Police Fiction

Hamish Macbeth, constable in the small Scottish Highland town of Lochdubh, is feeling down after losing both his promotion and his girlfriend, the town beauty, Priscilla Halbourton-Smythe. A trip to a charming seaside inn with his dog Towser's meant to raise his sagging spirits. Instead, he arrives at “Friendly House” to find the ambiance chilling, the food inedible, and his fellow guests less than neighborly. There’s an amorous spinster, two flirty girls, a retired military man, a secretive London family, and Bob Harris, who so nags his wife that everyone wants to kill him.

Amazing news has spread across the Scottish countryside. The most famous of highland bachelors, police sergeant Hamish Macbeth, may actually marry at last. The entire village of Lochdubh adores Macbeth's bride-to-be. Josie McSween is Hamish's new constable, and she is a pretty little thing, with glossy brown hair and big brown eyes. The local folk think that Josie is quite a catch, but Hamish couldn't be more miserable.

He stands in the shadows. Watching them. DI Sara Ramsey's life is about to change forever. Recently moved to the area and in charge of a new team, she's tasked with finding a serial killer terrorising a rural community. Crimes as heinous as this rarely happen in picturesque rural idylls. The community is living in fear, desperate for Sara to keep them safe. When the killer changes his MO and abducts a vulnerable resident, Sara realises she is in a race against time to prevent the killer from claiming yet another victim.

Before Jack the Ripper terrorised London, Police Inspector Samuel Ravenscroft patrolled the streets of Whitechapel. Clever and hard-working, Ravenscroft nonetheless has the worst record in the force. He lets a murderer escape during a chase and is banished to the spa town of Malvern for a water treatment to cure his asthma. Ravenscroft accepts a dinner invitation from a new acquaintance, Jabez Pitzer. Before dinner, the maid finds Pitzer slumped over his desk - dead. Ravenscroft immediately recognises the signs - Pitzer has been poisoned.

The Department of Sensitive Crimes takes on three extremely strange cases. First, the detectives investigate how and why a local business owner was stabbed...in the back of the knee. Next, a young woman's imaginary boyfriend goes missing. And, in the final investigation, Varg must determine whether nocturnal visitations at a local spa have a supernatural element.

She heard the knock, dread settling on her shoulders. A glance at the clock told her it was touching midnight. She glanced out of the window into the inky darkness and saw something that made her blood freeze solid with fear. Her time had come. She deserved to be punished. When a call comes in about a vulnerable woman found dead in a remote cottage, Detective Lottie Parker feels a deep sadness for this abandoned girl, who died alone with no family.

Shortly after 9.30 in the morning, a young man walks into Surf City, Bondi’s newest shopping complex. He’s wearing a dark grey hoodie - and a bomb around his neck. Just a few minutes later, he is locked in a shop on the upper floor. And trapped with him are four innocent bystanders. For police chaplain Paul Doherty, called to the scene by Senior Sergeant Boehm, it’s a story that will end as tragically as it began. For this is clearly no ordinary siege. The boy, known as Ali Khan, seems as frightened as his hostages and has yet to utter a single word.

When Scotland is hit by the recession, Police Constable Hamish Macbeth notices that the Highland people are forced to come up with inventive ways to lure tourists to their sleepy towns. The quaint village of Braikie doesn't have much to offer, other than a place of rare beauty called Buchan's Wood, which was bequeathed to the town. The savvy local tourist director renames the woods "The Fairy Glen," and has brochures printed with a beautiful photograph of a kingfisher rising from a pond on the cover. It isn't long before coach tours begin to arrive.

After nearly dying of a gunshot wound, Jonathan Stride has been on leave from the Duluth Police for more than a year. When his partner, Maggie Bei, gets called about a suspicious abduction involving a local lawyer, she tells Stride it’s time for him to come back.

Detective Sara Hirst has moved from London to Norfolk Police's Serious Crimes Unit. She wants to know the truth about her father, who has connections to the area. Her mother won't tell her the real story. A new job. A new place. Same old problems. Sara's first call-out is to a decomposing body discovered in a ditch on a local farm. How does the murder relate to a recent spate of thefts? Who wanted the victim dead? Then the case grows very personal.

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.

When lawyer Jenny Cooper is appointed Severn Vale District Coroner, she's hoping for a quiet life and space to recover from a traumatic divorce, but the office she inherits from the recently deceased Harry Marshall contains neglected files hiding dark secrets and a trail of buried evidence. Could the tragic death in custody of a young boy be linked to the apparent suicide of a teenage prostitute and the fate of Marshall himself?

Abby Endicott is chief of the district attorney's homicide unit in Boston, where she investigates and prosecutes the city's most dangerous killers. She attended the elite Winsor school, graduated from Harvard Law School, and has been known to change into an evening gown amid bodies in the morgue. She loves her job and is committed to it. But among Abby's many secrets is her longtime affair with fellow prosecutor Tim Mooney, a married father of one.

When journalist Lily Bigelow is found dead in the courtyard of Carrickfergus castle, it looks like a suicide. Yet there are a few things that bother Duffy just enough to keep the case file open, which is how he finds out that Bigelow was working on a devastating investigation of corruption and abuse at the highest levels of power in the UK and beyond. And so Duffy has two impossible problems on his desk: Who killed Lily Bigelow? And what were they trying to hide?

Houston Homicide Detective Jack West is back at work. A fresh case he's working might be connected to a murder case fellow detectives Chang and Severson are working. The medical examiner's report shows some similarities to each murder, but the victims are strangers with nothing in common. A third murder victim found under a bridge on the Buffalo Bayou confirms Houston has a serial killer on the loose. Three very diverse people are dead—are these hate crimes, and if so, how many more will die? The clock is ticking; Jack and his team need to catch this killer before another body shows up.

Homicide is always an abomination, but there is something exceptionally disturbing about the victim discovered in a high, lonely place: a corpse with a mouth full of sand, abandoned at a crime scene seemingly devoid of tracks or useful clues. Though it goes against his better judgment, Navajo tribal police lieutenant Joe Leaphorn cannot help but suspect the hand of a supernatural killer.

Jim Wekle's first day as a trooper on an island in Alaska could have gone better. It was raining, the coffee was bad, and within hours of stepping off the seaplane, he found a bikini-clad girl floating in a kelp bed. As Jim investigates who might have put the bullet in her back, he stumbles across a uniquely diverse and extraordinarily hilarious batch of island inhabitants. Puffing on his imported cigars, Jim soon learns that no one on the island is more unique, diverse, or hilarious than his unlikely counterpart: a man simply known as Kram.

The Pyramid is the long-awaited addition to Henning Mankell's critically celebrated and internationally best-selling Kurt Wallander mystery series: the book of five short mysteries that takes us back to the beginning. Here are the stories that trace, chronologically, Wallander's growth from a rookie cop into a young father and then a middle-aged divorcé, illuminating how Wallander became a first-rate detective and highlighting new facets of a now canonical character.

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.

New adventures of the iconic sleuth, an icon of detective fiction. Readers, listeners, investigators, and artists have come across Sherlock Holmes and his mythical stories of crime and adventure for generations. Now comes an outstanding anthology of never-before-seen short fiction stories featuring the much-loved powers of deduction and unerring quest for the truth - however improbable it might first appear. The Book of Extraordinary New Sherlock Holmes Stories brings together some of the most renowned American and British crime and thriller authors of today.