Police Fiction

Across Brattleboro, Vermont, rich people (some with dark secrets) are waking up in their high security, alarm-equipped homes to find a Post-it note stuck to their bedside tables reading, “You’re it.” There is little sign of disturbance anywhere, nothing stolen (that anyone admits) and only a bit of expensive food eaten as a signature. The press loves the story and dubs the burglar the Tag Man. But who is he? And what’s he actually doing?

This box set includes two mystery novels written by Edgar and Shamus Award finalist Ben Rehder. Included are Buck Fever (first novel in the Blanco County mystery series) and Gone the Next (first novel in the Roy Ballard mystery series).

When Gail Zigman, town selectwoman and Joe Gunther's companion of many years, is raped, Gunther finds himself caught between the media, local politicians, and a network of well-meaning victims' rights advocates as he tries to put his own feelings aside and follow a trail of evidence. Every lead points to a single obvious suspect, but is the evidence too perfect?

An entire family is murdered and, by a quirk, a young girl is left unharmed. For 15 years, she believed the killer had been caught, and he's now on death row, awaiting execution. While trying to be content with her adoptive family, she's living in relentless uncertainty and the fear of remembering what really happened that night when she was five years old. She's The Watson Girl.

Peter Marlin's wife is found strangled and he becomes the prime suspect. She'd only just returned from an unexplained absence of several months. And during that time, Peter had found a new lover. Everything points to the husband but there's no real proof. Inspector John Crow is called in to help the local police. But his new colleagues aren't keen on an outsider. And Crow must solve the case before anyone else dies.

Detective Hannah Shor is desperate to prove her worth to her superiors - and herself. When a middle-aged man is found stabbed to death in his apartment, she might just get her chance. But then she finds that the deceased was a vile Internet troll, sexually harassing women on Twitter. Hannah starts wondering if she really wants to catch his killer.

When the brutally beaten body of a young man is found in an alley, Eastvale's Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks and his colleague, Detective Constable Susan Gay, have no choice but to lock up the three Pakistani youths who seemingly started it all after an argument in a pub. But they're out in no time, and Banks is in big trouble with the chief for risking a racial incident with the arrest.

One time police detective Peter Diamond loses his job as a security guard when he fails to spot a small Japanese child hiding in the furniture department of Harrods. Weeks later, she's still unclaimed; Diamond is unable to forget the frightened eyes of the silent little girl and takes on the challenge of uncovering her identity.

Manhattan is filled with galleries and deep-pocketed collectors who can make an artist's career with a wave of a hand. But one man toils in obscurity, his brilliance unrecognized while lesser talents bask in the glory he believes should be his. Come tomorrow, he vows, the city will be buzzing about his work. Indeed, before dawn, Lt. Eve Dallas is speeding toward the home of the two gallery owners whose doorway has been turned into a horrifying crime scene overnight.

On the night he celebrates a big win, defense attorney Mickey Haller is pulled over by police, who find the body of a former client in the trunk of his Lincoln. Haller is immediately charged with murder but can’t post the exorbitant $5 million bail. Mickey elects to represent himself and is forced to mount his defense from his jail cell in downtown Los Angeles. Even if he can obtain a not-guilty verdict, Mickey understands that it won’t be enough. In order to be truly exonerated, he must find out who really committed the murder and why. That is the law of innocence.

The small town of Salem has been quiet for months - or so Bishop and his elite Special Crimes Unit believe. But then Hollis Templeton and Diana Hayes receive a warning in Diana’s eerie “gray time” between the world of the living and the realm of the dead that a twisted killer is stalking Salem, bent on destroying in the most bloody and horrifying way possible the five families that founded the town.

When a maid in the upper class Ellison household is strangled, Inspector Pitt is called in to investigate. He finds a world ruled by strict manners and social customs, where the inhabitants of the Ellison's neighborhood appear to be more outraged by the thought of scandal than they are by murder. Inspector Pitt finds a most unlikely ally in Charlotte, the Ellison's spirited daughter. But as the murders continue, Charlotte and Pitt find themselves drawn together by more than the investigation.

Just graduated from the police academy, Linda Wallander returns to Skane to join the police force, and she already shows all the hallmarks of her father - the maverick approach, the flaring temper. Before she even starts work she becomes embroiled in the case of her childhood friend, Anna, who has inexplicably disappeared.

Winter in Three Pines, and the sleepy village is carpeted in snow. It's a time of peace and goodwill - until a scream pierces the biting air. A spectator at the annual Boxing Day curling match has been fatally electrocuted. Despite the large crowd, there are no witnesses and - apparently - no clues. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache discovers a history of secrets and enemies in the dead woman's past.

A woman is missing. The clock is ticking. There's no time to lose when a life hangs in the balance.

Renée Ballard is working the night beat again and returns to Hollywood Station in the early hours only to find a stranger rifling through old file cabinets. The intruder is retired detective Harry Bosch, working a cold case that has gotten under his skin. Ballard kicks him out but then checks into the case herself, and it brings a deep tug of empathy and anger. Bosch is investigating the death of 15-year-old Daisy Clayton, a runaway on the streets of Hollywood who was brutally murdered and her body left in a dumpster like so much trash. Now, Ballard joins forces with Bosch.

For years the boglands of Northern Europe have given up bodies of the long-deceased. Bodies that are thousands of years old, uncannily preserved. Bodies with strange injuries that suggest ritual torture and human sacrifice. When a corpse is found in a bog in Galway, Cormac Reilly assumes the find is historical. But closer examination reveals a more recent story. The dead man is Thaddeus Grey, a local secondary school principal who disappeared two years prior.

For more than twenty-five years, Philadelphia homicide detective Bree Taggert has tucked away the nightmarish childhood memories of her parents’ murder-suicide…. Until her younger sister, Erin, is killed in a crime that echoes that tragic night: innocent witnesses and a stormy marriage that ended in gunfire. There’s just one chilling difference. Erin’s husband, Justin, has vanished.

It's the most dangerous case of Will Trent's career. He knows this from the moment he sets foot in the abandoned Atlanta warehouse where a body lies on the floor—the body of an ex-cop. Bloody footprints leading away from the scene reveal that another victim, evidently a woman, was carried away and has vanished into thin air. And, worst of all, the warehouse belongs to the city's biggest and most high-profile athlete—a local hero protected by the world's most expensive lawyers.

The polluted waters of the canals in Venice are an ever-present issue; but environmental concerns become significant in Commissario Guido Brunetti's work when an investigator from the Carabiniere—looking into the illegal hauling of garbage—asks for a favor. But the investigator is not the only one with a special request. Brunetti's father-in-law needs help and a mysterious woman comes into the picture. And the Commissario soon finds himself in the middle of an investigation into murder and corruption more dangerous than anything he's seen before.