Women Crime

Detective Angie Pallorino hasn't forgotten the violent rapist who left a distinctive calling card—crosses etched into the flesh of his victim's foreheads. When a comatose Jane Doe is found in a local cemetery, sexually assaulted, mutilated, and nearly drowned, Angie is struck by the eerie similarities to her earlier unsolved rapes. Could he be back?

When lawyer Jenny Cooper is appointed Severn Vale District Coroner, she’s hoping for a quiet life and space to recover from a traumatic divorce. But the office she inherits from the recently deceased Harry Marshall contains neglected files hiding dark secrets and a trail of buried evidence. Could the tragic death in custody of a young boy be linked to the apparent suicide of a teenage prostitute and the fate of Marshall himself? Jenny’s curiosity is aroused. Why was Marshall behaving so strangely before he died?

Life seems perfect in Valley Farm, a quiet community in Northumberland. Then a shocking discovery shatters the silence. The owners of a big country house have employed a house-sitter, a young ecologist named Patrick, to look after the place while they’re away. But Patrick is found dead by the side of the lane into the valley - a beautiful, lonely place to die.

When a call comes in about a young girl found dead at a high school prom—her life drained away from a fatal stab wound—Detective Josie Quinn drops everything to attend the scene. Taking in the girl’s neatly braided hair, Josie feels a flicker of recognition. But no one comes forward to identify this innocent child, murdered on what should have been the happiest night of her life. Trawling missing-persons files, Josie realizes where she has seen the girl before. Gemma Farmer disappeared a few months ago. But why would her body appear now, on her 16th birthday?

There are 206 bones in the human body. Forensic anthropologists know them intimately, can read in them stories of brief or long lives and use them to reconstruct every kind of violent end. 206 Bones opens with Tempe regaining consciousness and discovering that she is in some kind of very small, very dark, very cold enclosed space. She is bound, hands to feet. Who wants Tempe dead, or at least out of the way, and why? Tempe begins slowly to reconstruct...

In the small village of Kilbane, County Cork, Ireland, Natalie's Bistro has always been warm and welcoming. Nowadays twenty-two-year-old Siobhan O'Sullivan runs the family bistro named for her mother, along with her five siblings, after the death of their parents in a car crash almost a year ago. It's been a rough year for the O'Sullivans, but it's about to get rougher.

His victims are young, beautiful, and coldly mutilated. He calls himself the Beijing Ripper. Li Yan, head of Beijing's serious crime squad, must stop him. Just as pathologist Margaret Campbell finds an insight into the killer's cruel signature, Li receives a letter from the killer, betraying his cruel intentions. There's no way Li can misinterpret the Ripper's motives: He wants to tear Li and Campbell's lives apart, and write the darkest chapter in Beijing's history.

The messages waiting for Henry Pierce when he plugs in his new phone clearly aren't intended for him. They indicate something has gone terribly wrong for a woman named Lilly. Pierce probes, investigates, and then tumbles through a hole, leaving behind a life driven by work to track down and help a woman he's never met. Connelly's latest is "a grabber from the beginning...utterly compelling."

After Del Walker fled her small hometown and its cult-like church, she vowed to never return. The man she loved, Lars, left her to marry the local golden girl Eve, and their romance is now the focus of Eve’s viral blog espousing the pastor’s conservative philosophy about women and marriage. But six years later, Lars is suddenly killed, and she’s convinced it couldn’t have been an accident.

After two pregnant women in Dingle who have never met each receive a chilling email warning them that they’re in grave danger, the two decide to meet each other to figure out what is going on. But when one of the mothers, Shauna, a deaf woman, arrives at their meeting place at the village Spring Festival, she fears a trap and hurries off to meet the couple who plan to adopt her baby.

There's nothing Ruth Galloway hates more than amateur archaeologists, but when a group of them stumble upon Bronze Age artifacts alongside a dead body, she finds herself thrust into their midst - and into the crosshairs of a string of murders circling ever closer.

An army vet and former bodyguard for the rich and famous, Jessie Mercado has faced all kinds of danger and always emerged victorious. But one thing this motorcycle-riding private investigator has never encountered before is an incarceration consultant. Preparing wealthy people to go to prison is big business. When Owen Blake of Mamertine Consulting hires Mercado to find his missing partner, her suspect list is filled with recently released white-collar criminals, a few drug kingpins, and a couple of murderers to keep things interesting.

Everything has changed for Ruth Galloway. She has a new job, home, and partner, and she is no longer North Norfolk police’s resident forensic archaeologist. That is, until convicted murderer Ivor March offers to make DCI Nelson a deal. Nelson was always sure that March killed more women than he was charged with. Now March confirms this and offers to show Nelson where the other bodies are buried - but only if Ruth will do the digging. Curious, but wary, Ruth agrees.

For three years Investigator Cassie Dewell has been on a hunt for a serial killer known as the Lizard King whose hunting grounds are the highways and truck stops where runaways and prostitutes are most likely to vanish. Cassie almost caught him...once. Working for the Bakken County, North Dakota, sheriff's department, Cassie has set what she believes is the perfect trap, and she has lured him and his truck to a depot. But the plan goes horribly wrong, and the blame falls on Cassie.

It started with the murder of Kinsey Millhone's sometime drinking buddy, an insurance claims adjuster. But before long Kinsey stumbles onto a massive insurance scam. Going undercover as a wisecracking vamp, Millhone descends into the Los Angeles nether world of machismo and gang hideouts. Her companion, terrified at having crossed the violent crook Raymond Maldonado, is Bibianna Diaz, no Girl Scout herself.

England, 1936. On a clear autumn day, Kitty and her mischievous spaniel Bertie take a drive to a nearby village. After a long walk in the rolling country hills and lunch in a pretty tearoom, what could be nicer than to buy a couple of bottles of local cider for her husband—and partner-in-crime solving—Matt? Instead, she finds a body in the orchard… Kitty is shocked to discover Titus Blake dead, crushed by his own cider press.

This December in Kilbane, if you’re planning to warm up with a cuppa tea at Naomi’s Bistro, you may have a bit of a wait - the entire O’Sullivan brood has gone off to West Cork to spend the holidays with brother James’s fiancée Elise’s family, including her grandfather, the famous orchestral conductor Enda Elliot. Siobhán is so happy for James and Elise, but she’s also quietly disappointed that she must put her own wedding to fellow garda Macdara Flannery on hold. Then a cantankerous conductor is discovered crushed under a 90-pound harp in a local concert hall.

Cat Kinsella overcame a troubled childhood to become a detective constable. When she’s called to the scene of a murder, not far from the pub her estranged father still runs, she discovers that Alice Lapaine is dead. Cat and her team suspect Alice’s husband, until she receives a phone call that links the victim to Maryanne Doyle, a teenage girl who went missing in Ireland 18 years earlier. The call raises uneasy memories for Cat. Though she was only a child, Cat knew that her father wasn’t telling the truth when he denied knowing anything about Maryanne or her disappearance.

I Let You Go follows Jenna Gray as she moves to a ramshackle cottage on the remote Welsh coast, trying to escape the memory of the car accident that plays again and again in her mind and desperate to heal from the loss of her child and the rest of her painful past. At the same time, the novel tracks the pair of Bristol police investigators trying to get to the bottom of this hit-and-run.

Working alone as a private investigator is tough. Estranged from her PI family, Margo Angelhart does what she must to get by—including taking on sordid cases that pay the bills, even if she’d rather be helping those the justice system has failed. That is, until a cheating husband case she’s working intersects with her siblings’ corporate espionage investigation, forcing Margo to cooperate with the Angelhart firm. Now, as the siblings compare notes, it’s clear they need to work together before a white-collar crime escalates to murder.