English Detective Mysteries

Jack Stratton's back is up against the wall. He's broke, kicked off the force, and his new bounty hunting business has slowed to a trickle. With no money coming in, Jack's license to carry suspended, and no good job prospects on the horizon, Jack's got it tough. He thinks things are turning around when Alice (aka Replacement) gets a lucrative job setting up a home data network. That is, until he discovers it's for a handsome, jet-setting software tycoon.

When a mint copy of the final album by Valerian - England's great lost rock band of the 1960s - surfaces, all hell breaks loose. Finding this record triggers a chain of events culminating in our hero learning the true fate of the singer of Valerian, who died under equivocal circumstances just after...or was it just before the abduction of her two-year-old son? Along the way the Vinyl Detective finds out what happened to the missing child, and it wasn't what anyone expected - or wanted - to hear.

The fascinating and remarkable true story of the world’s first forensic ornithologist— Roxie Laybourne, who broke down barriers for women, solved murders, and investigated deadly airplane crashes with nothing more than a microscope and a few fragments of feathers.

Lambert Ramkin aka Imperium Dart, techno trickster and ambient music wizard of the 1990s, has gone walkabout, disappearing from his rather palatial home in Kent. This isn't the first time he's pulled a vanishing act, but he's never been gone so long before and his wife — wives, actually; it's complicated — are worried and hire the Vinyl Detective to find the old rascal. They theorize that wherever the missing man is, he won't be able to resist turning up at a record fair somewhere in search of 12-inch white label acid house singles, which he collects compulsively.

When the body of an old man is found lying in the ruins of St Benet’s Abbey, his throat cut, a knife resting in his open hand, DI John Tanner and DC Jenny Evans are given no choice but to accept a ruling of death by misadventure. But when the body goes missing from its tomb, after a priest is found nailed to a cross, and another impaled on a stake, everything begins to point back to the murder of a teenage girl, thrown from the top of a church tower, some 43 years before.

On a chilly Oregon morning, a policeman is found slain near the homeless camp where he'd been passing out blankets the night before. When Detective Jackson is called to the scene, witnesses point to a pair of mentally ill street twins as the likely perpetrators.

Eighty-one-year-old Eddie Wakefield is found brutally murdered at the nursing home where he lives. Crudely carved into his flesh—while he was still alive—is the number fifteen. Detective Jack MacIntosh and his team are determined to track down the ruthless killer of this frail elderly man. But the investigation is leading nowhere. Then the second body is discovered. The victim was stabbed to death in their own home. Again, the number fifteen is etched into the dead man's flesh.

DI Charlie West is investigating a series of robberies when three fingers are found in a refuse site. The investigation leads the team to a local restaurant, the university campus and the municipal dump. But when a man walks into a jeweller’s shop and calmly bashes in the head of the owner, they have a murder case on their hands. Despite the discovery of a man in some discomfort due to missing the fingers on his hand, the investigation draws blanks.

When one of his cats accidentally discovers a rare Victory Disc, the Vinyl Detective and his girlfriend, Nevada, are whisked into the world of big band swing music and a mystery that began during the Second World War. Hired to track down the rest of the highly sought-after recordings of the Flare Path Orchestra, our hero will discover that the battles of the last world war aren’t over yet. And if all this sounds simple, it’s only because we haven’t mentioned drive-by shootings, murderous neo-Nazis, or that slight case of being buried alive....

In 1858, a young woman on her honeymoon is forcibly abducted and taken across the border from Canada and sold into slavery. Thirty-eight years later, Detective Murdoch is working on a murder case that will take all of his resourcefulness to solve. The owner of one of Toronto’s livery stables has been found dead. He has been horsewhipped and left hanging from his wrists in his tack room, and his wife claims that a considerable sum of money has been stolen.

Portobello, Scotland. Grace McKenna is just back from a hearty breakfast at The Espy seaside pub when a perplexing mystery arrives at her door. Glamorous widow Sylvia Gordon is determined to find the truth about the death of her husband, Paul. Once a local celebrity with supposed psychic abilities, Paul is now the talk of the town after a deadly fall from the tower at a nearby college. The locals believe it was a tragic accident, maybe even a consequence of dabbling too deep into the psychic realm? But Grace has a feeling there's more than meets the eye…

When the dead body of a woman is found on public display, the murder scene bears all the hallmarks of a famous work of art. DI Ian Drake knows he is dealing with a very creative and intelligent killer - one who enjoys having their work showcased for all to see. As more murders take place, each copying a famous work of art, Drake faces a murderer who always seems to be one step ahead.

Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer’s dream has come true: The Sherlock Holmes-worshiping cowboy brothers are finally in business as professional detectives. But their fledgling A.A. Western Detective Agency faces a few challenges. Their partner, Col. Crowe, is almost as cantankerous and secretive as Old Red himself. The colonel’s daughter, Diana, insists on tagging along for the Amlingmeyers’ first assignment, which lands them smack dab in the middle of a range war - with Big Red and Old Red expected to shoot it out with rustlers rather than rustle up clues and solve a mystery.

From hunting pickpockets in London omnibuses and ghosts in Hesse Square, Sergeant Watters and Detective Silver are led into the notorious Wild Geese public house, and a tangled mystery that involves the murder of a guardsman and the vivacious wife of an Austrian diplomat. With the help of the Irish woman Rowena, Watters trawls through the back streets of London, encounters female prize-fighters and suave cracksmen, and finds himself in the savage world of espionage. But can he unravel the mysterious words: "There is a storm from the east and the west"?

Alice didn’t think her maternity leave would involve so much, well, murder. Before becoming proud new moms, she and her friends bonded more than members of a prenatal group usually would, as they became accidental amateur sleuths and solved a crime together. Now, with all this behind them and Alice’s son Jack somehow already a year old, Alice is keen to finally catch up on some sleep. So when an opportunity presents itself in the unlikely form of an eco-protest, Alice and her friends willingly chain themselves to trees and settle in as an excuse to get some overdue rest.

The Detective Novels Collection is a stunning collection of 8 classic detective novels and stories, read by three award-winning narrators. Included here are stories by some of the greatest crime writers in history, including Arthur Conan Doyle; AA Milne; Edgar Allan Poe; Josephine Tey; and Freeman Crofts Wills.

Northamptonshire, 1810: As a new canal network snakes across the landscape, a vicious mob stakes its claim to the county. Every local constable is out on the hunt for the ruthless Panther Gang. When an elderly man is robbed and murdered in sleepy Middleton, the beleaguered magistrates send for help from London's Bow Street Police Office.

Billie-Rose's bloodstained body is found in the kitchen of her ground-floor flat. She's been strangled to death, there's a deep laceration to her upper thigh, and a wooden chess-piece grasped tightly in her hand. Daubed on the wall in Billie-Rose's own blood is a strange symbol: a bishop's mitre. All Detective Jack MacIntosh can think is: He's back. Four years earlier, four young women were also strangled to death in their own homes, the same deep wound to the thigh, the same weird symbol scrawled on the wall. The work of the killer they call the Bishop. Is he back to kill again?

Charles has been gone for months, and Mimi's not feeling like being a private detective anymore. She's had it with the liars and the cheats. Speaking of liars and cheats, when she takes on a missing person case for a new client, she's thrown into a web of lies and deceit that ends in murder. Come along as, once again, Mimi Capurro butts heads with her homicide detective boyfriend, Nick Christianson, when their cases cross paths. What surprises do her client and employees have in store?

When teenager Nikki Jackson’s body is found at an amusement park, just hours after Fourth-of-July fireworks lit up the night sky, the Lost Creek police rule her death as suicide - a devastating final act from a girl who had lost all hope. But the absence of the knife used to make the wounds on her delicate wrists makes Detective Madison Harper think otherwise. And the partial fingerprint found on the girl’s face proves her right. Someone else was with Nikki in her final moments.