Traditional Police

Small-town police chief Arly Hanks takes on the New York Police Department to save her mother from a murder rap in this madcap police procedural.

"The dog came back." "This is a joke, right?" "No, it isn't.... So do you want to hear the rest of it?" Dumbly, Jury nodded. The rest of it is told by Harry Johnson, a stranger who sits down next to Richard Jury as he's drinking in a London pub called the Old Wine Shades. Over three successive nights Harry spins this complicated story about a good friend of his whose wife and son (and dog) disappeared one day as they were viewing property in Surrey.

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.

Local police stations all over the Scottish Highlands are being threatened with closure. This presents the perfect opportunity for Detective Chief Inspector Blair, who would love nothing more than to get rid of Sergeant Hamish Macbeth. Blair suggests that Cyril Sessions, a keen young police officer, visit the town of Lochdubh to monitor exactly what Macbeth does every day. Macbeth hears about Blair's plan and is prepared to insure that Cyril returns back to headquarters with a full report. But Cyril is soon found dead, and Hamish quickly becomes the prime suspect in his murder.

Former Seattle homicide cop J. P. Beaumont is learning to enjoy the new realities of retirement - doing morning crossword puzzles by a roaring fireplace; playing Frisbee with his new dog; having quiet lunches with his still-working wife. But then his past comes calling.

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.

When Rusty Mason, scion of one of Nantucket's oldest and wealthiest families, is found dead in a flooded cranberry bog one foggy fall night, 32-year-old detective Meredith Folger is faced with her first murder case. Merry is the daughter of the local police chief and granddaughter of his predecessor; her father is a strict boss and Merry feels pressure to go the extra mile to prove her promotion to detective isn't just nepotism. But the Mason murder is a demanding first test.

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.

The third book in the recently revamped Nantucket mystery series. When two children make a grisly discovery on Sconset beach, Detective Meredith Folger finds herself with a perplexing case on her hands. The crime lab can tell her only that the newly unearthed skeletal remains belonged to a woman who was strangled to death somewhere between two and 10 years ago - a conclusion that sends Merry sifting through old missing-persons files. But then a shocking piece of news changes everything.

Aidan Poole logs on to his laptop late at night to Skype his girlfriend, Zoe. To his horror, he realizes that there is someone else in her flat. Aidan can only listen to the sounds of a violent struggle taking place in the bathroom - and then the sound of silence. He is desperate to find out if Zoe is okay. But then why is he so hesitant to call the police?

The old salt farmers have always said that the violet scent of the Fleur de Sel at harvest time on the salt marshes of the Guerande Peninsula has been known to cause hallucinations. Commissaire Dupin also starts to believe this when he's attacked out of the blue in the salt works. He had actually been looking forward to escaping his endless paperwork and taking a trip to the "white country" between the raging Atlantic Ocean and idyllic rivers.

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.

In this novel from best-selling author John Verdon, ingenious puzzle solver Dave Gurney puts under the magnifying glass a notorious serial murder case - one whose motives have been enshrined as law-enforcement dogma - and discovers that everyone has it wrong.

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.

Muriel Ethel Galloway passed away at home, twitching and grasping at objects only she could see. Her family mourns, sad but unsurprised that an old woman suffering from heart disease should die suddenly. But when Mrs. Galloway's son receives an anonymous call alerting him that his mother's life was put in jeopardy by her doctors, he demands action from the Calleshire police.

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.

Kate Ardleigh is everything the Victorian English gentlewoman is not - outspoken, free-thinking, American...and a writer of the frowned upon penny dreadfuls. Soon after her arrival in Essex, England, a body is unearthed in a nearby archeological dig - and Kate has the chance to not only research her latest story but to begin her first case with amateur detective Sir Charles Sheridan.

The charming village of Llanfair, the setting for Rhys Bowen's beloved Constable Evans mysteries, sits amid lush, rolling Welsh meadows populated with quaint cottages and is considered by many of its colorful locals to be a kind of paradise. Unfortunately, there aren't many opportunities for young people in Llanfair, so when an exciting and glamorous American woman breezes into town talking of dormant psychic powers and important social research, barmaid Betsy Edwards is quick to take her up on an offer of employment at the recently opened Sacred Grove New Age center not far away.

As a Category 3 hurricane bears down on Nantucket, Dionis Mather and her father have their work cut out for them. Their family business is to ferry goods and people back and forth from Tuckernuck, the private island off Nantucket’s western tip, a place so remote and exclusive that it is off the electric grid. As caretakers of the small plot of sand in the middle of the Atlantic, the Mathers are responsible for evacuating Tuckernuck’s residents, who range from an elderly native who refuses to leave her family home to the abandoned summer house pets of an absentee NFL quarterback.

Scotland Yard's eminent Detective John Coffin was a mere sergeant. Anticipating a promotion, he buys a house that needs repairs and proves a catalyst to dire events. Workmen find the body of an adolescent boy under the floor - and Coffin, though it's not his case, keeps up with an investigation that comes to center on his own neighbors. Attracted to Rose Hilaire, the sergeant learns that her son was a friend of the murder victim and of other missing boys.