Police Fiction

The lifeless body of a renowned author is found murdered within his residence, prompting DCI Harry McNeil to uncover the unsettling truth that not everyone held the man in high regard. Initially dismissed as a tragic mishap stemming from a misjudged publicity stunt, this incident swiftly transforms into a grim realization of foul play.

The Time Police do not have problems. They have challenges. Idiots who want to change history have always proved 'challenging'. But now temporal tourism is on the rise - highly illegal but highly lucrative. If you're prepared to take the risk. To face down this threat the Time Police will despatch their toughest undercover agents. Which is fine until the unthinkable happens. Replacements are needed fast, and who better than three young officers who don't even look the part?

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.

It’s spring and Three Pines is reemerging after the harsh winter. But not everything buried should come alive again. Not everything lying dormant should reemerge. But something has. As the villagers prepare for a special celebration, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators’ lives after many years. The two were young children when their troubled mother was murdered, leaving them damaged, shattered. Now they’ve arrived in the village of Three Pines. But to what end?

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.

John Rebus spent his life as a detective putting Edinburgh's most deadly criminals behind bars. Now, he's going to join them... In this tense, gripping game of cat and mouse, 'The King of Crime' (Express) returns to his much-loved creation, the inimitable John Rebus, as he faces a case unlike any other...

Clete Purcel—private investigator, ex-member of the New Orleans Police Department, and war veteran with a hard shell and just a few soft spots—is Dave Robicheaux’s longtime friend and partner in detective work. But he has a troubled past. When Clete leaves his car at the local car wash, only to return to find it ransacked by a group of thugs tied to the drug trade from Mexican cartels to Louisiana, it feels personal—his grandniece died of a fentanyl overdose, and his fists curl when he thinks of the dealers who sold it.

Summer 1933. Fresh from the discovery that she has family living nearby, Kitty Underhay has packed her carpet bag, commandeered a chambermaid and set off on a visit to stately Enderley Hall. She’s looking forward to getting to know her relatives, as well as the assembled group of house guests. But when elderly Nanny Thoms is found dead at the bottom of the stairs after papers of national importance are stolen, Kitty quickly learns that Muffy the dog’s muddy paws on her hemline are the least of her problems.

When the body of a missing tourist is discovered slain in the foothills of the Cuillin Mountain range, it falls to D.I. Duncan McAdam and his small team to discover how he came to be there and who would have a motive to kill him. The summer season is a welcome distraction following a brutal and challenging winter. The Isle of Skye is booming with a revitalised tourist trade after a tough few years, and the Misty Isle is on course for its best year for visitors on record. But one person has not received the warm greeting the islanders are famed for.

Kieran Elliott’s life changed forever on a single day when a reckless mistake led to devastating consequences. The guilt that still haunts him resurfaces during a visit with his young family to the small coastal town he once called home. Twelve years earlier the storm of the century claimed the lives of Kieran’s brother and his friend. There was also a third casualty that day. A teenage girl, last spotted on the sand as the weather rolled in, then never seen again. Kieran has barely arrived back in town after a long absence when a body is washed up on the nearby beach.

Balford-le-Nez is a dying seatown on the coast of Essex. But when a member of the town's small but growing Asian community is found dead on its beach, his neck broken, sleepy Balford-le-Nez ignites. Working solo without her longtime partner, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, Sergeant Barbara Havers must probe not only the mind of a murderer and a case very close to her own heart, but the terrible price people pay for deceiving others...and themselves.

The newspaper refers to the body only as Victim 2117 - the 2117th refugee to die in the Mediterranean Sea. But to three people, the unnamed victim is so much more, and the death sets off a chain of events that throws Department Q, Copenhagen’s cold cases division led by Detective Carl Mørck, into a deeply dangerous - and deeply personal - case. A case that not only reveals dark secrets about the past, but has deadly implications for the future.

It’s the middle of the night when part-time police consultant and full-time empath Reece gets an anonymous call warning him that his detective sister needs his help. At an out-of-the-way Seattle marina, he discovers that three people have been butchered—including the author of the country’s strictest anti-empathy bill, which is just days from being passed into law. Soon, Reece’s caller arrives: a shadowy government agent known as The Dead Man, who is rumored to deal exclusively in cases involving empathy.

A cold night, in the middle of nowhere, in a vast county in New Mexico, a lone patrolwoman comes across a pair of dead cops sitting in their cruiser. And who does she find standing over their corpses? A giant, lone drifter with one stark trait; he is menacing like a nightmare. His name? Jack Widow. To find the real killer, she'll have to partner with Widow. What seems like an ambush and execution might turn out to be something conspiratorial and far more sinister.

Detective Peter Porteous is called to Cranwell Lake where the body of a teenager has been discovered. After trawling through the missing persons files, he comes to the conclusion that the corpse is Michael Grey, an enigmatic and secretive young man who was reported missing by his foster parents in 1972. The news report that a body has been found leaves prison officer Hannah Morton in shock. Michael had been her boyfriend, and she had been with him the night he disappeared. And now the discovery is bringing back dreaded and long buried memories from her past.

When a young man is found frozen to death on a Highland street in mid-December, DCI Jack Logan initially puts it down to a Christmas night out gone tragically wrong. But, when a postmortem reveals something more sinister, Jack discovers he is dealing with a cold, calculating killer with a long line of victims, a talent for torture, and a perverse sense of justice.

A call from an ex-husband is never welcome. For Berkeley cop Jill Smith it wins a Nobel Prize for chutzpah. Her ex wants a favor. His "friend" and co-worker, Anne Spaulding, is missing. Anne's ransacked apartment - complete with blood-sprayed walls - gives Jill the chilling feeling that her ex may be up to his arrogant neck in murder. Now Jill's out with the street people of Berkeley and the crazies of People's Park to uncover the fate of a welfare worker. But her best suspect is her ex: the former "significant other" who still pushes her buttons.

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.

Former Chief Inspector of Homicide, Armand Gamache, has found a peace he'd never imagined possible, away from the front line of the police and in the tranquil village of Three Pines. But when his friend Clara Morrow asks for help, he can't bring himself to refuse her, despite the old wounds it threatens to re-open. Clara's husband, Peter, is missing, having failed to come home on the first anniversary of their separation, as promised.

It’s December 19, 1931. Hercule Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool are looking forward to a much-needed, restful Christmas holiday, when they are called upon to investigate the murder of a man in a Norfolk hospital ward. Cynthia Catchpool, Edward’s mother, insists that Poirot stay with her in a crumbling mansion by the coast, so that they can all be together for the festive period while he solves the case.