Woman Detective Mysteries

When a family dog brings home a human bone, Chief of Police Kate Burkholder finds herself on a desperate search for answers. Where did the bone come from? Who does it belong to? And perhaps most importantly, are the bones a result of foul play? With Halloween approaching, the unsettling questions garner uneasiness, rumors, and macabre theories among the residents of Painters Mill.

Normally dead bodies in a graveyard are buried - but not this one. When a woman is found strangled in a North London cemetery with an old newspaper clipping clutched in her hand, Inspector Witherspoon is surprised to find that he and the victim have crossed paths before. Alice Robinson was a respectable widow who ran a quiet Islington lodging house. None of her lodgers have any apparent motive to murder their landlady.

One hot summer evening, 11-year-old Mikey Driscoll is on the way home from playing with friends. Two days later, his body is discovered on a bed of wildflowers by some local teenagers. The case is assigned to Detective Lottie Parker, and this time it’s personal. The victim was a close friend of her son, Sean, from the run-down Munbally estate on the other side of town. Sean tells his mother Mikey was behaving normally before he died, but Lottie can’t help but feel that her son is keeping something from her.

As a kid, Charlotte Illes’ uncanny sleuthing abilities made her a minor celebrity. But in high school, she hung up her detective’s hat and stashed away the signature blue landline in her “office”—aka garage—convinced that finding her adult purpose would be as easy as tracking down missing pudding cups or locating stolen diamonds.

It's with a heavy heart that Jane Austen takes up a new residence at Chawton Cottage in Hampshire. Secretly mourning the lost love of her life, she's stunned to learn that the late Lord Harold Trowbridge has made her heir to an extraordinary bequest: a Bengal chest filled with his diaries, letters, and most intimate correspondence. From these, Jane is expected to write a memoir of the Gentleman Rogue for posterity. But before she can put pen to paper on this labor of love, she discovers a corpse in the cellar of her new home.

When a young red-haired woman is found brutally murdered in downtown Chicago, one detail stands out: the red lipstick encircling her wrists and ankles. Detective Harriet Foster is on the case, even though she’s still grieving the sudden death of her partner. As a Black woman in a male-dominated department, Foster anticipates a rocky road ahead acclimating to a new team—and building trust with her new partner isn’t coming easily. After another victim turns up with the same lipstick markings, Foster suspects she’s looking for a serial killer.

When a 68-year-old woman is found dead outside the hospital in a wheelchair with an anti-abortion sign strapped to its back, Detective Madison Knight expects it to be an open-and-shut case. On the surface, there are no signs of foul play, but the deeper she digs, the suspicious death turns into a homicide. Just as the victim is identified as Faye Duncan, two more bodies turn up - Faye’s niece and a homeless man.

Rumor has linked Queen Elizabeth I to her master of the horse, Robin Dudley. As gossip would have it, only his ailing wife, Amy, prevents marriage between Dudley and the Queen. To quell the idle tongues at court, the Queen dispatches Ursula Blanchard to tend to the sick woman's needs. But not even Ursula can prevent the "accident" that takes Amy's life. Did she fall or was she pushed? Was Ursula a pawn of Dudley and the Queen?

World War II rages on across Europe, but Maggie Hope has finally found a moment of rest on the pastoral coast of western Scotland. Home from an undercover mission in Berlin, she settles down to teach at her old spy training camp, and to heal from scars on both her body and heart. Yet instead of enjoying the quieter pace of life, Maggie is quickly drawn into another web of danger and intrigue.

When the body of a teenage girl is found in Rydal Falls’ churchyard, Detective Morgan Brookes abandons her own birthday to attend the scene. In the dim evening light, Morgan can just make out the girl wrapped in a pristine white sheet and is certain she’s been left here for them to find. The autopsy identifies the girl as 16-year-old Shea Wilkinson, and Morgan’s heart cracks with sorrow. The beautiful teenager has been missing for weeks; could she have been suffering all this time?

India, 1922: Bombay’s only female solicitor Perveen Mistry is attending a lavish fundraiser for a new women’s hospital specializing in maternal health issues when she witnesses an accident. The grandson of an influential Gujarati businessman catches fire—but a servant, his young ayah, Sunanda, rushes to save him, selflessly putting herself in harm’s way. Later, Perveen learns that Sunanda, who’s still ailing from her burns, has been arrested on trumped-up charges made by a man who doesn’t seem to exist.

When former police detective Ted Conkaffey was wrongly accused of abducting Claire Bingley, he hoped the Queensland rainforest town of Crimson Lake would be a good place to disappear. But nowhere is safe from Claire's devastated father. Dale Bingley has a brutal revenge plan all worked out—and if Ted doesn't help find the real abductor, he'll be its first casualty.

Jenna has been working undercover for four years, and now she’s ready to take down the most dangerous man she’s ever met: her husband, Michael. But first, she must survive the most high-stakes night of her career at home. Michael is planning something deadly behind closed doors, and Jenna must find a place to hide, where she can listen to every word. Then, she must run for her life. But as night falls and guests arrive, Jenna sees a distressed young girl being dragged into the house, and she knows she can’t leave an innocent soul behind.

In the eighth installment of Alexander McCall Smith’s best-selling Isabel Dalhousie series, the inquisitive heroine helps a new friend discover the identity of her father. Jane, a visiting Australian philosopher on sabbatical in Edinburgh, has more questions than answers. Adopted at the age of six, she knows little about her father, other than he was a student in Edinburgh years ago. Always up for a challenge, Isabel is more than happy to help.

Separated from friends and family and haunted by personal demons, park ranger Anna Pigeon finds solace in the quiet ruins of the Anasazi civilization of Colorado's Mesa Verde. But the rugged beauty of the park and the mystery of the Anasazi are cruelly overshadowed by danger and death. Lately, visitors to Mesa Verde have been bringing home more than photos - they're also carrying a strange, deadly disease, and once it strikes, Anna Pigeon must find the very human source of the evil wind.

Nestled in the hills of the Cotswolds, the village of Duntisbourne Abbots is a well-kept secret. When Joel Jennison is found slaughtered in the same field where his brother’s corpse had lain ten weeks previously, a whole community falls under suspicion. Was it a family feud? An act of revenge?

ver a decade ago, beloved Amish bishop Ananias Stoltzfus disappeared without a trace. When skeletal remains showing evidence of foul play are unearthed, his disappearance becomes even more sinister. The town’s elders arrive in Painters Mill to ask chief of police Kate Burkholder for help, but she quickly realizes she has a personal connection to the crime. The handsome Amish man who stands accused of the murder, Jonas Bowman, was Kate’s first love.

Hannah Cameron was not well-liked, but who stabbed her in the back? To almost everyone, the answer was clear: she was killed by a burglar. This case is given to Inspector Nivens, so Mrs. Jeffries and the rest of the household must tiptoe around this case to find the real killer.

From idyllic small towns to claustrophobic urban landscapes, Mallory Viridian is constantly embroiled in murder cases that only she has the insight to solve. But outside of a classic mystery novel, being surrounded by death doesn’t make you a charming amateur detective, it makes you a suspect and a social pariah. So when Mallory gets the opportunity to take refuge on a sentient space station, she thinks she has the solution. Surely the murders will stop if her only company is alien beings. At first her new existence is peacefully quiet…and markedly devoid of homicide.

When a true-crime podcast turns into a true crime, Abby and her fellow FBI investigators are shocked when a young woman is murdered during a live broadcast. With no clue as to the victim’s identity or location, the team must rely on Abby’s intuition to hone in on the victim. When they discover the girl’s remains at the University of Texas, the team can barely catch their breath before another female student falls victim to the same killer.