International Police Procedurals

Jo told him the phone call had been about a woman who wanted to have her husband declared dead. Smith thought for a moment and then said, 'Hmm. There must be a few million women in this country who feel like that. I take it her husband's been missing for a while and she's decided it's time to move on. In the absence of a body, which is always a nuisance, she wants Diver and Diver to confirm there's no proof he's alive. And I've told Jason a dozen times I'm not getting involved in anything matrimonial. I have enough trouble sorting out my own relationships.'

During intermission at the famed La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy, a notoriously difficult and widely disliked German conductor is poisoned—and suspects abound. Guido Brunetti, a native Venetian, sets out to unravel the mystery behind the high-profile murder. To do so, he calls on his knowledge of Venice, its culture, and its dirty politics. Along the way, he finds the crime may have roots going back decades—and that revenge, corruption, and even Italian cuisine may play a role.

London, 1878. One April morning, a small boat bearing a young woman’s corpse floats down the murky waters of the Thames. When the victim is identified as Rose Albert, daughter of a prominent judge, the Scotland Yard director gives the case to Michael Corravan, one of the only senior inspectors remaining after a corruption scandal the previous autumn left the division in ruins. Reluctantly, Corravan abandons his ongoing case, a search for the missing wife of a shipping magnate, handing it over to his young colleague, Mr. Stiles.

In a quiet village surrounded by ancient woods and the imposing Italian Alps, a man is found naked with his eyes gouged out. It is the first in a string of gruesome murders. Superintendent Teresa Battaglia, a detective with a background in criminal profiling, is called to investigate. Battaglia is in her mid-60s, her rank and expertise hard-won from decades of battling for respect in the male-dominated Italian police force. Soon she finds that buried deep in these mountains are whispers of a dark and dangerous history, possibly tied to a group of eight-year-old children.

As the sun sets into the sea over the pretty Cornish town of St Ives, a young woman, Freya Kempston, hasn’t returned home after a day out in the mall at St Austell. Panicking, her husband begs Detective Lauren Pengelly and her team to find her. Has Freya run out on her stable, loving marriage, or has something more sinister taken place? Grainy security footage from the mall provides the first break in the case—capturing Freya talking intently with a well-known local mechanic on the day she disappeared. But when cornered, the mechanic denies even knowing her.

When a lobster fisherman on an early morning run pulls in his traps, he finds something he wasn't expecting to catch - a body. When police discover the dead man was the brother of a senior Scottish government official who vanished without a trace, Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie takes over the investigation. At the same time, a woman in the wealthy enclave of Perth is clearing out her sister's home after a fatal road accident and finds a mysterious camper van in the garage containing a skeletonized body. But who is it?

How far would you go to bury the truth? While searching for a missing hill walker, Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team uncovers a body - just not the one they were looking for. Still dealing with the fallout from their last case, DCI Jack Logan and his team venture south from Inverness to investigate a brutal, gangland-style execution in the wilds of the Highland countryside. As the victim's dark secrets are gradually revealed, Jack uncovers the rot lurking beneath the stunning scenery, making himself the target of a criminal more dangerous than any he has faced before.

This set contains books seven to nine in the gripping, fast-paced crime fiction series featuring DCI Whitney Walker and forensic psychologist Dr. Georgina Cavendish: Ritual Demise, Mortal Remains, and Silent Graves.

Twenty years ago, a young girl was brutally murdered, her body left in an abandoned shed in the Scottish Highlands. Her killer was never caught. Now, another girl has vanished from the same remote village of Kinloch Rannoch, and DCI Ross Fraser and his team are sent to find her. A dogged, methodical investigator with no taste for theatrics, Fraser builds his cases piece by piece. But with no sightings, no suspects, and the clock relentlessly ticking, he begins to fear the same killer has struck again—and that it’s only a matter of time before another body is found.

It’s April 2020 and Edinburgh is in lockdown, but that doesn’t mean crime takes a holiday. It would seem like a strange time for a cold case to go hot—the streets all but empty, an hour’s outdoor exercise the maximum allowed—but when a source at the National Library contacts DCI Karen Pirie’s team about documents in the archive of a recently deceased crime novelist, it seems it’s game on again. What unspools is a twisted game of betrayal and revenge, but no one quite expects how many twists it will turn out to have.

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.

In Brian Klingborg's Thief of Souls, a brutal murder in a rural village in Northern China sends shockwaves all the way to Beijing - but seemingly only Inspector Lu Fei, exiled to this tiny town, is interested in finding justice for the murdered village girl....

Constable Paul Hirschhausen - "Hirsch" - is a recently demoted detective sent from Adelaide, Australia's southernmost booming metropolis, to Tiverton, a one-road town in rustic, backwater "wool and wheat" country three hours north. Hirsch is more than just a disgraced cop, a rumored whistle-blower - internal investigations is still trying to convict him of something, even if it means planting evidence, and someone has a bullet they'd like to put in his head, as has been made clear by the pistol cartridge left in his mailbox.

There's nothing Ruth Galloway hates more than amateur archaeologists, but when a group of them stumble upon Bronze Age artifacts alongside a dead body, she finds herself thrust into their midst - and into the crosshairs of a string of murders circling ever closer.

It’s April 2020 and Edinburgh is in lockdown, but that doesn’t mean crime takes a holiday. It would seem like a strange time for a cold case to go hot—the streets all but empty, an hour’s outdoor exercise the maximum allowed—but when a source at the National Library contacts DCI Karen Pirie’s team about documents in the archive of a recently deceased crime novelist, it seems it’s game on again. What unspools is a twisted game of betrayal and revenge, but no one quite expects how many twists it will turn out to have.

Redoutant toujours les enquêtes sur des lieux incendiés, Tempe est appelée à analyser les dépouilles des victimes d’un brasier mortel, et voit ses inquiétudes confirmées. L’immeuble dévasté se trouve dans Foggy Bottom, un quartier coloré au passé tumultueux. Pour cette enquête, Tempe s’adjoint une nouvelle alliée en la personne d’Ivy Doyle, une journaliste de la télé. Ensemble, elles apprennent que, dans les années 1930 et 1940, l’immeuble était le repaire de contrebandiers et de trafiquants connus comme le « gang de Foggy Bottom ».

When the body of a church warden is discovered, DI Tom Janssen and his team must investigate the circumstances that led to his death. Whilst navigating the fallout from the conclusion of their previous case, the Norfolk CID team is under intense scrutiny with another police force investigating their recent conduct. Some people would like nothing more than to see the team fail. With no clear motive for murder or a reason to take his own life, the team have little to go on.

When a long-serving Master at one of England's most prestigious public schools drowns in Bassenthwaite Lake, Detective Inspector Skelgill is summoned to investigate his apparent suicide. It soon becomes clear that senior members of staff are not all that they seem. As the school closes ranks, Skelgill realizes he is pitted against a sinister power struggle for control of its highly lucrative operation.

A body is found at an ATM, the apparent victim a of heart attack. Then two teenage girls are arrested for the brutal murder of a cab driver. The girls confess to the crime, showing no remorse whatsoever. Two open-and-shut cases. At first these two incidents seem to have nothing in common, but as Wallander delves deeper into the mystery of why the girls murdered the cab driver, he begins to unravel a plot much more complicated than he initially suspected.

This "impossible to put down" #1 New York Times bestseller introduces Amos Decker, a gifted police detective with a perfect memory who must solve a mystery he wishes he could forget: his family's murder (Washington Post). Amos Decker's life changed forever--twice. The first time was on the...