International Thrillers

When Pope John XXIV is found dead in his bed just two years after his election, the world braces for a new conclave. But as the cardinal electors are sealed inside the Sistine Chapel, something unthinkable happens. Hours pass. No smoke rises. No vote is announced. And when Vatican Secretary of State Elisabetta Celestino breaks protocol to open the doors—she finds the chapel empty. The cardinals have vanished without a trace.

Interpol quickly becomes engaged in searching out and killing terrorists who have threatened their enemies with assassination. Several courageous women spearhead suspenseful police battles. The terrorists’ deadly US and European crime spree soon takes a frightening turn for the worse. The group’s maniacal leader masterminds a bioterror plot to drastically reduce the world’s population. Will it be too late to stop this madness before it can be realized?

Crime world fixer Levi gets mixed up with a widow who believes her husband was murdered - and the police are covering it up. A riveting thriller about power, corruption, and deadly politics. Levi is a fixer for one of the New York Mafia families. However, things take an unexpected turn for this mafioso when Rivka Cohen walks into his life. The police are calling her husband's death a suicide even though she has evidence that he's been murdered.

Donna Leon's Death at La Fenice, the first novel in her beloved Commissario Guido Brunetti series, introduced listeners to the glamorous and cutthroat world of opera and one of Italy's finest living sopranos, Flavia Petrelli - then a suspect in the poisoning of a renowned German conductor. Years after Brunetti cleared her name, Flavia has returned to Venice and La Fenice to sing the lead in Tosca.

Two bodies have been found in a park in the fashionable London neighborhood of Callander Square. While Inspector Thomas Pitt is fighting to get the square’s aristocratic residents to speak with him, his pretty, well-born wife, Charlotte, decides to do some detective work of her own. Soon she is unearthing secrets in every house on the square, while Thomas tries to discover what would drive a person to murder.

Betrayed by his own country, former spy Charles Jenkins survived an undercover Russian operation gone wrong. The retired family man is through with spy games. Then he learns of a woman isolated in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo Prison. If it’s Paulina Ponomayova, the agent who sacrificed her life to save his, Jenkins can’t leave her behind. But there’s no guarantee it’s her. Or proof Paulina is still alive. To find out, Jenkins must return to Russia and blackmail Viktor Federov, a former Russian officer with his own ax to grind, into helping him infiltrate Lefortovo.

Any wedding is a big deal in the small village of Kilbane - even more so when the bride is a famous fashion model. It's also good for business; Siobhan O'Sullivan's bistro will be catering the three-day affair. When the drunken best man is disinvited, Siobhan's own beau, Macdara, gladly steps in. But finding the original best man murdered in the woods casts a pall over the nuptials. And when a second member of the wedding party is poisoned, Macdara goes from being best man to prime suspect.

They were going to hold a gala at Trestles, but Acton wasn't one to want a passel of strangers tromping around his ancestral estate and so Doyle was rightfully suspicious; he must have some plan afoot—something to do with the Song case, which had gone cold even though there was a mighty fortune hanging in the balance. Stranger still, the charities were going to put-on that famous Sherlock Holmes story—the one with the horror-hound—and Doyle couldn't help but notice there seemed to be a lot of parallels to current events, what with unknown heirs, and a tightening web of unnatural goings-on...

Les crimes commencent par des aveux. Rome. Côté lumière, sa dolce vita, son Capitole, ses pèlerins, ses touristes. Côté ténèbres, ses sombres ruelles, ses labyrinthes souterrains ses meurtriers insaisissables. Marcus est un homme sans passé. Il y a un an, il a été grièvement blessé et a perdu la mémoire. Analyste de scènes de crime, il est aujourd'hui le seul à pouvoir élucider la disparition d'une jeune étudiante. Sandra est enquêtrice pour la police scientifique.

Dreams of stardom had lured Martyn Tarne from faraway New Zealand to make the dreary, soul-destroying round of West End agents and managers in search of work. The Vulcan Theatre had been her last forlorn hope, and now, driven by sheer necessity, she was glad to accept the humble job of dresser to its leading lady. And then came the eagerly awaited opening night.

As it turns out, an awful lot. Bunny and co are supposed to be keeping a low profile, but nature calls and ironically, one of their party has a hard and fast rule about not answering that call while surrounded by nature. This is how they end up in the wrong bar, surrounded by the wrong people at the wrongest of wrong times. The local right-wing militia has a big week planned, and Bunny and the boys have inadvertently crashed the party. Before they know it, they’re in a desperate fight for survival against a bunch of people who refuse to believe they’re not who they think they are.

In Bullet Train, underworld operative Ladybug was tasked by his handler Maria Beetle with retrieving a suitcase from a high-speed train in Japan. The job did not go according to plan. Will the unluckiest assassin in the world will find things easier this time around? All he has to do is deliver a painting to a hotel guest, a portrait made by his daughter. Easy enough, except when Ladybug makes the delivery, he realizes that the guest is clearly not the guy in the painting. Then he attacks Ladybug, they fight, and the guest ends up dead. How can such simple jobs always go wrong?

On a cold November evening, Guido Brunetti and Paola are up late when a call from his colleague Ispettore Vianello arrives, alerting the Commissario that a hand has been seen in one of Venice’s canals. The body is soon found, and Brunetti is assigned to investigate the murder of an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant. Because no official record of the man’s presence in Venice exists, Brunetti is forced to use the city’s far richer sources of information: gossip and the memories of people who knew the victim.

Tensions are at a breaking point. The Western markets that once relied on Russian gas have turned to Israel for their energy needs. Furious at this interference in its control over the West, Russia demands that Israel stop its defensive military strikes against Iranian weapons transported into Syria. Weapons Israel knows are meant for the annihilation of their country.

A crime of passion strikes close to home when Gemma and her best friend, Hazel Cavendish, travel to Scotland, a land of mists and fine whiskey, of hidden pasts and dangerous secrets, or so Gemma discovers when an unexpected meeting with Hazel's old flame yields shocking—and mortal—consequences. Hazel is the logical suspect, but Gemma knows nothing is simple in this place of secrets and long-seething hatreds.

I Am Liu Yuejin, by prize-winning Chinese novelist Liu Zhenyun, is a novel of Beijing that paints a microcosm of contemporary China, dealing with classes at the two extremes: the super rich and the migrant workers who make them rich through deceit and corruption. The protagonist, Liu Yuejin, is a work site cook and small-time thief whose bag is stolen. While searching for it, he stumbles upon another bag, which contains a flash disk that chronicles high-level corruption, and sets off a convoluted chase.

Justice with a vengeance. Imagine if you were offered a choice: give up your freedom or watch the people closest to you lose theirs. What would you do? When international fugitive Sydney Rye turns herself over to authorities in order to protect the vigilante network she inspired, her freedom depends on helping Homeland Security shift the tide in a war for "hearts and minds". Sydney Rye is tasked with the perfect assignment: recruit female fighters to take on jihadists. Being killed by a woman is the only thing extremists fear because they believe it bars their entrance to Heaven.

A lavish weekend party, a practical joke that goes murderously wrong, and stolen state secrets all transpire in The Seven Dials Mystery, by Agatha Christie. Full of her usual sly wit this clever murder mystery is a classic detective story featuring some of the characters from an earlier novel, The Secret of Chimneys: Lady Eileen (Bundle) Brent, Lord Caterham, Bill Eversleigh, George Lomax, Tredwell, and Superintendent Battle.

Bruno Courrèges - provincial French police chief extraordinaire - is back in another delectable tale of mystery and suspense that unfolds in the gastronomically ravishing Dordogne.

When a man in eighteenth-century Highland dress is found dead on the site of the Battle of Culloden, where Bonnie Prince Charlie led his forces to a rout seared into Scottish memory, Rebecca Connolly takes up the case for the Chronicle. A controversial film about the rebellion and battle is being shot nearby, and it has drawn the ire of the right-wing nationalist movement Spirit of the Gael. Is there some link between the murder—the weapon used to impale the man leaves no doubt it was murder—and Spirit of the Gael or the shadowy militant group New Dawn?