English Crime Thrillers

Against the romantic backdrop of Edwardian Egypt, the irresistible Amelia Peabody and her charmingly unconventional family prove themselves to be formidable foes of villainy. In The Ape Who Guards the Balance, Amelia must muster all of her considerable skills of detection to unravel a snarled web of stolen archeological treasures, murderous cults, and fallen women.

When Alex MacLure’s friend and colleague dies he is determined to carry on her research into ancient Egypt. He finds she has left him a coded message, and, as he tries to make sense of it all, he discovers she was murdered. And now the murderer needs to silence him. With only a few clues and a mysterious object, Alex follows a trail from London to Cairo. He must crack the code and expose a shocking and inconceivable truth before the secret is buried for ever.

When a body is discovered floating in a Thames river lock one dreary morning, Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and Sergeant Gemma James are summoned from Scotland Yard to Chiltern Hills. The dead man is Connor Swann, son-in-law of two of London's most renowned opera personalities. And prints on the corpse's neck suggest that Swann was strangled.

It was summer in the mountains when five small children vanished from their nursery school picnic. The heat was stifling that day, the tinkle of an ice-cream van in the air.... Three-and-a-half years later, in the dead of winter, the children are returned to their families...one by one. All except for Ivy - the granddaughter of Homicide Detective Kate Wakeland. The other four children say Ivy is dead.

The wealthy Agatha Dawson is dead and there are no apparent signs of foul play. Lord Peter Wimsey, however, senses that something is amiss and he refuses to let the case rest - even without any clues or leads. Suddenly, he is faced with another murder - Agatha's maid. Can super-sleuth Wimsey find the murderer and solve the case before he becomes the killer's next victim?

The disappearance of a Dundee-based dog breeder sets DS Vicky Dodds and her team on a desperate hunt through the city and the surrounding Tayside. But soon other crimes are committed, with clear signs of escalation, and as the perpetrators' message becomes clearer, Vicky begins to question where her own sympathies lie.

Hogmanay. New Year's Eve. A dead teenager, another missing. One hell of a case. Meet DS Vicky Dodds. Settling down for a nice Hogmanay with her daughter and her best friend, a phone call pulls DS Vicky Dodds into work and to a deadly new case. A teenage girl, her body cooling in a cold, dark supermarket car park. Found next to her friend’s car, but the driver’s missing too — has the killer taken her? Or is she the killer?

Arriving with her partner Noah for dinner at his family’s immaculate countryside home, Detective Josie Quinn is devastated to find Noah’s mother, Colette, lying lifeless in the back garden, her mouth clogged with soil. Searching the house for answers, Josie’s team don’t know what to make of the rosary beads buried in the dirt near the body or the hidden file labelled “Drew Pratt”, the small town of Denton’s most famous missing person.

Meet Simon Fenchurch, detective inspector working the Met’s East London beat. Honest and funny but damaged, he’s working a case that could give him answers to his deepest trauma....

While working one afternoon on the Northern Divide, a young tree-marker makes a grisly discovery: in a squatter's cabin near an old mill town, a family has been murdered. An army vet coming off a successful turn leading a task force that took down infamous biker criminals, Detective Frank Yakabuski arrives in Ragged Lake, a nearly abandoned village, to solve the family's murder. But no one is willing to talk. With a winter storm coming, Yakabuski sequesters the locals in a fishing lodge as he investigates the area with his two junior officers.

Retired from the force, Detective Superintendent Jeffrey Brandt goes native. He stabs a woman but holds back from killing her. Frustrated that no one takes any notice, he ups his game. Next time, he'll kill. Brandt fully knows how the police work. He'll use this knowledge to win a sick game; after all, he's chosen the rules. The crime scenes are spotless, Brandt's covered his tracks. There is no forensic evidence. Yet each killing has his unmistakable print. Faced with the challenge of discovering his identity is DCI Stella Johnson. She rises to Brandt's macabre challenge.

Bookstore owner Kerry Emerson finally seems to be back in control of her life. Her failure of a marriage firmly in her rearview mirror and her recent business expansion a success, she is in charge of her own future. One that is looking better than ever. The sight of the tall man, with the familiar salt and pepper goatee pushing open the door of her store, sets her hair on end. He doesn't exactly bring good memories.

Twenty-year-old Kendele Byers is savagely killed and buried in a shallow grave. She had a violent past, a bizarre, kinky line of work, and the suspect list grows longer every day. But when another woman is murdered, Detective Mitchell Lonnie realizes that there's something much more sinister afoot: a connection between the two murders. Both victims had received a clue hinting at their oncoming demise several minutes before they were attacked. There's a serial killer in Glenmore Park.

In a small Scottish university town, what links a spate of murders, a targeted bomb explosion and a lecturer's disappearance? Who is pulling the strings? Having returned to Castletown intending to win back his estranged wife, DCI Jim Carruthers finds himself entrenched in the investigation. DS Andrea Fetcher assists him in the hunt for the perpetrators. They need to work fast. But can they truly rely on Jim's old adversary?

Matthew Riker keeps to himself, doesn't cause trouble, and never talks about his past. But after a chance encounter with a woman and a small child on the run, Riker will have to make a choice: use his hard-won skills to protect two innocent victims, or stay in the safety of his quiet life. What follows is an adrenaline-soaked thrill ride that will take Riker on a cross-country chase, through the seedy underbelly of a New York criminal empire, and into the darkest places of the human heart.

Belfast, 1988. A man is found dead, killed with a bolt from a crossbow in front of his house. This is no hunting accident. But uncovering who is responsible for the murder will take Detective Sean Duffy down his most dangerous road yet, a road that leads to a lonely clearing on a high bog where three masked gunmen will force Duffy to dig his own grave. Hunted by forces unknown, threatened by Internal Affairs, and with his relationship on the rocks, Duffy will need all his wits to get out of this investigation in one piece.

Five figures gather 'round a shallow grave. They had all taken turns to dig. An adult-sized hole would have taken longer. An innocent life had been taken, but the pact had been made. Their secrets would be buried, bound in blood. Years later a headmistress is found brutally strangled, the first in a spate of gruesome murders that shock the Black Country.

When a young boy discovers the body of a woman beneath a thick sheet of ice in a South London park, Detective Erika Foster is called in to lead the murder investigation. The victim, a beautiful young socialite, appeared to have the perfect life. Yet when Erika begins to dig deeper, she starts to connect the dots between the murder and the killings of three prostitutes, all found strangled, hands bound, and dumped in water around London.

From its launch in 1920 until its demise in 1951, the magazine Black Mask published pulp crime fiction. The first hard-boiled detective stories appeared on its pages. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner and John D. MacDonald got their start in Black Mask. The urban crime stories that appeared in Black Mask helped to shape American culture. Modern computer games, films, and television are rooted in the fiction popularized by "the seminal and venerated mystery pulp magazine" ( Booklist).

Before leaving prison, having served 12 years, Harper Kane makes a promise - to find out what happened to an inmate’s missing teenage daughter. But first, she must secure a well-paid job and a place of her own to take back custody of her son. What she falls into is a frightening discovery of human trafficking. Forced to make an inconceivable decision, Harper will use everything she has learned inside to protect her family, even if that means resorting to murder.