International Police Procedurals

With their dark sophistication and dry humor, Andrea Camilleri’s classic crime novels continue to win more and more fans in America. The latest installment of the popular mystery series finds the moody Inspector Montalbano further beset by the existential questions that have been plaguing him of late. But he doesn’t have much time to wax philosophical before the gruesome murder of a man—shot at point-blank range in the face with his pants down—commands his attention.

Former Detective Hillary Greene and her cold case team are handed an impossible case. Thirty years ago, two days before Christmas, the much-loved Reverend Keith Coltrane was hit over the head and left to die inside his own church. The killer was never caught. This shocking crime took place in the pretty Oxfordshire village of Lower Barton. Everyone knows everyone else in this peaceful little community. The young reverend was handsome and popular, especially with the ladies of the village. Who would have wanted to harm him?

If Alison Girling, former principal of England's Holm Coultram College, died in an avalanche in Austria, why has her skeleton been unearthed on campus? While no love is lost between conservative detective Andrew Dalziel and the entirety of Liberal Arts, his attention to the grim discovery must be paid. But when he and Peter Pascoe scour the ivory tower for answers, they discover that the shady faculty and creepy student body have more to bury than just one corpse. Try two-and counting.

Jake Sawyer is in limbo. Facing an enquiry into his capture of a vicious killer, he turns private detective, and takes the seemingly hopeless case of a teenage boy, missing for seven years. When a young woman podcaster investigating the boy’s disappearance also goes missing, Sawyer is drawn into the secretive world of urban exploration. But then an adult male body is found, showing signs of extreme torture, and the murder reminds Sawyer of an unsolved case from his early career. He connects the past with the present, uncovering a terrible link which could hold the key to the disappearances.

Detective Inspector Karen Eiken Hornby is not the only person to have returned to her native island nation, Doggerland, after years abroad. Following a ten-year hiatus, Luna has chosen to secretly record her comeback album where she was born and raised. Spirits are high among her team at the wrap party, though Karen is less than impressed with the simpering singer. The next morning, Luna is nowhere to be found. Nothing goes unnoticed in the tight-knit community—certainly not the arrival, or disappearance, of a world-famous singer.

“I’ve read a lot of Simenon, who’s a favorite writer of mine.” —Sigrid Nunez In a run-down Paris suburb, housebound widow Juliette Boynet is strangled. For Inspector Maigret, this murder hits home more than most: he’s well acquainted with Juliette’s live-in carer, her selfless...

In a dimly lit apartment building, where shadowy figures come and go, a man has been killed in Georges Simenon’s The Shadow Puppet. On the dimly lit Place des Vosges, Maigret hears the sound of a woman in distress. But this is no crime; she is giving birth in a room above. The lights of the...

Spätsommer in Südschweden: Eine junge Frau wird vor dem Astrid-Lindgren-Freizeitpark in Vimmerby tot aufgefunden. Wer hat die hübsche und bei allen beliebte Imbissbesitzerin kaltblütig mit einem Pfeil erschossen? Der Polizeichef der Stadt, Marten Henriksson, nimmt zusammen mit seiner Kollegin und Ex-Frau Lena Wallin die Ermittlungen auf. Eine erste Spur führt zum Klärwerk, mit dessen Geschäftsführung die Tote seit Wochen in einem erbitterten Streit lag. Doch reicht das als Mordmotiv?

Inspector Maigret is followed home one evening by a man who reveals his intention to kill his wife and her lover. Maigret intervenes and speaks to the man daily, but when the calls suddenly stop Maigret finds a murder on his hands.

Montalbano's latest case begins with a mysterious tête à tête with a Mafioso, some inexplicably abandoned loot from a supermarket heist, and some dying words that lead him to an illegal arms cache in a mountain cave. There the inspector finds two young lovers, dead for 50 years and still embracing, watched over by a life-sized terra-cotta dog. Montalbano's passion to solve this old crime takes him on a journey through Sicily's past and into a family's dark heart.

A man's violent, early-morning death on the freezing pavement of a west-end convenience store parking lot in Canada's capital city appears at first to be just another random act of gang violence. But is it? The dead man has no identification, and his associate has mysteriously vanished. One of the victim's fingerprints is linked to the unsolved murder of a young woman more than twenty years earlier. When Inspector Matt Armitage begins investigating the cold case, he uncovers a second, identical, unsolved murder. This one took place years later, in another city, in another country.

Disgraced Detective Dave Slater is stuck on gardening leave, down in the quiet Hampshire town of Tinton, with just one last chance to redeem himself. He must search for mousy young journalist Ruth Thornhill. Months ago, she vanished from her home, her London job, her life. But the Met don't want to know. Now Slater's boss slips him the file, asking him to investigate discreetly, with the help of an unlikely new assistant. Bedraggled fifty-something Detective Norman Norman.

The table is set for family dinner; roast chicken, wine for them and juice for their darling boy, a vase of fresh daisies from the garden for decoration. But the food is cold, and the flowers are wilting. You might think they were sleeping in the next room, if it wasn’t for the blood dripping crimson onto the carpet.

Judge Dee Renjie, Empress Wu's newly appointed Imperial Circuit Supervisor for the Tang Empire, is visiting provinces surrounding the grand capital of Chang'an. One night a knife is thrown through his window with a cryptic note attached: "A high-flying dragon will have something to regret!"

Everything is peaceful in Tommerup, Denmark, until a young mother disappears in the middle of an idyllic summer day. There’s no trace of the missing woman when Chief Superintendent Liam Stark and Superintendent Dea Torp are called to investigate. The small town is on edge, rumors begin to fly, and blame is cast on Charlotte’s husband, who was the last to see her. When another person goes missing and Liam and Dea find a strange note linking the second missing person to the first crime, they suspect the disappearances may be the work of a serial killer.

Called to the scene of a murder outside Trige, Roland Benito assumes it's a case of petty criminals who made a gruesome mistake. After all, home robberies have been plaguing all of East Jutland for years. But it soon becomes clear that the men who beat Albert Hovgaard to death inside his country estate were no ordinary thieves. Meanwhile, journalist Anne Larsen has been out of work since the financial crisis shuttered the Daily News. But now an unwelcome visit from the past has her investigating a series of missing homeless people.

September 1878. One night, as the pleasure boat The Princess Alice makes her daily trip up the Thames, she collides with the Bywell Castle, a huge iron-hulled collier. The Princess Alice shears apart, throwing all 600 passengers into the river; only 130 survive. It is the worst maritime disaster London has ever seen, and early clues point to sabotage by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who believe violence is the path to restoring Irish Home Rule. For Scotland Yard Inspector Michael Corravan, born in Ireland and adopted by the Irish Doyle family, the case presents a challenge.

A friend in his cigar club asks Antoine Verlaque to visit Rene Rouquet, a retired postal worker who has found a rolled-up canvas in his apartment. As the apartment once belonged to Paul Cezanne, Rouquet is convinced he's discovered a treasure. But when Antoine arrives at the apartment, he finds Rene dead, the canvas missing, and a mysterious art history professor standing over the body. When the painting is finally recovered, the mystery only deepens.

The Forgotten Girls The body of an unidentified woman has been discovered in a remote forest. A large, unique scar on one side of her face should make the identification easy, but nobody has reported her missing. Louise Rick, the new commander of the Missing Persons Department, waits four long...

As a police team is called in to investigate a woman's suicide at the Holmsheiði prison outside Reykjavik, to detective Guðgeir Fransson it looks like a tragic but straightforward case. It's only afterwards that the pieces begin to fall into place and he takes a deeper interest in Kristin Kjarr's troubled background, and why she had found herself in prison.