Traditional Detectives Police Procedural

Widowed van driver Bob Naylor is prodded into joining the Chichester Writers' Circle by his teenage daughter. Bob writes limericks and jingles, and fears he will be out of his class amongst the literati. But the members of the circle come from all walks of life and practice many forms of writing, from fantasy to household hints. There seems to be nothing about any of them to incite a serial killer. However, there is an arsonist in their midst, burning his victims to death, and Bob becomes a suspect.

A late summer heatwave seems to have triggered an unusually high number of suicides. As the dead bodies pile up, DS Jack Mackinnon and the rest of MIT realise things aren’t as straightforward as they seem, and when similar letters are found at the scene of each "suicide", Mackinnon is convinced they are dealing with a serial killer. A killer who is determined to deliver his own deadly justice.

When Harold Merefield returned home in the early hours of a winter morning from a festive little party at that popular nightclub, the Naxos, he was startled by a gruesome discovery. On his bed was a corpse. There was nothing to show the identity of the dead man or the cause of his death. At the inquest, the jury found a verdict of ‘death from natural causes’ - perhaps they were right, but yet?

A friend in his cigar club asks Antoine Verlaque to visit Rene Rouquet, a retired postal worker who has found a rolled-up canvas in his apartment. As the apartment once belonged to Paul Cezanne, Rouquet is convinced he's discovered a treasure. But when Antoine arrives at the apartment, he finds Rene dead, the canvas missing, and a mysterious art history professor standing over the body. When the painting is finally recovered, the mystery only deepens.

Felicity Holland is missing. She left her handsome West London house to go to her weekly pottery class and didn't come back. She's a mature, sensible woman with a stable home life and a happy marriage - no reason to abscond. Her distraught husband is convinced she must have been snatched. DCI Bill Slider and his team know that when a woman goes missing, you have to move fast if there's to be a hope of finding her alive. But with no evidence of foul play - nothing to go on at all - where do you even start looking?

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.

Ten miles off the coast of Brittany lie the fabled Glénan Islands. Boasting sparkling white sands and crystal-clear waters, they seem perfectly idyllic, until one day in May three bodies wash up on the shore. At first glance the deaths appear accidental, but as the identities of the victims come to light, cantankerous Commissaire Dupin is pulled back into action for a case of what seems to be cold-blooded murder.

Anne Scott's address was scribbled on a crumpled note in the pocket of Morse's smartest suit....He turned the corner of Canal Street, Jericho, on the afternoon of Wednesday, October 3rd. He hadn't planned a second visit. But he was back later the same day - as the officer in charge of a suicide investigation.

A society wedding at Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire becomes a crime scene when a man is murdered. After another body is found, the baffled local constabulary turns to Scotland Yard. Though the second crime had a witness, her description of the killer is so strange it's unbelievable. Despite his experience, Inspector Ian Rutledge has few answers of his own. The victims are so different that there is no rhyme or reason to their deaths. Nothing logically seems to connect them - except the killer. As the investigation widens, a clear suspect emerges. But for Rutledge, the facts still don't add up, leaving him to question his own judgment.

A woman has been shot to death by a deer hunter on an island off the coast of Maine. To newly promoted Warden Investigator Mike Bowditch, the case seems open and shut. But as soon as he arrives on remote Maquoit Island he discovers mysteries piling up one on top of the other. The hunter now claims he didn’t fire the fatal shot and the ballistic evidence proves he’s telling the truth. Bowditch begins to suspect the secretive community might be covering up the identity of whoever killed Ariel Evans.

On a cold dark night in February, as a blizzard shrieks through Cedar Valley, police officer and new mother Gemma Monroe responds to an anonymous report of a prowler at the local private high school, The Valley Academy. In her idyllic Colorado small town, Gemma expects the call was just a prank by a bored teenager. But there in the snow lies the savaged body of a man whose presence in town was meant to be a secret. And a disturbing message left by his killer promises more death to come.

A TV reporter is murdered with a single bullet wound to the heart. The twist in the tale is that, this time, it's the man who fired the bullet who's asking all the questions. Michael Weston wants to know why the police were on his tail so quickly. His first task is to find the writer of his pay cheque, the second is to make sure he doesn't get caught.

Recipient of the British Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger, Gold Dagger, and Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement, Peter Lovesey has also won Anthony and Macavity Awards for his splendid mysteries. In The Headhunters, an innocent discussion about killing the boss leads friends Gemma and Jo into real-life murder.

In een stad waar de agenten zo corrupt zijn als de criminelen is het onmogelijk goed en kwaad nog te onderscheiden... Kerstmis, 1951. Zes gevangenen worden in hun cel afgetuigd door een aantal beschonken agenten. Voor drie jonge LAPD-detectives betekent dit voorval een keerpunt in hun carrières. Als jaren later een schokkende massamoord Los Angeles op z’n kop zet, dreigen ze verstrikt te raken in het web van leugens, geheimen en corruptie dat ze zelf hebben gewoven..

When a local woman tells Sergeant Hamish Macbeth that she doesn't remember what happened the previous evening, he doesn't begin to worry. She had been out drinking, after all, and he'd prefer not to be bothered with such an arrogant and annoying woman. But when her body is discovered, Hamish is forced to investigate a crime that the only known witness - now dead - had forgotten.

In this second book in the Frank Yakabuski Mystery series, Yakabuski is called in to investigate a gruesome crime scene. A body has been left hanging from a schoolyard fence. On closer inspection, Yak finds a large diamond in the murder victim’s mouth. Two criminal gangs - the Shiners and the Travellers - are fighting with each other, and Yakabuski turns to his father, a now-retired detective who has a long history with the gangs, for advice in the interrogation. And as if this weren’t enough for one detective, a serial killer is taking a deadly road trip through the United States.

On the hottest day in living memory, Richard Mallory Tindall, the owner of a patent firm, does not return home to Cleete village. When a man is found crushed to death, Tindall's case goes from missing person to homicide. In the course of solving murder cases, Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan has seen all manner of ugly death. But there's something particularly gruesome about this one, the body crushed beneath the marble and iron of an old Saxon church tower. With rubble blocking off access to the crime scene, no one can get close enough to inspect the body.

On leave from Canada's Community Policing department, Esa Khattak is traveling in Iran, reconnecting with his cultural heritage and seeking peace in the country's beautiful mosques and gardens. But Khattak's supposed break from work is cut short when he's approached by a Canadian government agent in Iran, asking him to look into the death of renowned Canadian-Iranian filmmaker Zahra Sobhani.

Carl Finch is a desperate man. Cut out of his stepfather's will, he is heavily in debt, and unless he can persuade his stepsister Hattie to bail him out, he'll be in even more trouble. Hattie's husband, Guy, has never liked Carl and wants his wife's inheritance for his own use, so Hattie agrees to meet Carl in secret to discuss his predicament. Little does she realise that when she arrives at their meeting point in Crooked Man Wood, she'll find Carl's dead body....

Mumbai is a city that thrives on extravagant spectacles and larger-than-life characters. But as Chopra is about to discover, even in the city of dreams, there is no guarantee of a happy ending.