Women Sleuths Detective

When a young woman is found murdered in a Painters Mill motel, Chief of Police Kate Burkholder is shocked to discover she once knew the victim. Rachael Schwartz was a charming but troubled Amish girl who left the fold years ago and fled Painters Mill. Why was she back in town? And who would kill her so brutally?

From internationally best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith comes the seventh novel in the phenomenally popular and endlessly charming series that began with The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Once again Botswana's only female detective, Mma Ramotswe, and her invaluable assistant, Mma Makutsi, puzzle out the mysteries of life while finding comfort in steaming mugs of bush tea.

Handsome Mark Callender did not die the way a young gentleman should. He was found hanged, a lipstick stain on his mouth and a nude girl's picture nearby. The official verdict was suicide, but his aristocratic father suspects murder. He hires Cordelia Gray, a fledgling detective, to investigate. And as she follows a trail of guilty secrets and shameful sins, she concludes that the nicest people do the nastiest things!

When the body of a young woman is found, tied to her bed and the victim of a brutal attack in her own home, Detective Morgan Brookes is sickened by what she finds as she searches the house, and unprepared for the nightmares it inspires about her childhood. When the DNA collected gives a positive ID, Morgan can’t wait to put the attacker behind bars. But the person it matches to is already in prison. How could the DNA of someone who has been locked up for over 20 years have shown up in Morgan’s crime scene? And then they make another close match - to Morgan herself.

Years ago, Beth Lathrop and her sister Kate suffered what they thought would be the worst tragedy of their lives the night both the famous painting Moonlight and their mother were taken. The detective assigned to the case, Conor Reid, swore to protect the sisters from then on. Beth moved on, throwing herself fully into the art world, running the family gallery, and raising a beautiful daughter with her husband Pete. Kate, instead, retreated into herself and took to the skies as a pilot, always on the run.

In this fifth installment in the critically acclaimed Irene Huss series, three men are found brutally executed in one of Goteborg's most fashionable neighborhoods. All three men were involved in an online poker company, but that's all they appear to have in common. The complex investigation immerses Detective Inspector Irene Huss and her colleagues into a world of expensive cars, fancy homes, and impressive castles in the air. Meanwhile, the normally peaceful atmosphere of the Huss family is disturbed by marital tension as Irene suspects her husband, Krister, of a having an affair with a younger woman.

Meet the Bright Young Things, the rabble-rousing hedonists of the 1920s whose treasure hunts were a media obsession. One such game takes place at the 18th birthday party of Pamela Mitford, but ends in tragedy as cruel, charismatic Adrian Curtis is pushed to his death from the church neighboring the Mitford home. The police quickly identify the killer as a maid, Dulcie. But Louisa Cannon, chaperone to the Mitford girls and a former criminal herself, believes Dulcie to be innocent and sets out to clear the girl's name...all while the real killer may only be steps away.

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.

DI Jane Phillips was a star detective driven by a relentless quest for justice. But then she stepped outside the law. Now, demoted and suffering with PTSD, she finds herself facing the deadliest threat of her career - a serial killer who is preying on vulnerable women, murdering them in a shocking and bizarre ritual. A master of deception, he selects his victims at random. Or so it seems. But as Phillips investigates, she begins to see a method in the killer's madness. Perhaps these victims aren't random at all....

After a scandal forces DI Kelly Porter out of the Met, she returns home to the Lake District. Crimes in the Cumbrian constabulary tend to be minor, but Kelly begins work on a cold case that shocked the local community - the abduction and brutal murder of a 10-year-old girl.

What's the best way to purge an unfaithful husband? Become a spy for British Intelligence, of course. Desperate to get out of London, and determined to help the war effort and stop thinking about her philandering husband, Fiona Figg volunteers to go undercover. At Ravenswick Abbey a charming South African war correspondent has tongues wagging. His friends say he's a crack huntsman. The War Office is convinced he's a traitor. Fiona thinks he's a pompous prig. What sort of name is Fredrick Fredricks anyway? Too bad Fiona doesn't own a Wolseley pith helmet.

When Detective Kim Stone rushes to the scene of a house fire, she’s shocked to discover it’s claimed the lives of two teenage children and their parents. But this tragedy is not quite as it seems. Each body is marked by a gunshot wound, and the mother, Helen Daynes, is holding the gun. The case sparks painful childhood memories for Kim, who suffered at the hands of her own abusive mother, but it just makes her more determined to uncover the truth. As Kim untangles Helen’s past, she finds a history of clinical depression. But did it drive Helen to murder her loved ones?

At the foot of a tree shattered by shelling and gunfire, stretcher bearers find an exhausted officer shivering with cold and a loss of blood from several wounds. The soldier is brought to battlefield nurse Bess Crawford's aid station, where she stabilizes him and treats his injuries before he is sent to a rear hospital. The odd thing is the officer isn't British - he's French. But in a moment of anger and stress, he shouts at Bess in German.

A timeless murder mystery with the fascinating, glamorous Mitford sisters at its heart, The Mitford Trial is the fourth installment in the Mitford Murders series from Jessica Fellowes, inspired by a real-life murder in a story full of intrigue, affairs and betrayal....

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.

Once again, Kinsey Millhone, America's favorite female P.I., embroils herself in a complex and entertaining Alphabet Murder Mystery. When Wendell Jaffe, mastermind of a real-estate scam, disappeared at sea, no body was found. Now, five years later, he's declared legally dead, and California Fidelity has to pay up on his life insurance policy to the tune of half-a-million dollars. Soon after, the tune slides off-key when Jaffe is spotted in Mexico and Fidelity hires Kinsey Millhone to sort things out.

From a small town outside Edinburgh comes the news that a young boy has been recounting vivid recollections of a past life: a perfect description of an island off the coast of Scotland that he couldn't possibly know and a house there where he claims to have spent his former life. When the boy's mother asks Isabel to investigate his claims, she feels she must - of course! - help them learn the truth, and she and her husband, Jamie, set off for the island.

December 1941. Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill arrives in Washington, D.C., along with special agent Maggie Hope. Posing as his typist, she is accompanying the prime minister as he meets with President Roosevelt to negotiate the United States’ entry into World War II. When one of the First Lady’s aides is mysteriously murdered, Maggie is quickly drawn into Mrs. Roosevelt’s inner circle—as ER herself is implicated in the crime.

In the early days of 1924, Mary Russell and her husband, the inimitable Sherlock Holmes, are given an urgent task by his brother, Mycroft: find a British spy gone missing along India's northwest frontier, where men are dying and trouble is brewing. The spy's name? It is one Holmes knows from his sojourn in India long ago, and one Russell knows from a book. It is Kimball O'Hara, known to the world by the name Rudyard Kipling called him - Kim....

When two young girls disappear from their primary school, the village of Heighington is put on high alert—and not for the first time. Called in to investigate, Detective Karen Hart is sure that parallels with a previous disappearance are anything but coincidental. DS Hart is still reeling from a case she tried and failed to solve eighteen months ago, when a young woman vanished without a trace. She’s no nearer to the truth of what happened to Amy Fisher, but with two children missing now, too, the stakes have never been higher.