British Fiction

What's playing at the Calliope Club may draw a furtive crowd, but as far as the CID's Andrew Dalziel can tell it's all perfectly legal. His partner, Peter Pascoe, begs to differ. From what he hears, an actress's violent ordeal on film looked all too real. When she turns up unharmed, it appears his suspicions were wrong . . . if Andrew and Peter can trust what they see. Because if this dirty business is well and good, why has the film in question vanished? Why has the theater been set ablaze? And why has its proprietor been beaten to death?

Elise, an artist grieving the loss of her son and a fracturing marriage, is in North Norfolk to restore Marsh House to its former glory, its walls adorned with the fading murals and paintings of its long-ago owner, Lilias Carter-Brown. Elise makes an immediate connection to the house, to Sam—a carpenter and a comfort—and to history itself when an old photograph draws Elise into Lilias’s heartbreaking past. In 1939, with war threatening, Lilias and her sister turn Marsh House into a sanctuary for London evacuees—a young boy and his mother.

They were best friends. Now they are murderer and witness. Pearl Day has always lived in the background - companion to her childhood friend, the dazzling and unpredictable Lady Eleanor Nicholson. Their bond was forged at Alderleigh, Eleanor's crumbling country estate, but now they share a sleek...

After the untimely death of her bestselling crime novelist mother, a young woman teams up with the fictional “ghost” of the heroine from her mother’s series in order to solve her mother’s murder. After the tragic death of bestselling crime writer Annie Morrisey, her daughter, Niamh...

Seventy-five-year-old Sylvia Perkins was found battered to death in her home in 2010. The murder weapon was suspected to be a fire poker and it seems she was quite popular with older gentlemen. Her grandson Robbie inherited everything, but he can't be placed at the scene of the crime. Who killed this harmless old woman and why? And what secrets was she hiding?

Saxford St Peter is Eve Mallow’s beloved home, but she can’t resist the chance to spend a weekend in the nearby Abbey Hotel, famed for its glamorous owner, Debra Moran, and an array of celebrity guests. For a confirmed people-watcher like Eve, it’s perfect: She can observe the rich and famous while sipping tea in the gardens, her faithful dachshund, Gus, by her side. But her relaxing break takes a shocking turn when Debra is found lying dead in the shadowy woods around the hotel.

Struggling with his new role as a detective chief inspector, John Tanner is warned of a convicted psychopath’s early release. When a couple is found later that day; the man stabbed to death, the woman with her throat cut, he's forced to assume the convict is responsible. But when the male victim turns out to be heir to a global pharmaceutical company, and his twelve-year-old son is nowhere to be found, he has to start looking closer at the victim’s family, and their sprawling stately ancestral home.

The mysterious connection between a teacher’s disappearance and an unsolved code in a children’s book is explored in this new novel from the “modern Agatha Christie” (The Sunday Times, London) and author of The Appeal. Forty years ago, Steven “Smithy” Smith found a copy of a famous...

Tuesday Reynolds’s dreamy life in Manhattan has gone belly-up. Ditched by her college sweetheart and with her Wall Street banking job at risk, she’s off to London to prove herself to a new CEO. Plans change when Tuesday meets Ben Kelley, a wealthy, scowly, and movie-star-handsome stranger. He’s just missing one thing to make his professional dreams come true. What does Ben need? Oh, just a fake fiancée to impress a duke and duchess.

Stanley Featherstonehough Ukridge is positively convinced that his complete ignorance of chicken farming gives him a particular advantage in the subject. A bombastic blowhard, he persuades his wife and his mild-mannered chum to start a chicken farm with him. What could go wrong?

DCI Kett is back, heading Norfolk Constabulary’s brand-new Extreme Crime Task Force. And it’s just in time. The body of a woman bound in thorns has been discovered in Norwich’s historic Cow Tower. In her mouth is a severed finger wrapped in a scrap of red cloth, and the first few lines of a fairy tale. “Once upon a time, a young maiden waited to be saved from a hideous monster.” The finger belongs to another missing woman, and if Kett, Porter and Savage want to find her alive they must follow a chain of blood-drenched riddles, each victim leading to the next.

The most fearsome enemy he ever faced. Of all the enemies that our hero has shrunk away from, there was one he feared above them all. By his own admission they gave him nightmares into his dotage. It was not the French, the Spanish, the Americans, or the Mexicans. It was not even the more exotic adversaries such as the Iroquois, Mahratta, or Zulus. While they could all make his guts churn anxiously, the foe that really put him off his lunch were the Ashanti.

For years, the Duchess of Fournier has buried a shameful secret connected to her remarkable, if bizarre, ability. While Audrey's gift has helped her solve cases alongside the captivating Bow Street officer Hugh Marsden, she longs to forget her previous committal to an insane asylum. But now, a blackmailer with a taste for violence is threatening former patients of Shadewell Sanatorium, and it appears the ghosts of Audrey's past have finally found her.

Gemma loves the quiet life of her bookshop, the Bookworm—a haven for book lovers in a quaint town in the heart of Derbyshire. But everything changes when Gemma discovers the body of local author Dominic Westley during the shop’s latest book signing event. When the police rule the death as an accidental overdose, Dominic’s estranged widow points the finger at one of his past lovers. Gemma and her trusty assistant, Mavis, won’t rest until they uncover the truth. Was it an accidental overdose or something more sinister?

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.

In 1920, at their country home in County Cork, Sir Richard Naylor and his wife, Lady Myra, and their friends maintain a skeptical attitude toward the events going on around them, but behind the facade of tennis parties and army camp dances, all know that the end is approaching-the end of British rule in the south of Ireland, and the demise of a way of life that had survived for centuries. Their niece, Lois Farquar, attempts to live her own life and gain her own freedoms from the very class that her elders are vainly defending.

“Louise Hegarty’s genre-splicing debut is a treat—clever, confident, and always surprising, a mystery story that ingeniously escapes the locked room of the genre to take on the biggest questions of life and death.”—Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting For fans of Anthony Horowitz and...

The Edgar-nominated, #1 internationally bestselling author of The Daughter and The Playground weaves a breathtaking tale of betrayal, family, and secrets from the past in this crackling novel of psychological suspense. Two women. Two secrets. One terrible night. PAXOS, GREECE The vacation...

When homeless man Bobby Stover insists his friend’s suicide was really murder, DI Sheridan Holler is sceptical—until she uncovers a series of deaths, all of them in Liverpool, all ruled as suicides, that suddenly look like anything but. The killings span years, each one chillingly staged, the truth buried beneath an illusion of despair. This murderer is following a mysterious pattern—and there seems to be no end in sight.

Campbell Flynn, art historian, professor, and fêted fixture of the literati, always knew that when his life came crashing down, it would happen in public—yet he never imagined that a single year in London would expose so much. He’s never taken other people half as seriously as they take themselves, which is the first of his mistakes. The second is a new project: opportunistic and precisely calibrated to rake in a fortune.