Police Fiction

Percival Everett's The Trees is a must-listen that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.

Weeks before NYPD Detective Michael Bennett is to marry his longtime love, Mary Catherine, an assassin announces his presence in the city with a string of grisly murders. Each victim is a young woman. And each has been killed in a manner as precise as it was gruesome. Tasked with working alongside the FBI, Bennett and his gung-ho new partner uncover multiple cold-case homicides across the country that fit the same distinctive pattern—proving the perpetrator they seek is as experienced at ending lives as he is at evading detection.

A pair of hikers find a tarp-wrapped body in a clearing in the woods. When a search in the surrounding area yields two more, Sheriff Bree Taggert knows they’ve stumbled onto a serial killer’s dumping ground. With the help of investigator Matt Flynn, Bree works the case. They go to interview Jana, the best friend of one of the victims. But when they arrive at her apartment, it’s been ransacked and set on fire. And Jana is missing.

When the body of a journalist is found in a traditional Shetland boat, Detective Inspector Willow Reeves is drafted in to head up the investigation. Jimmy Perez has been out of the loop, but his local knowledge is needed, and he decides to help the inquiry. Originally a Shetlander, the journalist had left the islands years before to make a name for himself in London, leaving a scandal in his wake. He had few friends in Shetland, so why was he back?

DI Tom Mariner thinks he's seen it all, but now he faces an investigation which will push him to the limit. Journalist Eddie Barham is found dead in his home. A syringe in his arm and a note by his side reading, "No More". Open and shut case of suicide? Not for DI Mariner. Hours before, he saw Barham picking up a prostitute in a bar. And then Mariner discovers Barham's younger brother, Jamie, hiding in a cupboard under the stairs. Mariner is determined to connect with Jamie and get to the truth.

The perfect family. The perfect house. The perfect life. All gone now. What could cause a man, when all the stars of fortune are shining upon him, to suddenly snap and destroy everything he has built? This is the question that haunts Sergeant Ryan DeMarco after the wife and children of beloved college professor and best-selling author Thomas Huston are found slaughtered in their home. Huston himself has disappeared and so is immediately cast as the prime suspect.

Nine physicists are dead. The medical examiner has determined that the victims died from drinking coffee laced with rat poison. The owner of the house, Professor Thaddeus Huntgardner, isn't suspected, but his claim that a piece of the debris from Roswell's 1947 UFO crash was hidden in Flagler might be true. Enter Luther "Luke" Stephens McWhorter, a Yale Divinity School-educated West Texas sheriff with all the right questions. Is the fragment real? If so, who's trying to locate it? And what has fueled the byzantine activities of Abbot County's two secret societies for the past 70 years?

The “Prey” novels by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist John Sandford consistently make the best-seller lists, but they are not for the faint of heart. Featuring Minneapolis Lieutenant Lucas Davenport, these thrillers are raw, graphic, and impossible to put down. In Eyes of Prey, a depressed and unfocused Davenport takes on a macabre case, tracking down a serial killer who maims the eyes of his victims after he has murdered them.

Stephen Wilton can’t stand his empty house. Throwing himself into his work to avoid his complicated personal life, the rookie U.S. Marshal goes undercover to apprehend a serial criminal. But when a childhood pal’s sister disappears, the by-the-book law enforcement officer is torn between the case in front of him and helping a friend. Mak Cunningham is used to moving fast. So the savvy federal agent channels her hair-trigger impulses in a bid to bring down the slippery drug dealer and sex-trafficker.

June 1933. Independent, young Kitty Underhay has been left in charge of her family’s hotel, The Dolphin, on the tranquil English coast. But when several rooms are broken into and searched, including Kitty’s own, she quickly realizes that something out of the ordinary is afoot at the hotel. Soon, rumors are flying in the cozy town that someone is on the hunt for a stolen ruby. A ruby that Kitty’s mother may well have possessed when she herself went missing during the Great War.

"To listen is to be, but to play is to live...." So believes Gideon Davies, 28-year-old musical wunderkind, a virtuoso violinist whose talents are internationally celebrated. When Gideon finds himself center stage, unable to play, his tortured search for his music - and for the truth behind the appalling event that shaped his life - will lead him to the very heart of love's darkest manifestations.

Harry Bosch has been given three years before he must retire from the LAPD, and he wants cases more fiercely than ever. In one morning, he gets two. DNA from a 1989 rape and murder matches a 29-year-old convicted rapist. Was he an eight-year-old killer, or has something gone terribly wrong in the new Regional Crime Lab? Then Bosch and his partner are called to a death scene fraught with internal politics....

Four years ago, LAPD detective Harry Bosch was on a movie set, asking questions about the murder of a young production assistant, when an armored car arrived with $2 million cash for use in a heist scene. In a life-imitates-art firestorm, a gang of masked men converged on the delivery and robbed the armored car with guns blazing. The crime was never resolved, and the young woman's murder was in the stack of unsolved-case files Bosch carried home the night he left the LAPD.

To the distaste of the Compton Dando villagers, the big house has been taken over by a group of New Age eccentrics. And when the first death is reported, no one is surprised...or disappointed. The coroner rules it an accident. But only weeks later, there’s another death. And this time, it is murder. Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby is called to the scene immediately, and there’ll be no escape until he has sifted through the world of psychics, cult leaders and horrifying deaths to get to the cause of it all.

Holly Stewart moved into Solace House thinking it would be a fresh start for her and her family. She knew a tragic murder had taken place there, but she didn’t know the full ghastly history of the house. Now, her husband has lost his job, the children are bullied at school, and someone is prowling around the garden at night. Someone who wants them gone. Detective Jackman wants to help. Instead he’s been pulled into a 20-year-old cold case.

An innocent family are the latest victims of a grisly series of hideous sacrificial killings that no one understands, and no one can stop. Nobody lives to tell of the unimaginable carnage. Only the blood-stained walls bear witness. All hope rests on Special Agent Will Graham, who must peer inside the killer's tortured soul to understand his rage, to anticipate and prevent his next vicious crime. Desperate for help, Graham finds himself locked in a deadly alliance with the brilliant Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the infamous mass murderer.

Fin Finnegan, a San Diego police detective and wannabe actor heading straight for a midlife meltdown, is assigned a routine truck theft that turns into a toxic chemical spill, setting off a bizarre chain reaction of death and murder on both sides of the Mexican border. Fin is forced to team up with Nell Salter, a sexy female investigator, as well as an equally fetching U.S. Navy investigator who wants to learn all that Fin can teach her - and that’s saying a lot

Tony Colletti, a good suburban cop and father of a child with autism, finds himself drawn into the controversy over the apparent but rarely acknowledged connection between childhood vaccines and autism. His quest to uncover the truth forces him to risk all he holds dear while confronting corrupt government officials, the powerful pharmaceutical industry, and disturbing elements of his own past. Even while holding down his job and dealing with family crises, Colletti spearheads the drive to contend with industrial espionage, Russian gangsters, and sexual predators.

It’s been a decade since Trumanell Branson disappeared, leaving only a bloody handprint behind. Her pretty face still hangs like a watchful queen on the posters on the walls of the town’s Baptist church, the police station, and in the high school. They all promise the same thing: We will find you. Meanwhile, Tru's brother, Wyatt, lives as a pariah in the desolation of the old family house, cleared of wrongdoing by the police but tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion and in a new documentary about the crime.

The second book in the Misty Isle series, by J M Dalgliesh.