Traditional Detectives Police Procedural

Handsome Mark Callender did not die the way a young gentleman should. He was found hanged, a lipstick stain on his mouth and a nude girl's picture nearby. The official verdict was suicide, but his aristocratic father suspects murder. He hires Cordelia Gray, a fledgling detective, to investigate. And as she follows a trail of guilty secrets and shameful sins, she concludes that the nicest people do the nastiest things!

The murder of a deaf academic in his North Oxford home is the start of a formidably labyrinthine case for Chief Inspector Morse, as he tries to track down the killer through the insular and bitchy world of the Oxford colleges.

London. A snowy December, 1888. Sherlock Holmes, 34, is languishing and back on cocaine after a disastrous Ripper investigation. Watson can neither comfort nor rouse his friend - until a strangely encoded letter arrives from Paris. Mlle La Victoire, a beautiful French cabaret star, writes that her illegitimate son by an English lord has disappeared, and she has been attacked in the streets of Montmartre.

The thought suddenly occurred to Morse that this would be a marvellous time to murder a few of the doddery old bachelor dons. No wives to worry about their whereabouts; no landladies to whine about the unpaid rents. In fact nobody would miss most of them at all.

In the respectable seaside town of Flaxborough, the equally respectable councillor Harold Carobleat is laid to rest. Cause of death: pneumonia. But he is scarcely cold in his coffin before Detective Inspector Purbright, affable and annoyingly polite, must turn out again to examine the death of Carobleat's neighbour, Marcus Gwill, former prop. of the local rag, the Citizen. This time it looks like foul play, unless a surfeit of marshmallows had led the late and rather unlamented Mr Gwill to commit suicide by electrocution. ('Power without responsibility', murmurs Purbright.)

The day gets off to a bad start for Montalbano: while trying to break up a fight on Marinella beach, he hits the wrong man and is stopped by the Carabinieri. When he finally gets to the office, the inspector learns about a strange abduction: a woman was abducted, drugged, and then released unharmed a few hours later. A few days later, the same thing happens again, but this time the woman abducted is the niece of Enzo, the owner of Montalbano's favorite trattoria. The only link between the two events is that both women are 30 years old and work in a bank.

On the day he retires, Inspector Ashwin Chopra inherits two unexpected mysteries. The first is the case of a drowned boy, whose suspicious death no one seems to want solved. And the second is a baby elephant. As his search for clues takes him across the teeming city of Mumbai, from its grand high rises to its sprawling slums and deep into its murky underworld, Chopra begins to suspect that there may be a great deal more to both his last case and his new ward than he thought.

A man falls to his death in Western Scotland. From a distance another man watches. He approaches the body, tucks a book into the dead man's pocket, and leaves. When the Scottish police show visiting detective chief inspector Domenic Jejeune the book, he recognises it as a call for help. Back in Saltmarsh the brutal murder of a researcher has everyone looking at the man's controversial studies as a motive.

Qui a tiré un coup de revolver, en pleine nuit, dans l'hôtel particulier de la puissante famille Gendreau-Balthazar, rue Chaptal ? Tout jeune secrétaire du commissariat du quartier Saint-Georges, Jules Maigret se voit confier une enquête officieuse - car on n'attaque pas de front ces gens de la haute société aux relations influentes. Maigret va habilement débrouiller l'écheveau des secrets de la famille Gendreau.

Felicity Holland is missing. She left her handsome West London house to go to her weekly pottery class and didn't come back. She's a mature, sensible woman with a stable home life and a happy marriage - no reason to abscond. Her distraught husband is convinced she must have been snatched. DCI Bill Slider and his team know that when a woman goes missing, you have to move fast if there's to be a hope of finding her alive. But with no evidence of foul play - nothing to go on at all - where do you even start looking?

Detective Sergeant Kathleen Doyle was investigating a tip she’d received about doctors who were being assaulted at a London free clinic, but - strangely enough - none of the volunteers was willing to give her a statement. Instead, her only witness offered a fanciful tale about supernatural evildoers - which was nonsense, of course; it was clearly an attempt to shift the blame to the appropriate cultural bogeyman.

Former Seattle homicide cop J. P. Beaumont is learning to enjoy the new realities of retirement - doing morning crossword puzzles by a roaring fireplace; playing Frisbee with his new dog; having quiet lunches with his still-working wife. But then his past comes calling.

The body of Joanna Franks was found at Duke's Cut on the Oxford Canal at about 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday, 22nd June 1859. At around 10:15 a.m. on a Saturday morning in 1989, the body of Chief Inspector Morse - though very much alive - was removed to Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital. Treatment for a perforated ulcer was later pronounced successful.

Une femme a disparu. Sa voiture est retrouvée au départ d'un sentier de randonnée qui fait l'ascension vers le plateau où survivent quelques fermes habitées par des hommes seuls. Alors que les gendarmes n'ont aucune piste et que l'hiver impose sa loi, plusieurs personnes se savent pourtant liées à cette disparition. Tour à tour, elles prennent la parole et chacune a son secret, presque aussi précieux que sa propre vie. Et si le chemin qui mène à la vérité manque autant d'oxygène que les hauteurs du ciel qui ici écrase les vivants, c'est que cette histoire a commencé loin, bien loin de cette montagne.

In this novel from best-selling author John Verdon, ingenious puzzle solver Dave Gurney puts under the magnifying glass a notorious serial murder case - one whose motives have been enshrined as law-enforcement dogma - and discovers that everyone has it wrong.

Detective Inspector Ian Hamilton is no stranger to Edinburgh's darkest crimes. Scarred by the mysterious fire that killed his parents, he faces his toughest case yet when a young man is found strangled in Holyrood Park. With little evidence aside from a strange playing card found on the body, Hamilton engages the help of his aunt, a gifted photographer, and George Pearson, a librarian with a shared interest in the criminal mind.

After leaving the NYPD following her abduction by serial killer Blake Bram, Shana Merchant hoped for a fresh start in the Thousand Islands of upstate New York. Her former tormentor has other plans. Shana and Bram share more than just a hometown, and he won't let her forget it. When the decades-old skeleton of Shana's estranged uncle is uncovered, Bram issues a challenge: Return home to Vermont and solve the cold case, or the blood he spills next will be on her hands.

Life is good for DI Dan Hellier until the discovery of two headless, handless bodies buried in a bog on Dartmoor. How can he identify the victims when nobody has reported them missing? The tension mounts when the death of a young man plunges Hellier into the murky world of the Garrett family. Could the peaceful, family-run Animal Rescue Centre really be a cover for murder and other criminal activity? Hellier is about to learn just how far people will go to get what they want, as he races to catch a murderer before it’s too late.

A society wedding at Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire becomes a crime scene when a man is murdered. After another body is found, the baffled local constabulary turns to Scotland Yard. Though the second crime had a witness, her description of the killer is so strange it's unbelievable. Despite his experience, Inspector Ian Rutledge has few answers of his own. The victims are so different that there is no rhyme or reason to their deaths. Nothing logically seems to connect them - except the killer. As the investigation widens, a clear suspect emerges. But for Rutledge, the facts still don't add up, leaving him to question his own judgment.

Thomas Pitt, mainstay of Her Majesty’s Special Branch, is summoned to Connaught Square mansion, where the body of a junior diplomat lies huddled in a wheelbarrow. Nearby stands the tenant of the house, the beautiful, notorious Egyptian woman Ayesha Zakhari, who falls under the shadow of suspicion. Pitt’s orders are to protect—at all costs—the good name of the third person in the garden: senior cabinet minister Saville Ryerson. The distinguished public servant, whispered to be Ayesha’s lover, insists that she is as innocent as Pitt himself.