International Thrillers

Payatas, a 50-acre dump northeast of Manila's Quezon City, is home to thousands of people who live off of what they can scavenge there. It is one of the poorest neighborhoods in a city whose law enforcement is already stretched thin, devoid of forensic resources, and rife with corruption. So when the eviscerated bodies of preteen boys begin to appear in the dump heaps, there is no one to seek justice on their behalf. In the rainy summer of 1997, two Jesuit priests take the matter of protecting their flock into their own hands.

Private detective Agatha Raisin, having recently taken up power-walking, is striding along a path in Mircester Park during her lunch break when she hears a cry for help. Rushing over, she finds an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Swinburn, in the middle of the green — with the body of an old man lying at their feet.

Natalka and Edwin are perfect if improbable partners in a detective agency. At eighty-four, Edwin regularly claims that he’s the oldest detective in England. He is a master at surveillance, deploying his age as a cloak of invisibility. Natalka, Ukrainian-born and more than fifty years his junior, is a math whizz, who takes any cases concerning fraud or deception. Despite a steady stream of minor cases, Natalka is frustrated. She loves a murder, as she’s fond of saying, and none have come the agency’s way. That is until local writer Melody Chambers dies.

John Puller is a former war hero and now the best military investigator in the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigative Division. He is a loner with few possessions by preference, but he has an indomitable spirit and an unstoppable determination for finding the truth. His father was the most decorated U.S. Marine in history, but now resides in a nursing home far from his battlefield glory. Puller’s older brother, also a military vet, is serving a life sentence in Leavenworth Penitentiary. Puller is called out to a remote, rural area far from any military outpost to investigate into the brutal murder of a family....

Vientiane, 1980: For a man of his age and in his corner of the world, Dr. Siri, the 76-year-old former national coroner of Laos, is doing remarkably well - especially considering the fact that he is possessed by a 1,000-year-old Hmong shaman. That is, until he finds a mysterious note tied to his dog's tail. The death threat is not just aimed at him, but at everyone he holds dear. And whoever wrote the note claims the job will be executed in two weeks. Thus, at the urging of his wife and his motley crew of faithful friends, Dr. Siri must figure out who wants him dead.

Life in modern Tokyo is a blast for Rei Shimura, a young Japanese-American woman who enjoys busy days as an antiques dealer and steamy nights with a devoted new boyfriend. But things come to a standstill when Rei overpays for a rare old chest of drawers for a wealthy client, the owner of a famous Zen temple in Kamakura. The exquisite tansu turns out to be a fake: the worst deal Rei has ever made. When the temple family turns on Rei - and the con man who sold the tansu is murdered - she realizes she's opened a Pandora's box of deception and death.

Amos Decker and his FBI partner Alex Jamison are visiting his hometown of Burlington, Ohio, when he's approached by an unfamiliar man. But he instantly recognizes the man's name: Meryl Hawkins. He's the first person Decker ever arrested for murder back when he was a young detective. Though a dozen years in prison have left Hawkins unrecognizably aged and terminally ill, one thing hasn't changed: He maintains he never committed the murders. Could it be possible that Decker made a mistake all those years ago?

“I jostled her shoulder and noticed when I did that her skin was cold to the touch, her entire torso was covered in tattoos of kimono motifs.” This ghastly scene was the last thing Ruth Bennett expected to encounter when she agreed to translate a novel by a long-forgotten Japanese writer. Returning to her childhood home in Kyoto had promised safety and solitude, but Ruth soon finds the storyline in the novel leaking into her everyday life. Fictional characters turn out to be frighteningly real.

It is 1980, and the Democratic People's Republic of Laos is proud to be competing in its first-ever Olympics. Ex-national coroner of Laos Dr. Siri Paiboun may be retired, but he and his wife, Madame Daeng, would do just about anything to have a chance to visit Moscow, so Siri finagles them the job of medical oversight for the Olympians. As the competition heats up, however, Siri begins to suspect that one of the athletes is not who he says he is. Then another Lao Olympian is accused of murder.

The president knows it's a perilous, high-risk assignment. If he gives the order, he has the opportunity to take down a global menace, once and for all. If the mission fails, he would face certain impeachment, and the threats against the nation would multiply. So the president turns to the one team that can pull off the impossible: Will Robie and his partner, Jessica Reel. Together, Robie and Reel's talents as assassins are unmatched. But there are some in power who don't trust the pair.

What if I told you that heroes lived among us, that a US government agency had grown these super powered children in labs, raising them to be super soldiers? What if the technology got out? What if the tech made it all the way to Asia? You probably wouldn't believe me. You would probably would tell me that I was crazy, or that I was some type of conspiracy theorist, that there was no way that a person could turn themselves invisible, or teleport, or morph into a terrible monster. But you would be dead wrong.

Cara Black’s best-selling Aimée Leduc mysteries feature a streetwise PI who calls Paris her home. In her 11th outing, Aimée is faced with her most daunting challenge yet. Her godfather and mentor Commissaire Morbier is accused of murder, and it’s up to Aimée to clear his name. But as she investigates, she uncovers a terrifying conspiracy involving police corruption and Basque terrorists.

There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. But perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world's oceans: too big to police, and under no clear international authority, these immense regions of treacherous water play host to rampant criminality and exploitation.

Things are not going well for Inspector Salvo Montalbano. His relationship with Livia is once again on the rocks and - acutely aware of his age - he is beginning to grow weary of the endless violence he encounters. Then a young woman is found dead, her face half shot off and only a tattoo of a sphinx moth giving any hint of her identity. The tattoo links her to three similarly marked girls - all victims of the underworld sex trade.

Rick Montoya has just moved from Santa Fe to Rome, embracing the life of a translator. He's beginning to settle in to la dolce vita when school friend Beppo, now senior in the Italian Art Squad, recruits Rick for an unofficial undercover role. Armed with a list of galleries, suspects, and an expense account, Rick arrives in Tuscany posing as a buyer for a Santa Fe gallery to flush out traffickers in priceless burial urns. However, before sunset on his first day in Volterra, the challenge intensifies. Rick has one quick conversation with a gallery employee who dies minutes later in a brutal fall from a high cliff.

Espionage. Blackmail. Revenge. Cunning. Slapstick. State secrets dating back to the fall of the Berlin Wall. All this and more in a tight package of five novellas by Mick Herron, CWA Gold Dagger-winning author of Slow Horses.

JOE LEDGER’s world has been torn apart. The people closest to him have been savagely murdered and Ledger is on the hunt for the killers. His already fragile psyche has cracked apart, allowing a dangerous darkness to overwhelm him. His hunt takes him deep into the world of the deadly black market weapons sales, and standing in his way are a new generation of private military contractors.

The year is 2026. The US military has a new weapon in its arsenal: an intelligent life-form so versatile that it can not only create a new generation of weapons but can become a weapon itself - entering a host’s body to manipulate (or kill) them. Admiral James Curtiss is tasked with deploying the new weapons, first in Cuba, then Venezuela, then China. But the news of the military’s breakthrough has gotten out and there are menacing forces trying to steal it. What’s more, a single man has somehow harnessed the new power and has become something more than human - godlike.

A dying man drags his oxygen machine into the office of Eric Besson, a lawyer in Paris' 13th arrondissement. The old man, an accountant, is carrying a dilapidated notebook full of meticulous investment records. For decades, he has been helping a cadre of dirty cops launder stolen money. The notebook contains his full confession - he's waited 50 years to make it, and now it can't wait another day.

When collegiate baseball phenom Chase Fulton suffers a freak injury on the field that shatters his dreams of becoming a Major League catcher, his future looks bleak until he’s recruited into quasi-governmental covert operations, where his training as an assassin and covert intelligence operative launches him into a world fraught with danger, intrigue, and unexpected passion.