Traditional Detectives Police Procedural

Peter Maxwell didn't want to attend the GNVQ course. He didn't want to get mixed up in murder either - but perhaps it was all part of death's rich tapestry. And while a disparate gathering of teachers was breaking ice upstairs at the Carnforth Centre, someone else was in the basement - breaking skulls. But what the killer couldn't have foreseen was that one of the victims was an old flame of Maxwell's. So now it was personal. And when 'Mad Max' takes something personally, he doesn't get madder - he gets results.

The activities of the infamous drug-running gang founded by Cornelius Mildew may have been hampered in The Mildew Gang, but the king of crime is still alive and well-and still threatening to take his revenge. Scotland Yard whisks the two young people responsible away from London, where they'll presumably be safe-but when they're attacked once again by Mildew's henchmen, they return to the big city to help bring about his downfall.

A beat cop winds up on the trail of a deadly mugger, but when it suddenly gets personal, his own life might be the next thing to be snatched….

When the managing director of Wainwright Enterprises dies everyone is amazed to find he was far richer than they supposed, and that he's left his estate to his nephew Alex and his wife Sally. She uncovers accounting irregularities within the company, but resists involving the police - until the firm's accountant is murdered. But DCI Andrew Fenwick's investigation reveals a web of corruption reaching the highest levels of the local community that puts his own child's life in peril.

Fresh from her first murder case, Nantucket detective Merry Folger is unwillingly sucked into her second. When Joe Duarte, a fishing boat captain with decades of experience on the wild seas off Nantucket, is swept overboard during a spring storm, his death is pronounced accidental. But his estranged daughter, Del, is convinced it's murder. She moves back to Nantucket to get closer to the truth and enlists her old friend, Detective Merry Folger, to help. But Del is also hiding secrets of her own.

On a damp autumn day, two girls playing truant from school find a body in a remote cottage not far from Hungerford. The dead woman, Gillian Lestrange, was a ghostwriter, engaged in writing the memoirs of a widely disliked retired spy, Lavinia (Vinnie) Latham. The mystery thickens when Superintendent Gregory Summers discovers that Gillian was a ghost in more ways than one – she has been presumed dead for the past fifteen years. Somebody paid the price for Gillian’s first death, and a heavy price it was.

Bazza Mackenzie, Pompey’s top criminal, is now beyond reach of DI Joe Faraday. Hungry for power and profile, Bazza decides to stand for Portsmouth North in the general election. And his campaign is taking the city by storm. But politics is an expensive business and so Bazza turns to ex-cop Paul Winter to call in a multi-million pound drug debt. Winter, though, is facing a nightmare of his own and knows his time with Bazza has to end.

No one liked Jake Kinsey. A rich man, he turned up out of nowhere, acquired Exmouth’s trophy penthouse flat, and then bought his way into the local rowing club. And now he’s dead. D/S Jimmy Suttle, a newcomer to the Devon and Cornwall force from his old job on Major Crimes in Portsmouth, is the one detective who suspects that Kinsey has been killed. His boss, beset by budget cuts and the pressure of other cases, needs to move on. The enquiry is dead in the water.

St Benjamin's Medical School is the greatest of its kind, any death occurring within its walls would have created ripples within the academic world, but the death of Nikki Exner is far from being ordinary. Raped, and then grotesquely executed, her theatrical murder horrifies everyone. John Eisenmenger, a former forensic pathologist, finds himself dragged unwillingly into the case. Teaming up with solicitor Helena Flemming, Eisenmenger sets out to discover what really did happen to Nikki Exner.

Past midnight, a horribly mutilated body is found on a road in Portsmouth. The victim has been killed in a hit-and-run. On the evidence, DI Faraday’s latest case seems cut and dried; the dead man had been responsible for the bullying and murder of a boy from his estate. Bazza Mackenzie, the city’s drug lord, has a job for ex-cop Paul Winter. His daughter is having an affair with a high-ranking policeman and he wants Winter to investigate.

Merry Folger is more than ready for a romantic vacation with her fiancé, Peter, when fate - and her police chief father - intervenes. Twenty-one-year-old Jay Santorski never should have drowned in the frigid waters off the Nantucket shore. What was the athlete, Harvard scholar, and part-time scalloper doing out alone in the storm-churned bay? At her father's insistence - and over Peter's objections - Merry returns to the island to investigate.

Jimmy Suttle has barely got his feet under the desk at his new job. Having flown in the face of his superiors on his first big case he now finds himself trying to track down a hugely skilled killer before another innocent dies and before the media tear the force apart. Jimmy is facing a case that could end his career. And his life.

For the right man, all doors are open ... Mike Mackenzie is a self-made man with too much time on his hands and a bit of the devil in his soul. He is looking for something to liven up the days and perhaps give new meaning to his existence. A chance encounter at an art auction offers him the opportunity to do just that as he settles on a plot to commit a "perfect crime".

After his ex-wife bled to death in a bathtub, covered in his fingerprints, the case against Aleksander Kaminski seemed open and shut. Though sentenced to life in prison, he swears he's innocent, a claim supported by his current wife. Private investigator Dylan Scott finds himself drawn back to dreary Lancashire in a search for justice.

When a skier goes missing at Sun Valley's Galena Summit, Sheriff Walt Fleming quickly assembles his crack search-and-rescue team and heads out into the snowy night. Despite the treacherous conditions, Walt and his group, including deputy Tommy Brandon and Walt's best friend, Mark Aker, set off on skis, accompanied by highly trained search dogs. Within minutes, something goes horribly wrong.

Charlie Resnick is the last person to see the attractive young woman who vanishes after a Christmas office party, but he can’t even remember the color of the car in which she left. Days later, a tape-recorded ransom note arrives at police headquarters, and Resnick—along with his faulty memory—is the key to outsmarting the abductor.

Ten months ago, Samantha Hunt set off for work…and was never seen again. Despite the statistics of cold cases, Dylan Scott wants to believe the young woman's alive - and not just because her father, his client, is desperate to find his missing daughter before he dies of cancer. By all accounts Sam was a lovely girl, devoted to her younger stepsisters, well-liked at her work, in love with her boyfriend. But as usual not everything is as it seems in sleepy Dawson's Clough. Sam's boyfriend has a violent past.

An isolated beach on the island of Guernsey in the English Channel is the scene of the murder of Guy Brouard, one of Guernsey's wealthiest inhabitants and its main benefactor. Forced as a child to flee the Nazis in Paris, Brouard was engaged in his latest project when he died: a museum in honor of those who resisted the German occupation of the island during World War II. It is from this period of time that his murderer may well have come. But there are others on Guernsey with reason to want Guy Brouard dead....

From the Collins Crime Club archive, the second Inspector French audiobook by Freeman Wills Crofts, once dubbed 'The King of Detective Story Writers'. When young Maxwell Cheyne discovers that a series of mishaps are the result of unwelcome attention from a dangerous gang of criminals, he teams up with a young woman who is determined to help him outwit them. But when she disappears, he finally decides to go to Scotland Yard for help. Concerned by the developing situation, Inspector Joseph French takes charge of the investigation.

At dawn one morning in 1933, an amateur dowsing team digging the banks of the Thames for precious metals unearths the body of a young woman with a missing toe and a priceless gold coin in her mouth. The case falls on Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard Joe Sandilands’ turf, but he’s been given another assignment - and a very high-profile one. London is hosting a historic global economic conference to try to solve the global Depression, and political tensions are running very high...