Modern Police

The serial killer known as the Player is taunting Jess Harris with pictures of his victims. He has dragged her into another of his deadly games. But Jess has a job to do in Birmingham. She's a deputy chief and her unit's latest case involves one of Birmingham's oldest and coldest cases.For two decades the Man in the Moon stole a little girl each year on the night of a harvest moon. Then suddenly he stopped, and the case was never solved. Now, 13 years after the last child was taken, Jess receives a gift from the Man in the Moon - the remains of his final victim.

When a colleague extends his summer vacation, Inspector Salvo Montalbano is forced to stay in Vigàta and endure the August heat. Montalbano’s long-suffering girlfriend, Livia, joins him with a friend - husband and young son in tow - to keep her company during these dog days of summer. But when the boy suddenly disappears into a narrow shaft hidden under the family’s beach rental, Montalbano uncovers something terribly sinister.

One year ago archaeologist Sophie Malone endured a night of terror while spelunking on a remote Irish island. Now she is convinced that what she discovered during that horrifying trip is related to a spate of violence besetting Boston. Teaming with detective Cyrus “Scoop” Wisdom, Sophie soon becomes the target of a killer with a penchant for ritual murder.

The Terrorists is the last Martin Beck mystery, finished just a few weeks before Per Wahlöö’s death. The book is, in effect, a marvelous summing up of the series. The story centers on the visit of an American senator to Stockholm. Martin Beck tries to protect him from an international gang of terrorists, while they decide that Beck too should be removed from the scene.

A young blonde in sunglasses robs a bank and kills a hapless citizen. Across town, a corpse with a bullet shot through its heart is found in a locked room - with no gun at the scene. The crimes seem disparate, but to Martin Beck they are two pieces of the same puzzle, and solving it becomes the one way he can escape the pains of his failed marriage and the lingering effects of a near-fatal bullet wound.

Somewhere in the teeming heart of London is a man on a lethal mission. His cause: A long-overdue lesson on the importance of manners. When a man gives a public tongue-lashing to a misbehaving child, or a parking lot attendant is rude to a series of customers, the "Manners Killer" makes sure that the next thing either sees is the beginning of his own grisly end.

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?