Private Investigators Mysteries

A wealthy woman needs to find her sister to settle a will. It looks routine...boring. Still, business is slow and even a private investigator has bills to pay, so Kinsey Millhone takes the case. But this is not routine and the deeper Kinsey digs the trickier things get. The client tries to call Kinsey off, an accusing husband surfaces, and a double murder turns the case sinister.

From the top-security confines of Stormcage to the barbarism of first-century Egypt, River battles to find the Eye of Horus before its powers are used to transform the universe. To succeed, she must team up with a most unlikely ally - her own fictional alter ego, Melody. And together they must solve another mystery: Is fiction changing into fact - or is fact changing into fiction?

During a houseboat vacation on the remote Lake of the Woods, a violent gale sweeps through unexpectedly, stranding Cork and his daughter, Jenny, on a devastated island where the wind has ushered in a force far darker and more deadly than any storm. Amid the wreckage, Cork and Jenny discover the body of a teenage girl. She wasn't killed by the storm, however; she'd been bound and tortured before she died. Nearby, underneath a tangle of branches, they also find a baby boy, hungry and dehydrated, but still very much alive.

When an English expat is brutally murdered, his charred corpse left on a Loire Valley hillside, the police turn to juge d’instruction Matthieu Lombard to find the perpetrator. Instead, Lombard discovers a wealth of secrets, grudges, and feuds in the idyllic town of Saint-Genèse-sur-Loire. He begins to suspect that the remaining members of the Comité des Fêtes know more about the death than they are letting on.

It's April, 1988, a month before Kinsey Millhone's 38th birthday, and she's alone in her office doing paperwork when a young man arrives unannounced. He has a preppy air about him and looks as if he'd be carded if he tried to buy booze, but Michael Sutton is 27, an unemployed college dropout. Twenty-one years earlier, a four-year-old girl disappeared, and a recent reference to her kidnapping has triggered a flood of memories.

"Un matin, Le Petit a décrété : - Je veux mon papa. Il a repoussé son bol de chocolat et j'ai su, moi, Benjamin Malaussène, frère de famille, que Le Petit n'avalerait plus rien tant que je n'aurais pas retrouvé son vrai père. Or ce type était introuvable. Probablement mort, d'ailleurs. Après deux jours de jeûne Le Petit était si transparent qu'on pouvait lire au travers. Mais il repoussait toujours son assiette : - Je veux mon papa." Daniel Pennac interprète avec jubilation cette intrigue policière loufoque, où se croisent tous les personnages de la saga Malaussène.

An ax-wielding monk hacks at the door. Toby Peters is on the other side, running as fast as his recently broken leg will allow. Alongside him is Salvador Dalí, dressed in a rabbit suit, insistently muttering "grasshoppers" as they try to make their escape. Dalí insists on being carried across the lawn, so Peters hobbles along with the surrealist in his arms. They get in the car just as the monk chops down the front door. The car doesn't start, and the monk charges silently, the ax in the air.

When an old acquaintance, finance magnate Eleanore Paget, hears August is back in town, she tries to hire him to investigate suspicious goings-on at her investment bank. August declines - detective work is no longer his beat. When Eleanore is found dead the next day of an apparent suicide, August doesn't buy it for a minute. His search for her killer will drag him into a rat's nest of Detroit's most dangerous criminals.

Taylor is the name, John Taylor. My card says I'm a detective, but what I really am is an expert on finding lost things. It's part of the gift I was born with as a child of the Nightside. I left there a long time ago, with my skin and sanity barely intact. Now I make my living in the sunlit streets of London. But business has been slow lately, so when Joanna Barrett showed up at my door, reeking of wealth, asking me to find her runaway teenage daughter, I didn't say no.

Two dead bodies changed the course of my life that fall. One of them I knew and the other I'd never laid eyes on until I saw him in the morgue. The first was a local PI of suspect reputation. He'd been gunned down near the beach at Santa Teresa. It looked like a robbery gone bad. The other was on the beach six weeks later. He'd been sleeping rough. Probably homeless. No identification. A slip of paper with Millhone's name and number was in his pants pocket. The coroner asked her to come to the morgue to see if she could ID him.

When the matriarch of a rich Seattle family dies under suspicious circumstances, private investigator Thomas Austin is on the case. This time, the suspect list is easy.

Joel Brandt swears he’s never met the woman before. His wife dead six months before, the small-time businessman is perplexed when Del Moray police inform him that a local woman, Marla Cloy, has accused him of harassing her. According to her, Joel has been lurking outside of her house, following her car, even assaulting her at the grocery store. Brandt says it’s all a lie, but the police don’t believe him. He goes to Fred Carver, an ex-cop turned PI, for help clearing his name.

First appearing in print in 1890, the character of Sherlock Holmes has now become synonymous worldwide with the concept of a super sleuth. His creator, Conan Doyle, imbued his detective hero with intellectual power, acute observational abilities, a penchant for deductive reasoning and a highly educated use of forensic skills. Indeed, Doyle created the first fictional private detective who used what we now recognize as modern scientific investigative techniques.

Most folks in Exile, Texas, think Megan Leary got away with murder. Megan was acquitted of her mother's vicious killing after someone else confessed—but suspicion still shadows her fifteen years later. Now a private investigator, she's come back to help a friend look for her missing teenage daughter—and it's not just gossip that's being stirred up. Sheriff's Deputy Dan Fox wasn't sure what to think of Megan or her mysterious past when he pulled her over for speeding. But suddenly, people are dying—and Dan may have to decide whether he can put his trust in Megan to ensure both of them survive.

I’m rather used to the crazy cases, because let’s face it, most cops can handle the run-of-the-mill with their eyes closed. I’m only called in when the situation is weird or they need to solve the case fast. This case is a little of both. Someone’s attacking women as they get off of work, hitting them in the back of the head. What started as a case of battery has steadily built up to homicide. With three murders, six victims, and no leads, the Clarksville PD are desperate to catch the assailant.

Cut loose from his former life at the coroner’s office, Clay Edison has set up shop as a private investigator. It’s steady, safe work. Until it isn’t. The trouble begins when a young man, tasked with managing his grandmother’s estate, hires Clay to examine some minor financial discrepancies. What starts off as a case of simple fraud rapidly explodes into a web of deception, an elaborate con game stretching back decades and involving countless victims. All the evidence points to a tiny town on California’s rugged, remote Lost Coast.

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.

Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony Award winner Rick Riordan is a master of Texas crime writing. In Southtown, maniacal convict Will Stirman escapes from the state penitentiary. With his gang of murderous thugs, Stirman pursues Erainya, the boss of college professor turned P.I. Tres Navarre. Erainya’s husband Fred helped put Stirman behind bars, and although Fred is dead, Stirman wants his revenge. Now only Tres can stop him.

It is 1997, and someone is slaughtering young women in Burdon County, Arkansas. But no one in the Dirty South wants to admit it. In an Arkansas jail cell sits a former NYPD detective, stricken by grief. He is mourning the death of his wife and child, and searching in vain for their killer. Obsessed with avenging his lost family, his life is about to take a shocking turn.

In Maine, Colleen Clark stands accused of the worst crime a mother can commit: the abduction and possible murder of her child. Everyone—ambitious politicians in an election season, hardened police, ordinary folk—has an opinion on the case, and most believe she is guilty. But most is not all. Defending Colleen is the lawyer Moxie Castin, and working alongside him is the private investigator Charlie Parker, who senses the tale has another twist.