British Thrillers

It's June 1941, and the low point of the war. England throws wave after wave of RAF bombers across the Channel, but somehow the Luftwaffe is able to shoot them down at will. The skies, indeed, the war itself seem to belong to Hitler.

St Michael’s Church may be derelict but it’s not deserted. Someone still comes here to worship on nights when the moon is full. Arnold Landon should know. He’s seen the grisly evidence for himself. Blood among the roses. The butchered remains of a man, tangled in the undergrowth. The victim was a traveler. How did he come to be in the churchyard? Arnold has a theory that leads back centuries, all the way to the cult of the Raging Wolf. Everyone tells him it’s impossible, that the cultists are dead and buried. But the devil wears many faces.

July 1912. Lady Hardcastle and her tenacious lady’s maid, Florence Armstrong, are enjoying a convivial gathering at the home of their dear friends, the Farley-Strouds. The only fly in the idyllic ointment seems to be the lack of musical entertainment for the forthcoming summer party—until, that is, Lady Hardcastle’s brother Harry calls with news of a murder.

When Caz steps onboard the exclusive cruise liner RMS Atlantica, it’s the start of a vacation of a lifetime with her new love, Pete. On their first night they explore the ship, eat, dance, make friends, but when Caz wakes the next morning, Pete is missing. And when she walks out into the corridor, all the cabin doors are open. To her horror, she soon realizes that the ship is completely empty. No passengers, no crew, nobody but her. The Atlantica is steaming into the mid-Atlantic and Caz is the only person on board. But that’s just the beginning.

Annabel, Esther, Tanya, and Chloe are best friends—or were, as children. Despite drifting apart in adulthood, shared secrets have kept them bonded for better or worse, even as their childhood dreams haven’t quite turned out as they’d hoped. Then one day they receive a wholly unexpected—but not entirely unwelcome—invitation from another old friend. Poppy Greer has invited them all to her extravagant bachelorette party: a first-class plane ticket to three days of white sand, cocktails, and relaxation on a luxe private island in the Bahamas.

Gary Nelson has a routine for the commute to his rather dull job in the city. Each day, he watches as a woman on the train applies her make up in a ritual he now knows by heart. He's never dared to strike up a conversation...but maybe one day. Then one evening, on the late train to Gipsy Hill, the woman invites him to take the empty seat beside her. Fiddling with her mascara, she holds up her mirror and Gary reads the words 'HELP ME' scrawled in sticky black letters on the glass.

D-Day is approaching. They don’t know where or when, but the Germans know it’ll be soon, and for Felicity "Flick" Clariet, the stakes have never been higher. A senior agent in the ranks of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) responsible for sabotage, Flick has survived to become one of Britain’s most effective operatives in Northern France. She knows that the Germans’ ability to thwart the Allied attack depends upon their lines of communications, and in the days before the invasion, no target is of greater strategic importance than the largest telephone exchange in Europe.

Emilia Ward lives in suburban London with her husband, their young son, and a teenager from her first marriage. Emilia is an ordinary mom—and she’s also the bestselling author of the Miranda Moody detective novels. But when writing her tenth—and most difficult—book, life takes a disturbing turn: an incident mimicking the plot of one of her novels occurs in real life. Just an unsettling coincidence, right? Until it happens again. And again.

Fifty years ago, a group of teenagers spent a weekend on Holy Island, forging a bond that has lasted a lifetime. Now, they still return every five years to celebrate their friendship and remember the friend they lost to the rising waters of the causeway at the first reunion. Now, when one of them is found hanged, Vera is called in. Learning that the dead man had recently been fired after misconduct allegations, Vera knows she must discover what the friends are hiding and whether the events of many years before could have led to murder then, and now.

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.

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.

What Bernard Sampson, protagonist of Berlin Game, Mexico Set, and London Match, is about to know may hurt him. When word gets to London Central that a cache of millions of pounds has disappeared inside the Service, Samson is determined to learn the truth. But not even that discovery will help if the Department itself wants his blood....

When DI Vera Stanhope finds the body of a woman in the sauna room of her local gym, at first, she thinks it is a death from natural causes. But then Vera spots ligature marks around the victim’s throat and has another murder case on her hands. The victim is Jenny Lister, who was an experienced social worker, but her neighbours are quick to inform Vera about Jenny’s involvement in a notorious case. A young child tragically died and a member of Jenny’s team was subsequently fired and vilified by the media. Another body is found, and Vera finds herself in a race against time to stop the killer.

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.

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?

London, 1930. The five greatest women crime writers have banded together to form a secret society with a single goal: to show they are no longer willing to be treated as second class citizens by their male counterparts in the legendary Detection Club. Led by the formidable Dorothy L. Sayers, the group includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Baroness Emma Orczy. They call themselves the Queens of Crime. Their plan? Solve an actual murder, that of a young woman found strangled in a park in France.

When the body of a man is found dead in his remote, isolated home, DI Tom Janssen and his team struggle to understand what motive there could be to murder such an inoffensive, seemingly placid local character. The man lived alone and was well known in the community, but kept his distance from others, leading a haphazard way of life almost entirely off the grid. What secrets did he hide in his private life that might be worth killing for? As the team are about to understand, even the most nondescript of people can exist in a world darker than most of us will ever see....

Only days before Britain declares war on Germany, Harry Clifton, hoping to escape the consequences of long-buried family secrets, and forced to accept that his desire to marry Emma Barrington will never be fulfilled, has joined the Merchant Navy. But his ship is sunk in the Atlantic by a German Uboat, drowning almost the entire crew. An American cruise liner, the SS Kansas Star, rescues a handful of sailors, among them Harry and the third officer, an American named Tom Bradshaw.

On the day of Alec Salter’s fiftieth birthday party, his wife, Charlotte, vanishes. Most of the small English village of Glensted is at the party for hours before anyone realizes she is missing. While Alec brushes off her disappearance, their four children—especially fifteen-year-old Etty—grow increasingly anxious as the cold winter hours become days and she doesn’t return. Then Etty and her friend Morgan find the body of Morgan’s father—and the Salters’ neighbor— Duncan Ackerley, floating in the river.

One moonlit night, the bodies of two young people are discovered lying entwined on a blanket in the woods. The young man is clutching a red rose. It appears to be a lovers' suicide pact.... Until Detective Nikki Galena and DS Joseph Easter look more closely. Romeo and Juliet, as they decide to call them, were murdered somewhere else and brought to the woods. But why? Then another young couple are found dead, again beautifully posed as lovers.