Police Fiction

Nellie Cavendish has very good reasons to seek out her roots-and not only because she has no memory of her mother, and hardly knew the father who left her upbringing to paid caregivers. In the eight years since her 21st birthday, very odd things have begun to happen. Crows gather near her wherever she goes, electronics short out when she touches them, and when she's upset, really upset, it storms. At first, she chalked up the unusual happenings to coincidence, but that explanation doesn't begin to cover the vivid nightmares that torment her.

After tracking down a crazed sniper last year, homicide detective Mike Houston opted to leave Boston for the isolated mountains of Maine. He adjusted nicely to chopping his own firewood, relaxing in his log cabin, and simply enjoying the solitude of the mountains. But then his former partner, Lt. Anne Bouchard, pays him a visit and dangles the words serial killer in front of him. And suddenly he finds himself back in the game beside her - though not "officially".

In his work as a defense attorney in Baltimore, Thorne has always been noble to a fault - specializing in helping young people in trouble in an attempt to atone for those he couldn't save when he himself was younger. He plays the part of the bachelor well but secretly holds a flame for his best friend and business partner, Gwyn Weaver, a woman struggling to overcome her own demons. After four years, he thinks he might finally be ready to confess his feelings, come what may. But his plans are derailed when he wakes up in bed with a dead woman, with no recollection of how he got there.

Lieutenant Jonathan Stride is quietly recovering from injuries sustained on his latest case when a rich doctor's baby is kidnapped and his peace is shattered. As suspicion builds that the doctor may have staged the baby’s disappearance, the relationship between the doctor and his wife and neighbors begins to disintegrate.

Kelly Roth, FBI profiler, returns home to Syracuse to stop a sadistic serial killer. Three murders in three separate jurisdictions in central New York State have the same pattern: women killed by fatal headshots from a hunting rifle. Kelly Roth is sent from Virginia to help the local police. Each victim was found murdered in a remote area or in a quiet park. The media call him “The Park Killer.” But Kelly doesn’t think the killer lurks in the bushes. She thinks he hunts his victims somewhere else.

Ian Dex is a genetically engineered man who has abilities from all classes in the supernatural spectrum. He's also the chief of the Las Vegas Paranormal Police Department (PPD). His job is to monitor all supers and their involvement in the world of normals. A group of ubernaturals has recently descended on the city, forcing Ian and his crew have to put everything on the line to control the ensuing chaos. While the crew of the Las Vegas PPD aren't exactly strangers when it comes to dealing with death, destruction, and mayhem, fighting these new powerful beasts is admittedly taking its toll.

Set in rural South Carolina in 1995, a veteran detective is forced to reconcile the errors of a past case when a woman she convicted of murder is exonerated after 10 years in prison. Meanwhile, a series of grisly and ritualistic murders rock their decaying town, and our heroine is put at odds against her ambitious partner as they race to put the pieces together.

Mike and Callie Simpkins moved north to restart their lives and get their finances back on track. Their son Braxton immerses himself in an online game-world of crime and gangs. When he decides to meet some of the players in the real world, tragedy strikes. Detective John Swift must untangle a web of virtual and real crimes in order to solve this complex mystery. And as the family copes with unimaginable grief, even Braxton’s stepfather, Mike, comes under suspicion.

Don Donaldson brings us to the famous French Quarter with our favorite dynamic detective duo in this gripping thriller. New Orleans's chief medical examiner, Andy Broussard, and his assistant, criminal psychologist Kit Franklyn, set off to investigate a series of violent serial murders. Examinations of the victims have led them to discover that each one's throat was ripped out with two tools: a garden fork and something unrecognizable.

DCI Whitney Walker’s in trouble. She’s threatened with demotion if she screws up another case. So, when a killer starts murdering female students, it’s a chance to redeem herself. Forensic psychologist, Dr. Georgina Cavendish, has spent her life inside the university walls, but when one of her students is murdered, she steps out from behind the text books and puts her skills to the test.

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.

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.

Over the years investigator Joe Gunther has battled drug pushers and corporate swindlers, grappled with environmental conspirators, and foiled gangs and home invaders. But while usually successful, Gunther hasn't always come out on top. Thirty years earlier, store owner Klaus Oberfeldt was robbed and beaten senseless. Gunther, distracted by his wife's losing struggle with cancer in the same hospital where Klaus was slipping from life, did something that would plague him for the rest of his career: He let the case go cold, burying it in the past along with his private sorrows.

Early one morning, Silvio Lupanello, a big shot in the village of Vigata, is found dead in his car with his pants around his knees. The car happens to be parked in a rough part of town frequented by prostitutes and drug dealers, and as the news of his death spreads, the rumors begin. Enter Inspector Salvo Montalbano, Vigata's most respected detective, who has his doubts about the way Silvio died.

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.

When campaigner Heather McGill forces Police Scotland to reopen the cold case murder of a local sex worker at Scott's View, a beauty spot in the Scottish Borders, she sets off a chain reaction that threatens to unravel decades of secrets. DCI Rob Marshall is tasked with investigating the crime his predecessors failed to solve–but the evidence leads back to the group of teenagers who found the body, now all grown up with new lives of their own.

First-year detective Kathleen Doyle is a plucky Irish redhead of humble origins and modest means. Chief Inspector Michael Acton is her antithesis: a British lord turned cop. He's tall, handsome, and enigmatic - to a fault. He also has a knack for solving London's most high-profile crimes. Acton selects Doyle out of the newbie squad to partner with him on a series of investigations because she always knows when someone is lying - a trait that comes in handy when interviewing suspects and witnesses.

Late one night, Commissario Guido Brunetti's telefonino rings. A woman's body has been found in a Spartan apartment on Campo San Giacomo dell'Orio. Brunetti sees some signs of force on the old woman, but they could just as easily have been from the radiator near where she fell. When the medical examiner rules that the woman died of a heart attack, it seems there is nothing to investigate.

Revellers are flocking into Greenborough for the yearly Dark Greenborough Festival, a three-day event celebrating local folklore, superstition, and the darker side of life. What the public doesn't know is that there has been a warning sent to the police, saying that Greenborough will be a very dangerous place this year. The anonymous letter ends with the Latin phrase, Mors certa, hora incerta: Death is certain, the hour uncertain.

The discovery of a dead body in the woods on Thanksgiving Weekend brings Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his colleagues from the Surete du Quebec to a small village in the Eastern Townships. Gamache cannot understand why anyone would want to deliberately kill well-loved artist Jane Neal, especially any of the residents of Three Pines - a place so free from crime it doesn't even have its own police force.