Private Investigator Thriller

Martin Cruz Smith has written nine previous novels featuring Arkady Renko, one of modern detective fiction’s most popular characters. These novels, beginning with 1981’s international sensation Gorky Park, have collectively traced Russia's evolution over the last half-century. Now, with Independence Square, Smith focuses on the fraught and frenzied days leading up to Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Life in Lake Eden, Minnesota, is usually pleasantly uneventful. Lately, though, it seems everyone has more than their fair share of drama to manage. With so much on her plate, Hannah Swensen can barely find the time to think about her bakery - let alone the town's most recent murder... Hannah is nervous about the upcoming trial for her involvement in a tragic accident. She's eager to clear her name once and for all, but her troubles only double when she finds the judge bludgeoned to death with his own gavel.

Some things are best left unsaid... Five months after the horrors that had terrified Buckinghamshire, DS Jack Townsend and the Specialist Crimes Unit are assigned the case of a man found dead of a suspected overdose. But when it is soon revealed that something more sinister is at play, Townsend and the SCU have to act fast.

Appie Knoll is the kind of suburb where kids grow up right. But something is wrong. Fourteen-year-old Kevin Bartlett disappears. Everyone thinks he's run away -- until the comic strip ransom note arrives. It doesn't take Spenser long to get the picture -- an affluent family seething with rage, a desperate boy making strange friends...friends like Vic Harroway, body builder. Mr. Muscle is Spenser's only lead and he isn't talking...except with his fists

Andrew Crain has it all: a brilliant scientist and astute businessman, his groundbreaking work with lithium has made him one of the world’s richest men. He is universally adored and admired; that is, until Crain’s beautiful wife, Laura, comes to Spenser hoping that he can find out what skeletons lurk in her husband’s closet. Though Crain is a generous philanthropist and loving family man, she is concerned—he has recently become secretive, bordering on paranoid, and prone to violent outbursts.

DS Lucas Walker is off duty. He's supposed to be showing his little sister Grace the Australian outback, on her visit from Boston, but instead they're headed out bush- where Walker's cousin has been mining for boulder opal. Something seemed off when Walker heard that Blair wanted to get out of Kanpara, so he and Grace are en route to bring him home to Caloodie. But Kanpara is in Channel Country, and a major flood is on the way.

When an extra $5,000 shows up in her bank account, Kinsey Millhone puts it down to clerical error. But suddenly the deposit makes sense. It's not a mistake, it's a setup!

"- La suite ! réclamaient les enfants. La suite ! La suite ! Ma suite à moi c'est l'autre petit moi-même qui prépare ma relève dans le giron de Julie. Comme une femme est belle en ces premiers mois où elle vous fait l'honneur d'être deux ! Mais, Julie, crois-tu que ce soit raisonnable ? Julie, le crois-tu ? Franchement... hein ? Et toi, petit con, penses-tu que ce soit le monde, la famille, l'époque où te poser ? Pas encore là et déjà de mauvaises fréquentations !"

Gideon Crew - brilliant scientist, master thief, intrepid adventurer - is shocked when his former employer, Eli Glinn, vanishes without a trace, and Glinn's high-tech lab Effective Engineering Solutions shuts down seemingly overnight. Fresh off a diagnosis that gives him only months to live, Crew is contacted by one of his former coworkers at EES, Manuel Garza, who has a bead on one final treasure hinted at in EES's final case, the long-awaited translation of a centuries-old stone tablet of a previously undiscovered civilization: The Phaistos Disc.

Former SAS soldier David Shelley was part of the most covert operations team in the special forces. Now settling down to civilian life in London, he has plans for a safer and more stable existence. But the shocking death of a young woman Shelley once helped protect puts those plans on hold. The police rule the death a suicide but the grieving parents can't accept their beloved Emma would take her own life. They need to find out what really happened, and they turn to their former bodyguard, Shelley, for help.

Kathryn Walker enjoys an enviable life. Her husband is an accomplished doctor, her children are bright and successful, and she devotes herself to charity work that uplifts her Suburban Colorado community. Settling into a new year, her life couldn’t be better. . . Until April.

Why we think it’s a great listen: When it comes to author/narrator pairings, nobody tops James Lee Burke and Will Patton in the Robicheaux thrillers. Beloved Burke hero Detective Dave Robicheaux here returns to New Iberia to solve a series of grisly murders. Seven young women in neighboring Jefferson Davis Parish have been brutally murdered. While the crimes have all the telltale signs of a serial killer, the death of Bernadette Latiolais, a high-school honor student, doesn’t fit.

Il suffit d'un mystérieux email adressé à la journaliste d'investigation Gina Kane pour l'alerter sur les méthodes de REL, une célèbre chaîne d'info. L'auteure du message dénonce le harcèlement sexuel dont elle a été victime et prétend ne pas être la seule. Mais après ce message, plus rien.

Dying billionaire Trevor Stone hires private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaroto find his missing daughter. Grief-stricken over the death of her mother and the impending death of her father, Desiree Stone has been missing for three weeks. So has the first investigator Stone hired to find her: Jay Becker, Patrick's mentor.

Once upon a time, though not so long ago, there was a girl named April Kyle, a beautiful teenage runaway who turned to prostitution to escape her terrible family life. Now, April Kyle's return in Hundred-Dollar Baby is nothing short of shocking.

Aileen Travers thought she had it all figured out. Part private investigator, part fixer to the supernatural community, she was slowly building a reputation as the go-to vampire in Columbus. If you had a supernatural problem and nowhere to turn, she was the girl for you. The best part - no one had tried to kill her in weeks. Aileen's peaceful existence comes crashing down around her when an unwilling visit to the police station results in her picking up a stalker - or two. Now, Aileen is dodging suspicious looking portals while evading kidnapping attempts.

Jerome Burnel was once a hero. He intervened to prevent multiple killings and in doing so destroyed himself. His life was torn apart. He was imprisoned, brutalized. But in his final days, with the hunters circling, he tells his story to private detective Charlie Parker. He speaks of the girl who was marked for death but was saved, of the ones who tormented him and of an entity that hides in a ruined stockade. Parker is not like other men. He died and was reborn. He is ready to wage war.

In 1966 in Pulaski, Tennessee, Bocephus Haynes watched in horror as his father was brutally murdered by 10 local members of the Ku Klux Klan. As an African American lawyer practicing in the birthplace of the Klan years later, Bo has spent his life pursuing justice in his father's name. But when Andy Walton, the man believed to have led the lynch mob 45 years earlier, ends up murdered in the same spot as Bo's father, Bo becomes the prime suspect.

There’s no one and nothing the great detective Nero Wolfe wouldn’t take on if the price was right. That’s something wealthy society widow Rachel Bruner is counting on when she writes him a check for a whopping hundred grand. But even Wolfe has a moment’s doubt when he finds out why the prize is so generous. For the oversize genius and his able assistant Archie Goodwin are about to lock horns with the FBI - and those highly trained G-men have a way with threats, tails, and bugs that could give even sedentary sleuth Nero Wolfe a run for his money.

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.