Historical Police Fiction

London 1859-62. A time of great exhibitions, foreign conquests and underground trains. But the era of Victorian marvels is also the time of the Great Stink. With cholera and depravity never far from the headlines, it's not only the sewers that smell bad. Novice detective Campbell Lawless stumbles onto the trail of Berwick Skelton, an elusive revolutionary determined to bring London to its knees through devilish acts of terrorism.

Ricciardi has visions. He sees and hears the final seconds in the lives of victims of violent deaths. It is both a gift and a curse. It has helped him become one of the most acute and successful homicide detectives in the Naples police force. But all that horror and suffering has hollowed him out emotionally: He drinks and doesn't sleep. Other than his loyal partner, Brigadier Maione, he has no friends.

DCI Monkia Paniatowski has seen dozens of murder victims in her time, but nothing could have prepared her for the corpse in the woods. It is not so much that the man’s throat has been slashed that shocks her, nor even the way he is naked – it is the way he has been carefully posed. Paniatowski has been assigned a new sergeant, who she does not entirely trust. Worse yet, an old enemy from the secret service announces he will be monitoring her every move.

Captain Alexei Korolev has nothing to complain about. He has his own room in an apartment, a job in the police force that puts food on the table, and his good health. In Moscow in 1937, that's a lot more than most people have to be grateful for. Korolev receives an urgent call from his boss - it seems an important man has been murdered, and Korolev is the only detective they're willing to assign to this sensitive case.

Scotland Yard Detective Joe Sandilands is caught off guard one night in 1933 by a phone call from a distressed boy named Jackie Drummond, who just might be the illegitimate son Joe never knew he had....

In December 1941, America is reeling from the brutal attack on Pearl Harbor. Both patriotism and paranoia grip New York as the city frantically mobilizes for war. Nurse Louise Hunter is outraged when the FBI, in a midnight sweep of prominent Japanese residents, storms in to arrest her patient’s wife. The desperately ill Professor Oakley is married to artist Masako Fumi. The nurse vows to help the professor free Masako. But when the murdered body of Masako’s art dealer is discovered in the gallery where he’d been closing down her controversial show, Masako’s troubles multiply.

To the outside observer, Salt Lake City seems to be the squeaky-clean “City of Saints” - its nickname since Mormon pioneers first arrived. Its wide roads, huge Mormon temple topped by a horn-blowing angel, and orderly neighborhoods give it the appearance of the ideal American city. But looks can be deceiving. When beautiful socialite Helen Kent Pfalzgraf turns up dead, Salt Lake County Deputy Art Oveson - a twenty-something husband, dad, and devout Mormon just getting his start - finds himself thrust into the role of detective.

A DCI Charlie Woodend Mystery - A charred body is discovered in an abandoned cotton mill, and the crime scene presents DCI Woodend and his team with many questions, but very few answers. As Woodend attempts to solve a murder with no clues, he must also battle against a police authority blocking him at every turn. And worse is to follow, because Elizabeth Driver, Inspector Bob Rutters lover, has almost finished the book which could destroy everything he has ever worked for.

The murder of Sarah Culdrose is just the first in a series of mysterious and often gruesome deaths that London's subterranean trains will witness. The deceased - all women - pile up quickly. There is a maniac at large, and Inspector Sholto Lestrade of Scotland Yard is detailed to work with the Railway Police. The detective plunges through a tangled web of deviants to solve a string of murders so heinous that every woman in London fears for her life. Will the London Transport System survive? Or will Lestrade run out of steam?

A nameless victim. An unknown killer. An impossible case for Monika Paniatowski. Before she can even begin to track down the killer of the old woman dumped by the lonely canal, Monika Paniatowski needs to find out who she is - and no one seems to know. Even when her daughter Louisa provides the vital clue, it only makes life more difficult, because the Chief Constable - intent on making Paniatowski's life difficult - refused to let her follow the obvious trail.

After an absence of a year, Catherine LeVendeur and her husband Edgar are glad to return to Paris. When they enter the house, however, they are shocked by the discovery of the dead body of a Knight Templar. Although innocent, Catherine fears that she or her family will be incriminated. Her father Hubert has recently announced his Jewish roots, and twelfth-century Europe is not a safe place for Jews.

New York, 1891: a rapidly changing city, torn between lamplight and electric light, where the burgeoning steel and railway industries attract a flood of humanity from every corner of the globe, fuelling cutthroat gangs, corruption and vice. A prostitute is found brutally murdered. Immediately fear starts to spread. The victim bears the same hallmarks as Jack the Ripper's recent killing spree in England. Could it be that the Ripper has crossed the Atlantic to fresh killing grounds? Or is this simply a copycat murder?

The colliery village of Bellingsworth is already divided over an impending strike, so the last thing it needs is a murder - but that's exactly what it gets, when a retired miner called Len Hopkins is found battered to death in his outside lavatory. Detective Chief Inspector Monika Paniatowski, called in to track down the killer with all possible speed, finds herself working in an atmosphere as thick with suspicion and distrust as the mine is with coal dust.

When a chorus girl is found dead on a Broadway stage dressed in the leading lady's costume, there are no signs of violence, no cuts, no bruises, no marks at all. If pressed, the coroner would call it a suicide, but then that would make her the second girl to turn up dead in such a manner in the last few weeks. And the news of a possible serial killer would be potentially disastrous to the burgeoning theater world, not to mention the citizens of New York.

The last thing Inspector Sam Blackstone wants to do is investigate the murder of a young lieutenant on the Western Front, but he owes a debt to General Fortesque - the soldier’s grandfather. Once he arrives at the front line, it does not take him long to realise that he is completely out of his depth. The officers resent his presence, and the enlisted men refuse - or do not dare - to talk to him. As thousands are slaughtered around him, Blackstone struggles to solve one of the most difficult cases of his career.

When a young girl, Jill Harris, is murdered, the case soon becomes personal for Monika Paniatowski. She saw the victim looking distressed only hours before she was killed, and Jill was the same age as her own daughter, Louisa. Driven by guilt and pity, Monika throws herself into the investigation, but both the chief constable, who is away, and Colin Beresford - her right-hand man - think she is too emotionally involved to handle it. What none of them know is that the killer is planning to strike again....

The grave on the football field is shallow, and easy to spot from a distance. It would have been found sooner, had most of the residents in the black half of Birmingham not been downtown, marching, singing, and being arrested alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. Police detective Ben Wellman is among them when he gets the call about the fresh grave. Under the loosely packed dirt, he finds a young black girl, her innocence taken and her life along with it. His sergeant orders Wellman to investigate, but instructs him not to try too hard.

The past has always felt near in the historic house of Jonathon Lydell III, who proudly advertises his family connection to the Virginia Lees. But now, history is repeating itself in a truly bizarre and spooky way. Sheriff Ike Schwartz and FBI agent Karl Hedrick are dispatched to resolve the mystery of the strangely identical murders 150 years apart.

There is a new broom at Scotland Yard: Nimrod Frost. His first “little job” for Lestrade is to investigate the reported appearance of a lion in Cornwall. This is hardly a task for an Inspector. Yet even as Lestrade questions a witness, a man is reported dead - horrifically mauled. Having solved that case to his own satisfaction, Lestrade returns to London and to more suspicious deaths - all old men who should have died quietly in their sleep. Is there a connection? Lestrade's superiors discount his speculations....

Rosenmontag 1933: Gereon Rath feiert Karneval in Köln. Der Morgen danach beginnt für ihn mit einem heftigen Kater, der falschen Frau im Bett und einem Anruf aus Berlin: Der Reichstag steht in Flammen! Sofortige Urlaubssperre! Seinen neuen Fall aber erbt Gereon Rath von seinem Vorgesetzten Wilhelm Böhm, der sich unter dem Nazi-Polizeipräsidenten ins politische Abseits manövriert hat: Ein Obdachloser ist erstochen am Nollendorfplatz gefunden worden.