Mystery England

DI Louise Blackwell is still reeling from her brother Paul's murder when she is brought back from enforced leave and tasked with solving a strange new case - the slaughter of wild sheep at Cheddar Gorge, a place shrouded in mystery and folklore. When a man is brutally attacked with a machete on the clifftop and a young girl disappears, Louise realises that the horror is just beginning. Rumours of a mythical presence near the gorge are spreading fast, and why is a local environmental cult resisting all attempts to solve the case?

It started out as a party: six little girls gliding and giggling at the ice rink to celebrate Natalie’s daughter’s eighth birthday. But by Natalie’s next head count, it’s turned into a crime scene. Six children went onto the ice—and now there are just five. Nobody saw her niece, Elle, being taken. Nobody saw the person in a cartoon costume lure her quietly away. Traumatised by what happened on her watch, Natalie spends the next decade supporting her sister, Jo, as the years since Elle’s abduction tick by.

A young woman is found dead in a college while the students demonstrate. It turns out she was the principal's secretary, and there was more to her than meets the eye. Who wanted her dead and why? And what does it have to do with the student revolt led by a charismatic firebrand from Iraq? Inspector John Crow is called in and has little doubt who's responsible, but a series of surprises will make him reconsider everything. Many of the faculty seem to have things to hide.

When an Oxford caretaker is killed by a fall down the library stairs and a professor is attacked, rumors fly that it's the work of a poltergeist who's been causing havoc at the college. The prof is a knitter, and a customer at Lucy Swift's shop, Cardinal Woolsey's. But Lucy thinks a very human killer is shifting the blame onto a ghost who can't defend itself, and she's determined to trap the real killer and get justice for the dead man.

While on a visit to London, American genealogist Jefferson Tayte’s old friend and colleague dies in his arms. Before long, Tayte and a truth-seeking historian, Professor Jean Summer, find themselves following a corpse-ridden trail that takes them to the Royal Society of London, circa 1708.

Kitty Underhay is looking forward to a week of long lunches and wedding planning with her husband-to-be, Captain Matthew Bryant. But the plan is derailed when he is called on to collect a former comrade-in-arms, arriving on the 15:50 from Paddington. As the train bearing Simon Travers pulls up to the platform, a piercing scream rises over the screech of its brakes. Travers is dead in his seat, a dagger in his heart. Only a few individuals had access to Travers’s compartment, and Kitty must find out which of these seemingly benign passengers is, in fact, a cross-country killer.

Chase has two compelling reasons for returning to England—a group walk along the famed Coast to Coast trail in the picturesque Lake District, and a chance to further his relationship with Mike, the handsome Devonshire coroner he met on his last trip. The walkers, including Chase’s dear friend and fellow Anglophile Billie Mondreau, assemble at a Cumbrian hotel and begin their adventure with the traditional “baptism of the boots” in St. Bee’s Bay. But they’ve barely begun traveling eastward with their genial guide than the group dynamic turns unexpectedly rocky.

February 1816: A race through the icy, twisting cobblestone streets of London ends inside an abandoned church - and a horrific discovery. Bow Street Runner Sam Kelly is called to investigate the grisly murder of Sir Giles Holbrooke, who was left naked and garroted, with his tongue cut out. Yet it becomes even stranger when symbols that resemble crosses mysteriously begin to appear across the dead man's flesh during autopsy. Sam turns to the one person in the kingdom who he believes can solve the bizarre murder - the Duke of Aldridge's odd but brilliant ward, Kendra Donovan.

Stiles Island is a wealthy and exclusive enclave separated by a bridge from the Massachusetts coast town of Paradise. James Macklin sees Stiles Island as the ultimate investment opportunity: all he needs to do is invade the island, blow the bridge, and loot the island. To realize his investment, Macklin, along with his devoted girlfriend, Faye, assembles a crew of fellow ex-cons - all experts in their fields - including Wilson Cromartie, a fearsome Apache. James Macklin is a bad man - a very bad man. And Wilson Cromartie, known as Crow, is even worse. As Macklin plans his crime, Paradise Police Chief Jesse Stone has his hands full. He faces romantic entanglements in triplicate: his ex-wife Jenn, is in the Paradise jail for assault, he's begun a new relationship with a Stiles Island realtor named Marcy Campbell, and he's still sorting out his feelings for attorney Abby Taylor. When Macklin's attack on Stiles Island is set in motion, both Marcy and Abby are put in jeopardy. As the casualties mount, it's up to Jesse to keep both women from harm.

It was a most peculiar murder. A man's body was found in the canal - but the evidence showed that he had drowned in a bathtub. A theater critic known for his savage reviews, the victim had had a full cast of enemies. While Inspector Witherspoon scoured the theater, his housekeeper and unofficial sleuthing partner Mrs. Jeffries uncovered the critic's secret past: a real-life drama more compelling than any stage play.

Joanna and the Watsons receive an unexpected visitor to 221B Baker Street during a nocturnal storm. A rain-drenched Dr. Alexander Verner has just returned from an unsettling trip to see a patient who he believes is being held against his will. Joanna quickly realizes Verner's patient is a high-ranking Englishman who the Germans have taken captive to pry vital information about England’s military strategies for the Great War. The police are frantic to find him before the Germans can use him to decode all of England’s undeciphered messages.

Private detective Cordelia Gray is invited to the sunlit island of Courcy to protect the vainly beautiful actress Clarissa Lisle from veiled threats on her life. Within the rose red walls of a fairy-tale castle, she finds the stage is set for death.

When schoolteacher Lorna Buchanan witnesses a strange ceremony on the grounds of St. Anne’s College, she is sacked by the tyrannical headmistress - and becomes entangled in a web of mysticism and murder. Set in a cozy 19th-century English spa town, The Malvern Mystery follows Lorna as she investigates a deadly crime clouded by deception, greed, and ancient rituals.

Practical, unassuming Jane Shoringfield has done the calculations and decided that the most secure path forward is this: a husband, in a marriage of convenience, who will allow her to remain independent and occupied with meaningful work. Her first choice, the dashing but reclusive Doctor Augustine Lawrence, agrees to her proposal with only one condition: that she must never visit Lindridge Hall, his crumbling family manor outside of town. Yet on their wedding night, an accident strands her at his door in a pitch-black rainstorm, and she finds him changed.

Joanna and the Watsons are called in by the Whitechapel Playhouse to find Pretty Penny, a lovely, young actress who has gone missing without reason or notice. While on their search, the trio is asked by Scotland Yard to join in the hunt for a vicious murderer whose method resembles that of Jack the Ripper. It soon becomes clear that the Ripper has reemerged after a 28-year absence and is once again murdering young prostitutes in Whitechapel.

Fourth in the series of Charlotte and Thomas Pitt mysteries, Anne Perry's Resurrection Row explores the dark undercurrents that run through the lives of the idle rich in Victorian England. After a wonderful night at the theatre, Thomas and Charlotte find themselves confronted with a corpse in the driver's seat of a cab. Even more shocking, it is the body of a peer who had been decently buried the week before.

Victorian England is a country of sharp divides between rich and poor, but James Lionel Falconer, who spends his days working at his father’s market stall, is determined to become a merchant prince. James quickly rises through the ranks, proving himself both hardworking and trustworthy and catching the eye of Henry Malvern, head of the most prestigious shipping company in London. But when threats against his reputation - and his life - begin to emerge, James will have to prove he truly is the master of his fate.

Ever since her first ghostly sighting, Abby Kimball has been trying to unravel the mystery of her newly discovered ability. So when she sees the apparition of a Revolutionary War soldier in the middle of the town green - just days before the annual Patriot's Day celebration, no less - she's determined to figure out her connection to the man. The ethereal soldier is not the only mystery in Abby's life.

This is a story of corrupt liaisons between criminal elements in the new Russian states and the world of legitimate finance in the West. It is also an intimate portrait of two families. Masterful and prescient, le Carré is writing at the top of his creative powers, and the central protagonist, Oliver Single, is one of his most fascinating characters.

As mysterious injuries, and even deaths, begin to appear in the medical ledgers, it's clear that all is not well amongst the native recruits to Britannia's imperial army. Is the much-decorated centurion Geminus preying on his weaker soldiers? And could this be related to the appearance of Emperor Hadrian? Bound by his sense of duty and ill-advised curiosity, Ruso begins to ask questions nobody wants to hear. Meanwhile his barbarian wife Tilla is finding out some of the answers....