Women Sleuth Police

Melissa Craig is settling in nicely to a new teaching position in the quaint little village of Upper Bembury, getting to know her way around, drinking tea with the eccentric staff, even sewing the first seeds of romance. But when she arrives one morning to find police outside her classroom, Melissa is shocked to hear that her beautiful colleague Angelica has been found dead in her home. As everyone in Angelica’s life comes under suspicion, Melissa makes it her mission to go in search of the truth.

New York Times best-selling author Linda Castillo is known as a “master of the genre” (People) for her pulse-pounding mystery series set in Amish country. Now, together for the first time in print, A Simple Murder features six original short stories starring whip-smart chief of police, Kate Burkholder.

It was a crime so brutal, it changed the lives of even the most hardened homicide cops. The Haas family murders left a scar on the community nothing can erase, but everyone agrees that convicting the killer, Karl Dahl, is a start. Only Judge Carey Moore seems to be standing in the way. Her ruling that Dahl's prior criminal record is inadmissible raises a public outcry, and puts the judge in grave danger.

When Cassidy’s lifeless body is discovered dumped on a busy highway near a patch of forest, Beth is devastated. And as more girls go missing, she fears the murderer is escalating. A breakthrough finally comes when she finds a name written in blood next to one of the bodies. Beth knows she’s close to catching the killer and is determined to stop any more lives from being taken—even if it means serving her own form of justice. Will she be able to resist the urge to take a life herself? Or will she become the killer’s next victim?

An extraordinarily beautiful Amish woman, a dangerous femme fatale, is the central figure in Linda Castillo's Her Last Breath, a story that reveals a dark side of Painter's Mill and its seemingly perfect Amish world. A rainy night, an Amish father returning home with his three children, a speeding car hurtling toward them out of nowhere. What at first seems like a tragic, but routine car accident suddenly takes on a more sinister cast as evidence emerges that nothing about the crash is accidental.

In a small town shaken by tragedy, Kate Fox finds herself at the center of a deadly mystery that threatens those she loves. When attorney Garrett Haney is found electrocuted, it's quickly deemed an accident. But as Kate assists young Sheriff Zoe in the investigation, they uncover a tangled web of lies involving the Haney family and Garrett's powerful clients. As shocking secrets come to light, Kate discovers the person behind the murders is closer to home than she ever imagined.

On a crisp autumn day in Painters Mill, Chief of Police Kate Burkholder responds to a call only to discover an Amish man who has been violently killed with a crossbow, his body abandoned on a dirt road. Aden Karn was just twenty years old, well liked, and from an upstanding Amish family. Who would commit such a heinous crime against a young man whose life was just beginning? The more Kate gets to know his devastated family and the people—both English and Amish—who loved him, the more determined she becomes to solve the case.

Alex Morrow is not new to the police force - or to crime - but there is nothing familiar about the call she has just received. On a still night in a quiet suburb of Glasgow, Scotland, three armed men have slipped into a house, demanding a man who is not, and has never been, inside the front door. In the confusion that ensues, one family member is shot and another kidnapped, the assailants demanding an impossible ransom. Is this the amateur crime gone horribly wrong that it seems, or something much more unexpected?

Rumspringa is the time when Amish teens are allowed to experience life without the rules. It's an exciting time of personal discovery and growth before committing to the church. But when a young teen disappears without a trace, the carefree fun comes to an abrupt and sinister end, and fear spreads through the community like a contagion. A missing child is a nightmare to all parents, and never more so than in the Amish community, where family ties run deep. When the search for the presumed runaway turns up a dead body, the case quickly becomes a murder investigation.

At first glance, Jellicoe Close seems to be a perfect suburban street – well-kept houses with pristine lawns, neighbours chatting over garden fences, children playing together. But there are dark secrets behind the neat front doors, hidden dangers that include a ruthless criminal who will stop at nothing. It’s up to DS Maeve Kerrigan and DI Josh Derwent to uncover the truth. Posing as a couple, they move into the Close, blurring the lines between professional and personal as never before.

Christmas in Birmingham means the Frankfurt Christmas Market. Loved and hated by brummies in equal measure, it certainly makes life interesting for West Midlands Police. But when the body of a homeless man is found behind a market stall early one Sunday morning, it looks like Christmas might be cancelled for DI Zoe Finch and her team. And when they discover that the victim has a history that makes his death politically sensitive, things get even more complicated.

A bloated corpse turns up in the Thames, throat slashed, and the only clue is a hospital wristband reading "Dr. F. Klein". Frieda is taken to see the body and realizes with horror that it is Sandy, her ex-boyfriend. She's certain that the killer is Dean Reeve - the man who has never stopped haunting her. But the police think he has been dead for years, and Frieda is their number one suspect. With few options, Frieda goes on the run to save herself and try to uncover the truth.

Trauma victims are not new to medical examiner Faith McIntyre, but this one is different. The unconscious woman clinging to life after a hit and run is FBI agent Macy Crow. What the woman from Quantico was doing in a dark alley after midnight is just one mystery. The other is more unsettling: Macy is Faith’s mirror image—the twin sister she never knew she had.

When 12-year-old Holly Mitchell’s fragile little body is found on the steps of a mountainside church in the small town of Denton, a doll made from pine cones clasped tightly to her chest, Detective Josie Quinn rushes to attend the scene. She knows this little girl’s angelic face; her mother had offered Josie help when she’d needed it most. Searching the girl’s house, Josie is devastated to find that Holly’s mother is dead, too, and her little sister is missing.

Detective Londyn Steele is thrown into the deep end when she’s assigned to find an abducted socialite. Problem is, her family’s company, Steele Guardians, was supposed to protect the family matriarch at her 80th birthday party when she disappeared, and Londyn fears her investigation will expose problems in her family’s company and bring them down. Especially when County Detective Nate Ryder declares jurisdiction over the scene and Londyn must take a back seat in one of the most important cases she’s ever investigated.

Called in to consult after a young woman disappears, Tracy Crosswhite has the uneasy feeling that this is no ordinary missing-persons case. When the body turns up in an abandoned well, Tracy’s suspicions are confirmed. Estranged from her family, the victim had balked at an arranged marriage and had planned to attend graduate school. But someone cut her dreams short. Solving the mystery behind the murder isn’t Tracy’s only challenge. The detective is keeping a secret of her own: she’s pregnant.

When Hanlon is suspended from the force for assaulting a suspect, she escapes to the remote Scottish island of Jura, home to the mysterious Corryvreckan whirlpool. But wherever Hanlon goes, violence is sure to follow. As soon as she checks into The Mackinnon Arms, Hanlon senses something isn't quite right about the staff at her home for the week. Sure enough, within days of arriving, the body of a member of staff is found floating in the sea. While police believe she was claimed by the local whirlpool, Hanlon isn't so sure.

Back when Harry Bosch was just a rookie homicide detective, he had an inspiring mentor who taught him to take the work personally and light the fire of relentlessness for every case. Now that mentor, John Jack Thompson, is dead, and his widow gives Bosch a murder book, one that Thompson took with him when he left the LAPD twenty years before—the unsolved killing of a troubled young man.

A call from an ex-husband is never welcome. For Berkeley cop Jill Smith it wins a Nobel Prize for chutzpah. Her ex wants a favor. His "friend" and co-worker, Anne Spaulding, is missing. Anne's ransacked apartment - complete with blood-sprayed walls - gives Jill the chilling feeling that her ex may be up to his arrogant neck in murder. Now Jill's out with the street people of Berkeley and the crazies of People's Park to uncover the fate of a welfare worker. But her best suspect is her ex: the former "significant other" who still pushes her buttons.

Ingrid Skyberg is a brilliant FBI agent working out of the US Embassy in London. She took a job in England to put some distance between her and the past, but this new case is forcing painful memories to the surface. An American student at an elite London college is in police custody, suspected of murdering her roommate. Convinced something sinister is happening on campus, Ingrid enters a world of deadly mind games to hunt for the real killer, in defiance of both her new boss and the Metropolitan Police. To get to the truth, Ingrid must work out who—if anyone—she can really trust.