister launched the Monochrome inquiry, investigating "historical over-reaching" by the British Secret Service “to investigate historical over-reaching.” Monochrome’s mission was to ferret out any hint of misconduct by any MI5 officer—and allowed Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, the two civil servants seconded to the project, unfettered access to any and all confidential information in the Service archives in order to do so. But MI5’s formidable First Desk did not become Britain’s top spy by accident, and she has successfully thwarted the inquiry at every turn.

Lucy Durmast waits patiently in front of the judge at her own murder trial, refusing to utter a single word. Kenneth Carline, an employee of her father's, was found poisoned to death after eating a meal that Lucy herself had prepared. Kenneth was set to marry another, and Lucy, it seems, was jealous. But what should have been an open-and-shut case of envy-driven murder becomes complicated when primary detective Trevor Porritt suffers permanent brain damage. C. D. Sloan inherits the file - and immediately begins poking holes in what looked like an airtight case.

When African jihadis attack a Nigerian regiment using American weapons, Cabrillo and the Oregon crew are on the case, investigating from Afghanistan to Kuala Lumpur to track a mysterious arms dealer—a genius, or perhaps a devil—known only as the Vendor. Cabrillo goes undercover to find the Vendor’s base, but his adversary isn’t just an arms smuggler. He’s an arms maker, and Cabrillo just walked into a lethal military game alongside the most dangerous mercenaries in the world, designed to test the Vendor’s cutting-edge AI arsenal.

Three unsolved murders spanning 70 years have befallen the same French family, each taking place two nights before Christmas at their Paris mansion - and blamed on the family ghost. When Jaya realizes the truth hits closer to home than she realized, she must risk everything as she flees San Francisco for France and Cambodia to find a missing sculpture known as the Serpent King and stop a flesh and blood killer.

The Cambodian Curse: When an ancient and supposedly cursed Cambodian sculpture disappears from an impenetrable museum, and the carving's owner is killed by an invisible assailant while a witness is a few feet away, historian Jaya Jones and her old nemesis Henry North team up to solve the baffling crime. Additional stories include: "The Hindi Houdini", "The Haunted Room", "The Library Ghost of Tanglewood Inn", "The Curse of Cloud Castle", "Tempest in a Teapot", "A Dark and Stormy Light", "The Shadow of the River", plus the bonus novella Fool's Gold.

No outsiders are ever admitted to the monastery of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, hidden deep in the wilderness of Quebec, where two dozen cloistered monks live in peace and prayer. They grow vegetables, they tend chickens, they make chocolate. And they sing. Ironically, for a community that has taken a vow of silence, the monks have become world-famous for their glorious voices, raised in ancient chants whose effect on both singer and listener is so profound it is known as “the beautiful mystery.”

When her dreams of rising through the Accra police ranks like her late father crash around her, 26-year-old Emma Djan is unsure what will become of her career. Through a sympathetic former colleague, Emma gets an interview with a private detective agency that takes on cases of missing persons, theft, and infidelity. Meanwhile, Gordon Tilson, a middle-aged widower in Washington, DC, has found solace in an online community after his wife's passing. Through the support group, he's even met a young Ghanaian widow he's come to care about.

Dr. Siri Paiboun, the ex-national coroner of Laos, may have more experience dissecting bodies than making art, but when he manages to smuggle a fancy movie camera into the country he devises a plan to shoot a Lao adaptation of War and Peace. The only problem? The Ministry of Culture must approve the script first. That and he can't figure out how to turn on the camera. Meanwhile, the skeleton of a woman has appeared under the Anusawari Arch in the middle of the night. Siri assists his friend, the newly promoted Senior Police Inspector Phosy Vongvichai, with the ensuing investigation.

For US Navy SEAL Bowie "Ruckus" Cooper, going on a mission into the most dangerous place on earth wasn't new, neither were the orders to tag and bag an international criminal, but when Bowie finds a captive American reporter, that wasn't exactly run of the mill. Neither was getting separated from his team, teaming up with her, or protecting her against all odds, while working to keep his hands from around her neck and off her delectable body.

Ex-Navy SEAL John Clark is the newly named head of Rainbow, an international task force dedicated to combating terrorism. In a trial by fire, he must stop a terrorist group of men and women so extreme that their success could literally mean the end of life on earth as we know it.