Women Sleuths Detective

Seven years ago, Mia Briscoe was at a college frat rave with her best friend, Serena, when a fire broke out. Everyone was accounted for except Serena, who was never seen nor heard from again. Now an investigative journalist covering the political scene in New York City, Mia discovers old photos taken the night of Serena’s disappearance and begins to uncover a sinister string of events going all the way back to that disastrous party. Working with Sherlock, the secrets begin to unravel.

Arriving at High Wraith cottage, Detective Morgan Brookes joins her horrified team, who have found a woman’s body chained and dangling from the gnarled branch of an old oak tree. It’s a race against time to preserve any evidence as heavy rain destroys the scene, but they’ve already identified the victim as a woman who once tried to kill her own family. Twenty years ago, Margery Lancaster went to prison for poisoning her husband and infant son. They both survived, and Morgan must treat the pair as her first suspects.

Detective Josie Quinn is still recovering from the killing of a beloved member of her team when she and her husband Noah receive yet more devastating news. Close to her breaking point, Josie heads to a specialist trauma retreat, set in an isolated group of log cabins in the mountains of Pennsylvania. But fear is not far behind her. Josie’s five fellow patients all seem to be hiding secrets darker than just the problems that brought them there and a storm is gathering, with thick snow coming down fast, isolating the cabins from the world below.

Precious Ramotswe's comfortable existence as the only detective in Botswana is suddenly rattled when the Satisfaction Guaranteed Detective Agency opens, and its brochure proclaims, "Don't take any chances! Entrust your enquiries to a MAN!" As if the development isn't enough, Mma Ramotswe has also taken on two difficult cases, one of which hits close to home. But with wisdom on her side, Mma Ramotswe figures to crack both cases and upstage her competition.

Detective Megan Carpenter is no stranger to horrifying crime scenes, but when she arrives at the home of a woman whose body has been brutalized, Megan is shocked to discover that she knows the victim. Monique Delmont helped Megan when she was in danger years ago. And the killer has left a disturbing calling card...two laminated photographs of a 16-year-old high school girl - Megan.

When a gay Los Angeles magician named Parsifal dies suddenly, he leaves behind his heartbroken assistant, Sabine, and a secret past that leads her to Nebraska and a father she never knew he had.

When prison inmate and former police officer John Brace says he’s willing to give up information about the location of a dead body in return for protection for his family, Vera knows that she has to look into his claims. But opening up this cold case strikes much closer to home than Vera anticipates as her investigation takes her back in time to The Seagull, a once-decadent and now-derelict nightclub where her deceased father and his friends used to congregate.

This is a land of long memory and hidden corners, a land that had known Vlad the Impaler, a land from whose churchyards the shades creep. When Queen Marie calls, Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes are as dubious as they are reluctant. But a young girl is involved, and a beautiful queen. Surely it won't take long to shine light on this unlikely case of what would seem to be strigoi? Or, as they are known in the West...vampires.

The handpicked stories in this collection introduce us to the most determined of gumshoe gals, from debutant detectives like Anna Katharine Green's Violet Strange to spinster sleuths like Mary Roberts Rinehart's Hilda Adams, from groundbreaking female cops like Baroness Orczy's Lady Molly to contemporary crime-fighting PIs like Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, and include indelible tales from Agatha Christie, Carolyn Wells, Edgar Wallace, L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, Sara Paretsky, Nevada Barr, Laura Lippman, and many more.

Two bodies have been found in a park in the fashionable London neighborhood of Callander Square. While Inspector Thomas Pitt is fighting to get the square’s aristocratic residents to speak with him, his pretty, well-born wife, Charlotte, decides to do some detective work of her own. Soon she is unearthing secrets in every house on the square, while Thomas tries to discover what would drive a person to murder.

A routine weekend visit by the Gillibry Bird Observatory Trust is made memorable by the owner’s announcement that he is going to sell the island. A sale would mean the end of the Observatory, which for some of the birders made life worth living. A fire in Charlie Todd’s cottage added to their distress. And when, next morning, after a fierce storm, they found Charlie dead in a bird hide, their pleasant September weekend assumed a dangerous new face.

This latest installment of the beloved No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series finds Botswana's premier detective agency as busy as ever, with no shortage of sensitive situations requiring Mma Ramotswe's keen eye and discerning input. Through it all, Mma Ramotswe will demonstrate that there are solutions to all manner of difficulties, there to be discovered as long as one is led by kindness, grace, and logic, and can rely on the wise counsel of close friends and loved ones.

Spring 1937. In the four years since she left England, Maisie Dobbs has experienced love, contentment, stability - and the deepest tragedy a woman can endure. Now all she wants is the peace she believes she might find by returning to India. But her sojourn in the hills of Darjeeling is cut short when her stepmother summons her home to England; her aging father, Frankie Dobbs, is not getting any younger.

It is 1921 and Mary Russell—Sherlock Holmes's brilliant apprentice, now an Oxford graduate with a degree in theology—is on the verge of acquiring a sizable inheritance. Independent at last, with a passion for divinity and detective work, her most baffling mystery may now involve Holmes and the burgeoning of a deeper affection between herself and the retired detective.

In the life of Precious Ramotswe, a woman duly proud of her fine traditional build, there is rarely a dull moment, and in the latest installment in the universally beloved No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, there is much happening on Zebra Drive and Tlokweng Road. Mma Ramotswe is experiencing staffing difficulties. Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni asks to be put in charge of a case involving an errant husband. But can a man investigate such matters as successfully as the number-one lady detective can?

While on a much needed camping vacation with her boyfriend, Sheriff Eric Dalton, Casey hears a baby crying in the woods. The sound leads them to a tragic scene: a woman buried under the snow, murdered, a baby still alive in her arms. A town that doesn’t let anyone in under the age of 18, Rockton must take care of its youngest resident yet while solving another murder and finding out where the baby came from - and whether she's better off where she is.

Meg's neighbors, the Smetkamps', have won a makeover for their old home from Marvelous Mansions, a flashy, yet dubious company, focused on making historic homes more "modern." The company already several days into its makeover of the Smetkamps' house, and tensions are running high—not only between the officious, demanding Mrs. Smetkamp and her neighbors, but also between her and the renovation crew.

Recently transferred to the London borough of Camden from Scotland Yard headquarters, Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and his new murder investigation team are called to a deadly bombing at historic St. Pancras Station. By fortunate coincidence, Melody Talbot, Gemma's trusted colleague, witnesses the explosion. The victim was taking part in an organized protest, yet the other group members swear the young man only meant to set off a smoke bomb.

On her first day back with the Denton PD after a major trauma, Detective Josie Quinn is on the hunt for a missing woman, Krystal Duncan, the mother of one of five children killed in a devastating school bus crash. Hours later, Josie finds Krystal’s body beside her daughter’s grave, her lips sealed together forever with wax.

Inspector Witherspoon always triumphs...but how does he do it? Even the inspector himself doesn't know - because his secret weapon is as ladylike as she is clever. She's Mrs. Jeffries: the determined, delightful detective who is also Inspector Witherspoon's housekeeper.