Comedy Mystery Thrillers

The Aventine is full of fracturing families. Wives plot to leave their husbands, husbands plot to spend more time with their mistresses. Masters must endure slaves taking obscene liberties, while aggressive slaves are learning to ape dangerous masters. But no one wants to hire an investigator during the holiday. Albia is lumped with her own domestic stress: overexcited children and bilious guests, too many practical jokes and her magistrate husband Tiberius preoccupied with local strife.

For Colorado caterer Goldy Schulz, business isn’t just booming—it’s skyrocketing. Her friend Marla is constantly warning her, “Success can kill you.” But Goldy doesn’t take the warning literally until her next booking: a cocktail party for the Westside Mall’s Elite Shoppers Club. While setting up, Goldy is nearly run down by a truck with no intention of stopping. Then she finds an old friend in a pile of sale shoes—stabbed with one of Goldy’s new knives. Goldy must catch the real killer between whipping up Sweethearts’ Swedish Meatballs, Quiche Me Quick, and Diamond Lovers’ Hot Crab Dip.

Jan Nyman, the ace detective of the covert operations unit of the National Central Police, is sent to a sleepy seaside town to investigate a mysterious death. Nyman arrives in the town dominated by a bizarre holiday village - the ‘hottest beach in Finland’. The suspect: Olivia Koski, who has only recently returned to her old hometown. The mission: find out what happened, by any means necessary.

Raised from birth to be a force for justice, Damian Stockwell has spent his entire life honing his body, mind, and fists to combat the evils of the world. He travels the globe on a quest to confront those evils and punch them in the face. At his disposal are a vast fortune, an endless array of gadgets and an army of friends including Bertrand, his loyal and lethal valet.

Violet Parker has big troubles these days—the ticking kind. To duck the Grim Reaper, she needs to get her hands on eighty-plus rare, mystical clocks locked up tight by a thick-headed detective. The solution? Hijack the truckload of ticking time bombs out from under Johnny Law’s nose. But no caper ever goes according to plan. What starts out as a game of clocks and robbers twists and turns into a chaos of cops and clobbers. Will Violet beat the detective in time? Or will she spend Valentine’s Day behind bars?

Siem Sigerius is a beloved, brilliant professor of mathematics with a promising future in politics. His family - including a loving wife, two gorgeous, intelligent stepdaughters, and a successful future son-in-law - and carefully appointed home in the bucolic countryside complete the portrait of a comfortable, morally upright household.

Harry Flashman: the unrepentant bully of Tom Brown's schooldays, now with a Victoria Cross, has three main talents - horsemanship, facility with foreign languages, and fornication. A reluctant military hero, Flashman plays a key part in most of the defining military campaigns of the 19th century, despite trying his utmost to escape them all. If only Flashman had got on with his dinner and ignored the handkerchief dropped by a flirtatious hussy in a Calcutta hotel....

In the aftermath of a family tragedy, an aspiring author is torn between love for her childhood friend and the temptation of a mysterious outsider. Trying to escape the ghosts of her past, she is swept away to a house that breathes, bleeds...and remembers.

It’s Christmas Eve, and Violet Parker has one request on her list for Santa - to make it home to her kids. Unfortunately, “home” is also the lair of her life-long nemesis, her sister Susan, aka the devil’s concubine. Standing in Violet’s way is Old Man Winter, who slammed the Black Hills with a show-stopping blizzard. However, a little snow isn’t going to ground her sleigh, not with family counting on her to deliver Santa’s goods.

Molly is terrified that she may lose her farm because her idle husband has left her for a rich hobby winemaker and is demanding his half of the land. Meg enlists Mother's help to find Molly a divorce lawyer, which Mother is all the more willing to do because the unfaithful husband's new girlfriend is the bete noire of the wine pavilion. She is so universally disliked that Meg begins to worry about her safety. But it's the unfaithful husband whose murdered body she and Michael find that night.

'What? You mean the earl does it for money? That's way beyond the barbed wire!' This explosion of disgust from Blotto is provoked when Twinks informs him of the activities of the Earl of Woking. The gentleman in question is owner of Clusters, a stately home not far from Tawcester Towers, and he has been renting out parts of Clusters for private functions - and charging his guests! The discovery of this appalling lapse in aristocratic behaviour sets Blotto and Twinks off on their latest adventure.

After one too many terrifying encounters, Millie Masters sets up a hotline for women who feel unsafe walking home alone at night: Message M. But very quickly she realises that there’s much more to be done to help the women who call in. Because the men just do it again the next night, and the next, and the next… And when her own sister is assaulted on a night out, the temptation to take the law into her own hands becomes too much to resist. Because M can also stand for murder.

A chain of events that will change the lives of each and every character will leave some of them wiser, some of them deader, and some of them definitely looking for a new line of work. With a wicked wit, razor-sharp observations, rich characters, and a plot with more twists than the Inland Waterway, Dave Barry makes his debut a complete and utter triumph.

Alone in the midnight hours with nothing but dead leaves, stray cats, and legends of ghosts and ghoulies to accompany him. A sleeping village doesn’t mean a simple shift, though. Between the early risers of the farming community, a badger with a sweet tooth, and getting to know his new workmates, there’s no time for Nick to kick his feet up in the station. And of course there’s Claude Jeremiah Greengrass! Why did he have to retreat hastily down a ladder from a lady’s bedroom and what happened to his trousers and shirt?

In this masterful debut, Martin Clark proves to be the heir apparent of great Southern raconteurs and the envy of more seasoned novelists as he takes us on a frantic tour of the modern South. Hung over, beaten by the unforgiving sun, bitter at his estranged wife, and dreading the day's docket of petty criminal cases, Judge Evers Wheeling is in need of something on the morning he's accosted by Ruth Esther English.

In his latest bizarre concoction, Dorsey picks up - sort of - various plot strands from his earlier books, including Florida Roadkill, Hammerhead Ranch Motel, and Orange Crush. There's still the matter, you see, of the briefcase full of cash, and still unresolved are the stories of Serge Storms, the serial killer and history buff; Johnny Vegas, the startlingly handsome virgin; Jethro Maddox, the Hemingway look-alike; and Paul, the Passive-Aggressive Private Eye. Fans of Dorsey's magnificently off-kilter adventures will be thrilled to rejoin these characters....

Obsessed with the iconic '60s classic Easy Rider, encyclopedic Floridaphile, lovable serial killer, and movie buff extraordinaire Serge A. Storms devises his wildest plan yet: finish the journey begun by his freewheeling heroes, Captain America and Billy, tragically cut short by some shotgun-wielding rednecks.

Written in reaction to what Bentley perceived as the sterility and artificiality of the detective fiction of his day, Trent's Last Case features Philip Trent, an all-too-human detective who not only falls in love with the chief suspect but reaches a brilliant conclusion that is totally wrong. Trent's Last Case begins when millionaire American financier Sigsbee Manderson is murdered while on holiday in England. A London newspaper sends Trent to investigate, and he is soon matching wits with Scotland Yard's Inspector Murth.

Big-shot ad exec Dan Steele feels entitled to the best life has to offer - even if he has to live way beyond his means to acquire it. But there's hope on the horizon. Dan has just stolen what's sure to be an award-winning idea for a multimillion-dollar account. If he can keep the creditors at bay long enough, he'll get the keys to the executive restroom and all his problems will be solved.

As a shaky truce between suburban gangsters starts to unravel, schlubby civilian Scott Clark has other things on his mind: if he can't afford to buy out his ex-father-in-law, Scott's about to lose the only house he's ever called home. In the red-hot urban housing market, he doesn't have a chance - until he and his best friends take the desperate measure of staging a fake drive-by shooting on the property to push down the asking price. But then Scott's mobster-posturing stunt attracts the attention of the real criminals.