British Literature

When 14-year-old Zoe Johnson doesn't come home on a Monday night in early December, the alarm bells in Kings Lake Central police station do not ring straight away - after all, she's from the Dockmills, one of the toughest estates in the town. But for Detective Sergeant DC Smith, due to retire in just three weeks' time, there are some strange echoes of the case that has haunted him for the past 13 years. Maybe it's simply his over-developed sense of irony, or maybe, in his final days as a police officer, Smith must look once more into the eyes of a serial killer.

Claire Barclay finds a home in England after 25 years of travelling. She has money, a tour guide business, and ambitions. She is shocked by the murder in her quiet village, but is not going to give up on the haven she has finally found. With the help of her sister, the barracuda barrister, her new dog, new friends, and the unexpected stimulus of a new man in her life, she deals with suspicion, confusion, and threats.

Two Bestselling Agatha Christie Novels in One Great Audiobook The Secret of Chimneys What is The Secret of Chimneys? A young drifter finds out when a favor for a friend pulls him into the heart of a deadly conspiracy in this captivating classic from Agatha Christie. Little did Anthony Cade...

Mark Randall lay dead in a field near Lowacre long before Smith had done what he had to do in Belfast. By the time he went back to work, the investigation was well underway. "It's not my case," he says more than once, and he really doesn't need it to be; he has enough to think about as it is. But going around the Norfolk countryside dotting the i's and crossing the t's, speaking to the local farmers and the Brothers of St. Francis from Abbeyfields, Smith begins to suspect that the investigation might be heading in entirely the wrong direction.

As the mists roll over the fens and enigmatic lights twinkle in the distance, only the locals know their way along the hidden paths through the mysterious watery terrain of one of England's most beautiful and sometimes dangerous places. Detective Matt Ballard may have retired but there's still plenty going on in the fens to keep him busy. Someone trashes an old lady's garden and daubs her isolated cottage with hateful graffiti. Emilia Swain seems to be totally harmless, so why is she being targeted?

The experience of motherhood is an experience in contradiction. It is commonplace and it is impossible to imagine. It is prosaic and it is mysterious. It is at once banal, bizarre, compelling, tedious, comic, and catastrophic. To become a mother is to become the chief actor in a drama of human...

DC Scott Cullen of Lothian and Borders CID has only been in the job three months. Young, eager to please and desperate to do good. So a missing persons should be an easy case to solve. Right? Fresh from a messy divorce, Caroline Adamson’s future is finally looking up. Her son seems happy and she’s dating again. Trouble is, Cullen can’t find Caroline or the man she met on Schoolbook, the latest social network taking Edinburgh by storm.

As the sun sets into the sea over the pretty Cornish town of St Ives, a young woman, Freya Kempston, hasn’t returned home after a day out in the mall at St Austell. Panicking, her husband begs Detective Lauren Pengelly and her team to find her. Has Freya run out on her stable, loving marriage, or has something more sinister taken place? Grainy security footage from the mall provides the first break in the case—capturing Freya talking intently with a well-known local mechanic on the day she disappeared. But when cornered, the mechanic denies even knowing her.

From the frenzy of the 2012 Olympics to the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, here Jonathan Coe chronicles the story of modern Britain by way of a cast of characters whose world is being upended. There are newlyweds who disagree about the country’s future and, possibly, their relationship; a political commentator who writes impassioned columns about austerity from his lavish town house while his radical teenage daughter undertakes a relentless quest for universal justice; and Benjamin Trotter, who embarks on an apparently doomed new career in middle age, and his father.

When the body of a young woman is found by the coast in Land’s End, Cornwall, Detective Lauren Pengelly and her deputy Matt Price are first on the scene. Sophie Bethany Yates was well-known around the docks – a pretty girl from up the coast, always dreaming of something more. As locals jostle the barricades for a better look, whispers go round that Sophie’s boyfriend Samuel was more than capable of murder.

In Agatha Christie’s classic, A Pocket Full of Rye, the bizarre death of a financial tycoon has Miss Marple investigating a very odd case of crime by rhyme. Rex Fortescue, king of a financial empire, was sipping tea in his “counting house” when he suffered an agonizing and sudden death. On...

Take a trip back to Jane Austen's world and the many places she lived as historian Lucy Worsley visits Austen's childhood home, her schools, her holiday accommodations, the houses - both grand and small - of the relations upon whom she was dependent, and the home she shared with her mother and sister towards the end of her life.

The Luke Sackville Crime Thriller series continues… Where secrets are worth more than lives Ex-DCI Luke Sackville is asked by a friend to locate a missing woman. It appears to be a routine case, but as he digs deeper he discovers that all is not as it seems. Meanwhile, his Ethics Team face a variety of cases ranging from harassment to online bullying to physical intimidation. As these seemingly unconnected investigations progress, a prestigious private school is revealed as a common thread.

The inimitable Agatha Christie intrigues, surprises, and delights with The Mysterious Mr. Quin—a riveting collection of short stories centered around the enigmatic Harley Quin, whose unpredictable comings and goings are usually a good indication that something is about to happen…and rarely...

Claire Barclay is enthusiastic about her British Mystery Book Tour business. She enjoys taking her guests, usually from America, to the settings of mystery novels where bodies are long dead. Her neighbor's plea for help to deal with a recently murdered well-known author unsettles her. She leaves the body to the police and takes her guests to Cornwall, including a British tourist who far is too interested in the dead author.

Private investigator Maisie Dobbs receives her first assignment from the British Secret Service in A Lesson in Secrets, the eighth book in Jacqueline Winspear’s award-winning mystery series. Sent to pose as a junior lecturer at a private college in Cambridge, she will monitor any activities...

The book is unique and unprecedented—uncovering the secret history, facts, insights and observations, eloquently and neatly composed, and beautifully presented as a narrative nonfiction. It opens the eyes of locals, visitors, guides on some of the most distinguished capital's thoroughfares and references some of the best and worst names of London streets. It acts as a guide to curious, romantic and poetically inclined wanderers of the streets of London.

From the Author of the Sunday Times Bestseller, Mrs. England! In 1612 Lancaster, England, the hunt for witches has reached a fever pitch… But in a time of suspicion and accusation, to be a woman may be the greatest risk of all. Fleetwood Shuttleworth, the mistress of Pendle Hill’s Gawthorpe...

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.

Sir Claud Amory's formula for a powerful new explosive has been stolen, presumably by a member of his large household. Sir Claud assembles his suspects in the library and locks the door, instructing them that the when the lights go out, the formula must be replaced on the table -- and no...