Detective Mystery Thriller

In the six volumes of the Library of the World’s Best Mystery and Detective Stories, Julian Hawthorne presents us thrilling and mysterious short stories from all corners of the world. Some of the stories appeared in this 1907 collection for the first time translated into English, and many of them come from unexpected sources, such as the letters of Pliny the Younger, or a Tibetan manuscript. In the first volume, we find stories written by American authors.

Northern Ireland, spring 1981. Hunger strikes, riots, power cuts, a homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera, and a young woman’s suicide that may yet turn out to be murder: on the surface, the events are unconnected, but then things—and people—aren’t always what they seem. Detective Sergeant Duffy is the man tasked with trying to get to the bottom of it all. It’s no easy job—especially when it turns out that one of the victims was involved in the IRA but was last seen discussing business with someone from the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been "exiled" to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island, after department politics drove him off a homicide desk on the mainland. But while following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Detective Stilwell gets a report of a body found wrapped in plastic and weighed down at the bottom of the harbor. Crossing all lines of protocol and jurisdiction, he starts doggedly working the case.

On a damp October day, a body is found in an abandoned hospital, too burnt to be identified, but detective Alex King knows that every victim is someone’s daughter or son. Pushing aside her own troubles, Alex puts everything into finding the killer, but when someone else is found dead, she begins to suspect that the body in the hospital was just the first of many. Just as Alex uncovers a heart-breaking link between the victims, she finds her own safety under threat. Is this a figure from her past hell-bent on revenge, or could the murderer be even closer than she thinks?

Detective Madison Knight shows up at the local train station in the aftermath of a fatal shooting, and finds two women killed on scene. One was expecting her first child. The other was a wife and mother of two children and has Madison seeing a ghost from her past. She’s convinced the woman is her missing college friend, but why would she change her identity? And where has she been all this time?

Recently engaged and deeply ensconced in her third year of surgical residency in Chicago, Emily Hartford gets a shock when she is called home to Freeport, Michigan, the small town she fled a decade ago after the death of her mother. Her estranged father, the local medical examiner, has had a massive heart attack. At the hospital, she finds her father in near total denial of the seriousness of his condition. He insists that the best thing Emily can do to help him is to take on the autopsy of a senator's teen daughter whose sudden, unexplained death has just rocked the sleepy town.

The calm façade of Norfolk conceals a storm of deadly intentions. In this gripping trio of investigations, DI Tom Janssen finds himself drawn into the shadows cast by greed, obsession, and revenge. The brutal killing of a barrister in his own home, the mysterious deaths of a young mother and her disabled child to a murderer released from prison who still claims his innocence. Each case has sinister undertones, threatening to tear the community apart through threats, intimidation and suspicion. During his investigations, Tom Janssen is forced to confront the darker side of human nature.

It was called the Great Awakening, when magickal kind returned to our world. They live among us now, renting apartments, laboring in the workforce, and paying taxes. Ares is a vampire and doing very well for himself in the modern world. Between teaching at the local university and assisting a paranormal investigator, things couldn't be better. But when a woman dies mysteriously in her own home, the question isn't who killed her, but what.

When the body of wealthy businessman Charles Stott is found dead on Wimbledon Common, covered in bruises just feet away from his luxury home, Detective Dan Lockhart is called to investigate the shocking scene. Examining the sickeningly disfigured body before him, Lockhart knows he’s dealing with a brutal killer. Looking more closely, he notices something on the victim’s neck: a small, crudely drawn symbol in black ink. It seems the murderer has marked his victim, but why? Dan needs to get inside the perpetrator’s mind, so he contacts psychologist Dr. Lexi Green.

LAPD detective Marcy Kendrick and her partner, Angel Reyes, are called to investigate the brutal sex murder of an up-and-coming starlet. A calling card has been left at the crime scene. This was the work of a professional, Alejandro 'El Gato' Gómez, an infamous drug lord who has evaded LA police for over a decade. Gómez has a right-hand man, a mysterious assassin known as El Mariachi de los Muertos. The assassin, for reasons unknown, is on a murderous rampage across LA. The bodies are piling up. But why?

In a town full of liars, who can you trust? When Detective Finnegan Beck is demoted from his high-powered job in Dublin and relocated in disgrace to the small Irish town of Cross Beg, he predicts boredom will be his biggest threat. But then a beautiful local teenage girl is found strangled in the cold, dark woods a mile from town. The prime suspect is the seemingly gentle drifter who found Tanya’s body. Beck seems to be the only person who can’t escape the feeling that Tanya wasn’t killed at random.

Haunted private detective Charlie Parker returns in this “not to be missed” (Bookreporter) thriller by New York Times and internationally bestselling author John Connolly. Daniel Clay, a once-respected psychiatrist, has gone missing, following revelations about the harm done to children in...

Mma "Precious" Ramotswe sets up a detective agency in Botswana on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, making her the only female detective in the country. At first, cases are hard to come by. But eventually, troubled people come to Precious with a variety of concerns. Potentially philandering husbands, seemingly schizophrenic doctors, and a missing boy who may have been killed by witch doctors all compel Precious to roam about in her tiny van, searching for clues.

Detective James Corstorphine’s blood ran cold. His wife never left her clinic door unlocked. Inside, her receptionist sat bound and gagged, tears streaming down her face. “He’s taken Shamila.” But Shamila’s abduction is just the beginning. When human remains are discovered dressed as a scarecrow in a Highland farmer’s field, Corstorphine realizes the cases are connected. The victim worked at Carstairs State Hospital–the same institution where Shamila once treated the criminally insane.

It's a stormy December morning when seal-watchers find the body on the beach at Winterton-on-Sea. His clothes have been torn to shreds on the rocks. The bright-orange life jacket didn't save him in the end. Detective Sara Hirst races to the scene. The washed-up body turns out to be a deckhand who got swept overboard in a storm.

1941. Rupert and Adelaide Stride are raising their two daughters, Clare and Rosa, in the midst of war. When Rupert is called to fight, he dies on the beaches of Dunkirk, leaving his family to fend for themselves. 2023. Decades later, Clare and Rosa have retreated to the annex, trapped in the place where they were raised: Yew Tree House. When the rooms are put up for rent, Jack Harmon sees the perfect spot for a family holiday with his twins and detective Stella Darnell. But then the children discover a skeleton with a hole in its skull hidden in the brambles of a decommissioned WWII pill box.

Kinder verschwinden und der falsche Tote liegt in einem Grab – um die Wahrheit zu finden, ermittelt DI Logan McRae in den eigenen Reihen. DI Logan McRae, der aktuell bei der Internen Ermittlung von Police Scotland arbeitet, wird zu einem tödlichen Verkehrsunfall gerufen. Der Fahrer weist eine Stichwunde in der Brust auf, und es stellt sich heraus, dass es sich um den Ex-Kollegen DI Duncan Bell handelt, dessen verkohlte Leiche man vor zwei Jahren gefunden hatte. Warum hatte Bell damals seinen Selbstmord vorgetäuscht? Wer hat ihm nun ein Messer in die Brust gerammt?

When famed psychic Alicia Lysander is brutally attacked after leaving a seance at the home of an earl, Jason Redmond and Daniel Haze must retrace her movements to determine who might have had a motive to want Alicia dead. As they delve into the private life of the woman who had not only become a friend but had also helped Daniel to rescue his abducted daughter, they uncover buried secrets, bitter rivalries, and unexpected betrayals.

When a young girl is found dead in the woods, all the evidence seems to point to the teacher she has just accused of molesting her. After all, with his career, and marriage, under threat, he appears to have the most to lose. But for DI Geraldine Steel things aren't adding up, even though her colleagues disagree, she is certain they have accused the wrong man.

The Southside Restoration has been keeping Diana busy, but Jimmy knows it’s the phantoms in their past that are driving them apart. Jimmy agrees to act in a theatre production in an effort to draw closer, but a too-coincidental series of accidents won’t let his suspicions rest. Some more immediate phantom from their past is threatening more than their relationship–will Jimmy discover the threat in time?