Police Detective Mysteries

Oxford, 1960. As the city of Oxford prepares itself for the inaugural Miss Oxford Honey Beauty Pageant at The Old Swan Theatre, excitement is in the air. But when one of the leading contestants is found dead, suspicion hangs over the competition. Poisoned, the authorities assume her death was suicide. But after a malicious series of pranks and blackmail attempts are reported, WPC Loveday and Coroner Clement Ryder are called upon to solve the case. In an atmosphere of fierce competition, the list of suspects is endless....

Set in the wilds of Maine, this is an explosive tale of an estranged son thrust into the hunt for a murderous fugitive - his own father. Game warden Mike Bowditch returns home one evening to find an alarming voice from the past on his answering machine: his father, Jack, a hard-drinking womanizer who makes his living poaching illegal game. An even more frightening call comes the next morning from the police: They are searching for the man who killed a beloved local cop the night before - and his father is their prime suspect.

When a young red-haired woman is found brutally murdered in downtown Chicago, one detail stands out: the red lipstick encircling her wrists and ankles. Detective Harriet Foster is on the case, even though she’s still grieving the sudden death of her partner. As a Black woman in a male-dominated department, Foster anticipates a rocky road ahead acclimating to a new team—and building trust with her new partner isn’t coming easily. After another victim turns up with the same lipstick markings, Foster suspects she’s looking for a serial killer.

On holiday on the Cornish Riviera, Hercule Poirot is alarmed to hear pretty Nick Buckley describe her recent "accidental brushes with death". First, on a treacherous Cornish hillside, the brakes on her car failed. Then, on a coastal path, a falling boulder missed her by inches. Later, an oil painting fell and almost crushed her in bed. So when Poirot finds a bullet hole in Nick's sun hat, he decides that this girl needs his help. Can he find the would-be killer before he hits his target?

Scotland Yard Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and his wife, Detective Inspector Gemma James, have been invited for a relaxing weekend in the tranquil Cotswolds, one of Britain’s most beautiful and historic regions. A centerpiece of this glorious fall getaway is a posh charity luncheon catered by up-and-coming chef Viv Holland. But a tragic car accident followed by a series of mysterious deaths could ruin her ascent. Each piece of information that surfaces makes it clear that the killer had a connection with Viv’s pub - and perhaps with Beck House itself.

When Detective Amanda Steele unexpectedly reconnects with an old boyfriend, the last thing she expects to see lying on his bed is the dead body of his wife, Claire, who walked out on him four years ago. Logan begs Amanda to believe he’s innocent. But she doesn’t miss the gun on a nearby table, and she’s torn when forensics reveal that not only was this the murder weapon, but Logan’s fingerprints are all over it.... Could he have been framed? Or is he using his connection to Amanda to get away with murder?

When human remains are found in a fisherman's crab pot, Detective Alana Mack faces her toughest case yet. As she unravels a complex web of genetic links, Alana becomes the target of a seemingly random attack, leaving her injured and reliant on her ex-husband for help.

Adam Dalgliesh takes on a baffling murder in the rarefied world of London book publishing in this masterful mystery from one of our finest novelists. Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team are confronted with a puzzle of impenetrable complexity. A murder has taken place in the offices of the Peverell Press, a venerable London publishing house located in a dramatic mock-Venetian palace on the Thames. The victim is Gerard Etienne, the brilliant but ruthless new managing director, who had vowed to restore the firm's fortunes.

Ruth Lennox, housewife and mother of three, is found dead in a pool of her own blood. Detective Chief Inspector Karlsson can’t piece together a motive and calls in Frieda, hoping her talents will offer a new angle on the case. When it emerges that the mother was hiding a scandalous secret, her family closes ranks. Frieda herself is distracted, still reeling from an attempt on her life, and struggling with her own rare feelings of vulnerability. Then a patient’s chance remark sends Frieda down a dangerous path that seems to lead to a serial killer who’s long escaped detection.

Prison is a dangerous place for a former cop - as Harriet Blue is learning on a daily basis. So, following a fight for her life and a prison-wide lockdown, the last person she wants to see is Deputy Police Commissioner Joe Woods. The man who put her inside. But Woods is not there to gloat. His daughter Tonya and her two-year-old child have gone missing. He's ready to offer Harriet a deal: find his family to buy her freedom....

Sam Reeves is a kindhearted psychologist who treats court-ordered clients. After one of his patients—a pathological liar—starts revealing plausible new details from a long-unsolved serial murder case, he’s compelled to report anonymously to the SDPD tip line, though his attempts to respect patient confidentiality land him facedown and cuffed by the aggressive (and cute) Detective McKittrick.

In Midcoast Maine, Jamie Flint and her K-9 team search for the cognitively challenged son of a local animal hoarder, while recently licensed private investigator Jack Juarez looks into a murder related to the case. Unfortunately, each new clue Jack finds in the investigation seems to lead him back to a suspect police already have in their sights: Jamie's son. Meanwhile, Jamie fights to save a critically ill pit bull pulled from the hoarder's home who could hold the key to the woman's dark secrets.

Thomas Pitt, mainstay of Her Majesty’s Special Branch, is summoned to Connaught Square mansion, where the body of a junior diplomat lies huddled in a wheelbarrow. Nearby stands the tenant of the house, the beautiful, notorious Egyptian woman Ayesha Zakhari, who falls under the shadow of suspicion. Pitt’s orders are to protect—at all costs—the good name of the third person in the garden: senior cabinet minister Saville Ryerson. The distinguished public servant, whispered to be Ayesha’s lover, insists that she is as innocent as Pitt himself.

Constable Evans joins Sergeant Watkins to follow a trail of clues that leads them to the South of England and then to France, and finally to the conclusion that a dangerous killer is loose in Llanfair, in Rhys Bowen's fourth Evan Evans mystery, Evan and Elle. There is both excitement and dismay in Llanfair when a new French restaurant opens. The glamorous owner, Madame Yvette, tries to win over the locals, and everything seems to be going well until a string of fires plagues the town.

December 1889. Fresh from debunking a 'ghostly' hound in Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes has returned to London, only to find himself the target of a deadly vendetta. A beautiful client arrives with a tale of ghosts, kidnapping and dynamite on a whisky estate in Scotland, but brother Mycroft trumps all with an urgent assignment in the South of France. On the fabled Riviera, Holmes and Watson encounter treachery, explosions, rival French detective Jean Vidocq...and a terrible discovery.

When reclusive war poet Olivia Marlowe and her half-brother, Nicholas Cheney, die together in their ancestral home on the Cornish coast, it looks like suicide. The grieving relatives gather together to discuss the fate of Barcombe Hall, when another shocking death occurs. Inspector Rutledge, who is still shell-shocked from his experiences in the Great War, is sent from Scotland Yard to investigate. Rutledge is soon convinced that the answers to this baffling case lie within the family’s secret history.

The death of Adam Penhallow on the eve of his birthday seems, at first, to be by natural causes. He was elderly after all. But Penhallow wasn't well liked. He had ruled over his estate with an iron will and a sharp tongue. He had played one relative off against another. He was so bad tempered and mean that both his servants and his family hated him. It soon transpires that far from being a peaceful death, Penhallow was, in fact, murdered.

Veteran reporter Jack McEvoy has taken down killers before, but when a woman he had a one-night stand with is murdered in a particularly brutal way, McEvoy realizes he might be facing a criminal mind unlike any he's ever encountered. Jack investigates—against the warnings of the police and his own editor—and makes a shocking discovery that connects the crime to other mysterious deaths across the country. Undetected by law enforcement, a vicious killer has been hunting women, using genetic data to select and stalk his targets.

When Detective Kim Stone races to the crime scene, there is no body waiting for her: The paramedics are desperately trying to save the victim’s life. But there is something very strange about the way the man was found, his arms raised above his head, his legs spread apart. When he dies on the way to the hospital, Kim is certain she’s on the hunt for a killer…but all evidence at the scene has been destroyed.

The Department of Sensitive Crimes, renowned for taking on the most obscure and irrelevant cases, led by Ulf Varg, their best detective, is always prepared to take on an investigation, no matter how complex. So when Ulf is approached by the girlfriend of Trig Oloffson, who claims her beau (the infamous bad boy of Swedish letters) is being blackmailed, Ulf is determined to help. It turns out that this wild bear of a man may be more of a teddy.