Private Detective Fiction

Stone Barrington is back in the exciting new adventure from perennial fan favorite Stuart Woods. It’s not often that Stone Barrington finds a woman as accustomed to the jet-set lifestyle as he, so he’s pleasantly surprised when he meets a gorgeous pilot who’s soon moving to New York...

Stone Barrington returns in the new action-packed thriller from the #1 New York Times bestselling author. It’s a time of unexpected change for Stone Barrington. A recent venture has achieved a great victory, but he is immediately faced with a new challenge: an underhanded foe who’s...

1950s Staffordshire. Within the clay tanks at the pottery company Shentall's, a body has been found. Amid cries of industrial espionage and sabotage of this leader of the pottery industry, there is a case of bitter murder to solve for Inspector Hedley Nicholson. Kelly's mystery won the CWA Gold Dagger Award in 1961 for its impeccable sense of place and detail, and for the emotional weight of its central crime. The novel is part of a shift from the cosiness of crime novels before to mysteries characterised by their psychological interest and affecting realism. An influential classic.

Los Angeles, 1986. A group of right-wing Christians has put an initiative on the November ballot to allow health officials to force people with HIV into quarantine camps - and it looks like it’s going to pass. Rios, now living in LA, agrees to be counsel for a group of young activists who call themselves QUEER. QUEER claims to be committed to peaceful civil disobedience. But when one of its members is implicated in the bombing of an evangelical church that kills its pastor, Rios finds himself with a client suddenly facing the death penalty.

When ex-CIA agent Vera Kelly loses her job and her girlfriend in a single day, she reluctantly goes into business as a private detective. Heartbroken and cash-strapped, she takes a case that dredges up dark memories and attracts dangerous characters from across the Cold War landscape. Before it's over, she'll chase a lost child through foster care and follow a trail of Dominican exiles to the Caribbean. Forever looking over her shoulder, she nearly misses what's right in front of her: her own desire for home, connection, and a new romance at the local bar.

Quirke—the hard-drinking, insatiably curious Dublin pathologist—is back, and he's determined to find his daughter's best friend, a well-connected young doctor April Latimer has vanished. A junior doctor at a local hospital, she is something of a scandal in the conservative and highly...

"Vikas Adams' excellent narration gives personality and distinction to the characters in this audiobook... [his] vocal dexterity makes it seem like there's a full cast portraying the men and women in the audiobook." — AudioFile (Earphones Award Winner) Lev AC Rosen delivers a new and...

In this new installment of Ken Bruen's beloved Jack Taylor series, the whiskey-swigging Irish detective investigates a series of violent attacks on the local convent's nuns.

One woman. Five personalities. Private investigator IQ is back to piece together a Newport Beach murder with an eyewitness who gives "people person" a whole new meaning. Christiana is the daughter of the biggest arms dealer on the West Coast, Angus Byrne. She's also the sole witness and number...

When Lily Rowan doesn’t laugh at his jokes, Archie Goodwin knows something’s wrong. Her niece Noreen has been running around with Sparky Linville, a club-hopping bad boy who’s the terror of Manhattan nightlife, and the last time she went out with him, Noreen wasn’t herself when she came home. Springing into action, Goodwin waits for Linville outside of Morgana’s, a chrome-and-glass palace. They nearly come to blows, but Linville’s bodyguard intervenes, and Goodwin retreats to plan his next move. In the morning, Linville is dead, and Goodwin is the chief suspect.

San Francisco homicide detective Frost Easton hadn’t seen his estranged friend Denny in years. Not until he dies in Frost’s arms uttering a final inexplicable word: Lombard. Denny appears to be the latest victim in a string of murders linked by a distinctive clue: the painting of a spiraled snake near the crime scenes. Is it the work of a serial killer? Or is Denny’s death more twisted and personal? To find the answer, Frost reaches into a nest of vipers - San Francisco’s shady elite - where the whispered name of Lombard is just one secret.

A dreich day for a crossing and a small ferry packed to the gills. A fracas when off loading leads to blood and tears. And one man sits dead at the wheel of the last remaining car. Macleod and McGrath return to Cromarty when a man is found dead at the wheel of his car on the small, local ferry. As the passengers are identified, the trail extends across the highlands and islands as past deeds are paid back in full. Can the now seasoned pair hunt down a killer before their butchery spreads across the land?

Eighty-one-year-old Eddie Wakefield is found brutally murdered at the nursing home where he lives. Crudely carved into his flesh—while he was still alive—is the number fifteen. Detective Jack MacIntosh and his team are determined to track down the ruthless killer of this frail elderly man. But the investigation is leading nowhere. Then the second body is discovered. The victim was stabbed to death in their own home. Again, the number fifteen is etched into the dead man's flesh.

Archie Goodwin’s aunt Edna is about to lure him away from his work at Nero Wolfe’s New York brownstone. After a phone call, he heads off to Ohio, where the president of Farmer’s State Bank and Trust, an elderly widower, has died in an apparent suicide. But Archie’s aunt has expressed nagging suspicions - which only grow stronger when someone takes a shot at a local reporter who wrote about the case.

From the number-one New York Times bestselling author and FOX News host Trey Gowdy comes a dark mystery debut about a murder in a small South Carolina town. Assistant DA Colm Truesdale must pick up the pieces of his own life in order to solve the case. Following the death of his wife and...

Facing enemies at every turn, private spy Simon Riske dashes across Europe to find the truth behind a mysterious investor in this high-stakes international espionage series: "comparison to the Bond novels is apt in many ways." (Booklist) Simon Riske sits in sun-dappled Napa Valley, toasting the...

Childbirth can be dangerous even for the wealthy. So when opera singer Claire Buchanan shows Prudence and Geoffrey a postmortem cabinet photograph of her deceased twin sister and newborn niece, they express sadness but not surprise. The popular black-bordered portraits are the era's way of coping with the devastating losses that plague every family. What makes this death different is that Claire is convinced Catherine and her child were murdered.

Almost 20 years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of his family’s fortune. Now Anthony’s aging and very rich mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a boy who claims to be Galton’s son, and a con game whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them.

At the request of Her Majesty's government, private enquiry agent Cyrus Barker agrees to take on his least favorite kind of assignment - he's to provide security for a secret conference with the French government. But shortly after the parties land at the island, Lord Hargrave is killed by a sniper shot, and the French ambassador's head of security is found stabbed to death. The only means of egress from the island - a boat - has been sent away, and the means of signaling for help has been destroyed.

In Vera Kelly: Lost and Found, Rosalie Knecht gives Vera her highest-stake case yet, as Vera quickly puts her private detective skills to good use and tracks a trail of breadcrumbs across southern California to find her missing girlfriend. She travels first to a film set in Santa Ynez and, ultimately, to a most unlikely destination where Vera has to decide how much she is willing to commit to save the woman she loves.