Traditional Police

Ellery Hathaway knows a thing or two about serial killers, but not through her police training. She's an officer in sleepy Woodbury, Massachusetts, where a bicycle theft still makes the newspapers. No one there knows she was once victim number 17 in the grisly story of serial killer Francis Michael Coben. The only victim who lived. When three people disappear from her town in three years, all around her birthday - the day she was kidnapped so long ago - Ellery fears someone knows her secret. Someone very dangerous.

Along the picturesque Belon River, home of the world famous oyster beds, between steep cliffs, ominous forests, and the Atlantic Ocean, a stubborn elderly film actress discovers a corpse. By the time Commissaire Dupin arrives at the scene, the body has disappeared. A little while later, he receives a phone call from the mystical hills of Monts d'Arree, where legends of fairies and the devil abound: Another unidentified body has turned up. Dupin quickly realizes this may be his most difficult and confounding case yet.

Love and need make unexpected bedfellows, and both are blind. As the grip of a long hard winter tightens on Lydmouth, a dead woman calls the dying in a seance behind net curtains. Two provincial newspapers are in the throes of a bitter circulation war. A lorry driver broods, and an office boy loses his heart. Britain is basking in the warm glow of postwar tranquillity, but in the quiet town of Lydmouth, darker forces are at play. The rats are fed on bread and milk, a gentleman's yellow kid glove is mislaid on a train and something disgusting is happening at Mr Prout's toy shop.

When the body of Rufus Moorcroft, a middle-aged widower with a distinguished war record, is found in his summerhouse, the verdict is suicide. But both reporter Jill Francis and her lover, Detective Richard Thornhill, approaching the case from different angles, discover there's more to it than that. The sixth instalment in the acclaimed Lydmouth series.

In the respectable seaside town of Flaxborough, the equally respectable councillor Harold Carobleat is laid to rest. Cause of death: pneumonia. But he is scarcely cold in his coffin before Detective Inspector Purbright, affable and annoyingly polite, must turn out again to examine the death of Carobleat's neighbour, Marcus Gwill, former prop. of the local rag, the Citizen. This time it looks like foul play, unless a surfeit of marshmallows had led the late and rather unlamented Mr Gwill to commit suicide by electrocution. ('Power without responsibility', murmurs Purbright.)

Constable Nick has come to know and love the host of characters who live and work on the beautiful North Yorkshire Moors. The amiable constable handles every encounter with his characteristic humor and professionalism, whether he’s investigating a plot to scare away a troublesome suitor or helping a neighbor return his late wife’s ashes to her beloved moors. But when Ted Williamson’s sheep start disappearing, can Rhea find the culprit without making enemies of the farmers of Yorkshire?

Forbidden in Victorian England, the grim and violent world of bare-knuckle fighting has gone underground. So when a headless body is found floating in the Thames, his hands "pickled" for fighting, Sergeant Cribb knows he is facing a challenge. Desperate for information, they select the young constable Henry Jago to infiltrate the gang, subjecting him to a rigorous program of purging, pickling, and training. Cribb is certain that the losing fighters are being killed, or worse, so getting Jago out just in time is crucial....

Rebus is off the case, quite literally. A few days into a murder inquiry following the brutal death of an Edinburgh art dealer, Rebus blows up at his superior, DCS Gill Templer, and is sent into purdah - which, in his case, means the Scottish Police College, sited on the edge of a village in central Scotland. Rebus has been sent there for "retraining". In other words, it's his Last Chance Saloon. He is not alone. At the college, he is put into a group of similar officers.

It begins with a phone call. Gordon Reeve's brother has been found dead in his car in San Diego; the car was locked from the inside, and he had a gun in his hand. In the US to identify the body, Gordon comes to realise that his brother has in fact been murdered. What's more, it is soon obvious that his own life is in danger.

Lorsque Nico Sirsky, chef de la brigade criminelle du 36 quai des Orfèvres, est chargé de l’enquête sur le corps congelé d'une fillette retrouvé dans un square parisien, il sait qu'il ne s'agira pas d'une enquête ordinaire. Quand d'autres cadavres apparaissent, et qu'il s'avère que ces meurtres sont les copies conformes d'homicides commis par de célèbres tueurs en série, il comprend qu'il lui faut aller vite pour arrêter un tueur extrêmement organisé et dangereux.

August, 1940. On the streets of London, locals watch with growing concern as German fighter planes plague the city’s skyline. But inside the famous Ritz Hotel, the cream of society continues to enjoy all the glamour and comfort that money can buy during wartime - until an anonymous man is discovered with his throat slashed open. Detective Chief Inspector Coburg is called in to investigate, ably assisted by his trusty colleague, Sergeant Lampson.

Former detective sergeant Norman Norman’s retirement is boring him to tears. So when he’s asked to assist an upcoming female DI and mentor a new team of misfits in a sleepy Welsh coastal town, he jumps at the opportunity. But the training has barely begun when a woman’s corpse washes up on the sand. With no reports of missing persons, DS Norman is stumped...until the post-mortem reveals a shocking hint to the culprit being local. But with a growing list of suspects who all have alibis, the experienced cop and his fledgling team’s first case could be their last.

The British-based Anglo-Lassertan Mineral Company finds itself in hot water its engineer, Alan Ottershaw, hits and kills a pedestrian while driving in a foreign country - a nation with thick veins of the strategically important mineral querremitte. This country has draconian laws about killings, so Ottershaw is relieved when he's whisked back to Calleshire. Bur the Lassertan government threatens to strip the company of its most valuable contract, and poor Mr. Ottershaw dies suddenly, a very convenient solution. A little too convenient, if you ask Calleshire detective C. D. Sloan.

When two bodies are found sprawled at the bottom of the Devil's Kitchen in the mountains of Snowdonia, it looks like a murder-suicide. But something doesn't feel right to Detective Inspector Ian Drake, and his gut instinct has never let him down before. Drake suspects at least one of the deaths could be suspicious, but who would kill such an ordinary couple, and why? This might be Drake's first murder inquiry, but his years as a detective have taught him one thing - every murder has a motive, and every killer leaves a trace.

When the Berebury Footpaths Society created their locally infamous motto, "Every walk a challenge," they couldn't have known just how apt it would be. Avid hikers Wendy Lamport and Gordon Briggs suffer from a good walk spoiled when, while reclaiming a public footpath from the greedy barbed-wire fences of encroaching farmers, a crow drops a severed human finger at their feet. And where there's a finger, thinks Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan, a body can't be far behind.

An abandoned church in a village set in time-the ideal setting for murder. Detective Inspector Tremayne and his sergeant, Clare Yarwood, are hard pushed to solve the crime and to stay alive.

Detective Sergeant Kathleen Doyle was investigating a tip she’d received about doctors who were being assaulted at a London free clinic, but - strangely enough - none of the volunteers was willing to give her a statement. Instead, her only witness offered a fanciful tale about supernatural evildoers - which was nonsense, of course; it was clearly an attempt to shift the blame to the appropriate cultural bogeyman.

As a brilliant young biochemist studying at Oxford, Martin Blackthorn had a bright future ahead of him. And then in the course of a behavioural experiment, he met a boy called John Slade, and in a moment his life took a very different and infinitely darker turn. On the surface John appeared quite normal, but when it came to inflicting pain, his behaviour was off the scale.

Newly promoted DCI Nick Dixon is stuck behind a desk when the peace of the Somerset countryside is shattered by a spate of sheep killings. Dixon recognises a sinister pattern: the animals have all been slaughtered with a crossbow, the power increasing with each kill. It seems whoever is responsible is practising, but for what?

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.