Traditional Detectives Police Procedural

Two deaths, the suicide of a newly laid-off worker and an unscrupulous businessman found murdered, lead Inspector Montalbano to inspect the Halcyon, a nearly abandoned mysterious ship with no passengers.

The once-charismatic Billy Maples was last seen in a club named Dust, before his murder in a trendy London hotel. Proving as inscrutable - and challenging - to Jury as the case is the beautiful chief inspecting officer. Before his death, Maples was a patron of London's finest art galleries and caretaker of author Henry James' house in Rye. It's there where Jury installs Melrose Plant, who takes his job to heart, as Jury closes in on the dark secrets behind Maples' friends and family.

"The dog came back." "This is a joke, right?" "No, it isn't.... So do you want to hear the rest of it?" Dumbly, Jury nodded. The rest of it is told by Harry Johnson, a stranger who sits down next to Richard Jury as he's drinking in a London pub called the Old Wine Shades. Over three successive nights Harry spins this complicated story about a good friend of his whose wife and son (and dog) disappeared one day as they were viewing property in Surrey.

Love and need make unexpected bedfellows, and both are blind. As the grip of a long hard winter tightens on Lydmouth, a dead woman calls the dying in a seance behind net curtains. Two provincial newspapers are in the throes of a bitter circulation war. A lorry driver broods, and an office boy loses his heart. Britain is basking in the warm glow of postwar tranquillity, but in the quiet town of Lydmouth, darker forces are at play. The rats are fed on bread and milk, a gentleman's yellow kid glove is mislaid on a train and something disgusting is happening at Mr Prout's toy shop.

When the body of Rufus Moorcroft, a middle-aged widower with a distinguished war record, is found in his summerhouse, the verdict is suicide. But both reporter Jill Francis and her lover, Detective Richard Thornhill, approaching the case from different angles, discover there's more to it than that. The sixth instalment in the acclaimed Lydmouth series.

Detective Abish Taylor left Utah for a reason. But with her husband’s passing, it’s time to come home. Reconnecting with her family means dealing with her past: the father she abandoned and the community she left behind. Her one escape is serving as the sole police detective in the small town of Pleasant View. But when the quiet Mormon suburb in the Wasatch Mountains is shaken by a macabre death - with the hallmarks of a sacred ritual dating back to the days of Brigham Young - Abbie is called into action.

A young woman is found dead in a college while the students demonstrate. It turns out she was the principal's secretary, and there was more to her than meets the eye. Who wanted her dead and why? And what does it have to do with the student revolt led by a charismatic firebrand from Iraq? Inspector John Crow is called in and has little doubt who's responsible, but a series of surprises will make him reconsider everything. Many of the faculty seem to have things to hide.

One year after moving to his late wife’s Tuscan hometown of Gravigna, Nico Doyle has fully settled into life there, seeing friends in the course of daily errands and helping to serve and test recipes at his in-laws’ restaurant. But the town is shaken by the arrival of wine critic Michele Mantelli in his flashy Jaguar. Mantelli holds his influential culinary magazine and blog over Gravigna’s vintners and restaurateurs. Mantelli’s lavish, larger-than-life, and often vindictive personality has made him many enemies, and when he is poisoned, Maresciallo Perillo needs help....

Ruth and Nick are called to a fatal shooting at Chirk Castle, a well-known tourist spot in North Wales. The only witness to the murder is Daniel, the 10-year-old son of the victim. Ruth discovers that the victim was a small-time drug dealer and it seems that his killing might be linked to stolen drugs. However, when a local girl is also brutally murdered, Ruth has to change the focus of the investigation as it is clear that the murderers will go to any lengths to cover their tracks.

As Police Superintendent Thomas Pitt investigates the leak in the Colonial Office, he quietly looks into the tragic death of his childhood mentor, Sir Arthur Desmond. Pitt believes he was murdered and that the crime is connected with the treachery in the government. He makes little progress...until a second murder reverberates through London.

Tony Colletti, a good suburban cop and father of a child with autism, finds himself drawn into the controversy over the apparent but rarely acknowledged connection between childhood vaccines and autism. His quest to uncover the truth forces him to risk all he holds dear while confronting corrupt government officials, the powerful pharmaceutical industry, and disturbing elements of his own past. Even while holding down his job and dealing with family crises, Colletti spearheads the drive to contend with industrial espionage, Russian gangsters, and sexual predators.

A junkie lies dead in an Edinburgh squat, spreadeagled, cross-like on the floor, between two burned-down candles, a five-pointed star daubed on the wall above. Just another dead addict - until John Rebus begins to chip away at the indifference, treachery, deceit and sleaze that lurks behind the facade of the Edinburgh familiar to tourists. Only Rebus seems to care about a death which looks more like a murder every day, about a seductive danger he can almost taste, appealing to the darkest corners of his mind.

In 1912 Ian Rutledge watched as a man was condemned to hang for the murders of elderly women. Rutledge helped gather the evidence that sent Ben Shaw to the gallows. And when justice was done, Rutledge closed the door on the case. But Shaw was not easily forgotten. Now, seven years later, that grim trial returns in the form of Ben Shaw's widow Nell, bringing Rutledge evidence she is convinced will prove her husband's innocence. It's a belief fraught with peril, threatening both Rutledge's professional stature and his faith in his judgment. But there is a darker reason for Rutledge's reluctance.

Mourning the loss of his wife, Rita, former NYPD homicide detective Nico Doyle moves to her hometown of Gravigna in the winesoaked region of Chianti. Half Italian and half Irish, Nico finds himself able to get by in the region with the help of Rita’s relatives, but he still feels alone and out of place. He isn’t sure if it’s peace he’s seeking, but it isn’t what he finds. Early one morning, he hears a gunshot and a dog's cries near his cabin and walks out to discover a dead body in the woods, flashily dressed in gold tennis shoes.

An unidentified woman is found murdered on the North Norfolk Coastal Path and newly promoted Detective Sergeant Kate Brannon and Kings Lynn's CID have the task of figuring out whom, how, and why. A job that's made more difficult when every one of the 40 residents in the village has something to hide and answers her questions with a string of lies. Georgina Temple has her own secrets to keep, and her own reasons to keep them. But her growing attraction to Kate makes it increasingly difficult to keep them.

When a prostitute is found murdered in her bedsit, the Metropolitan police set to work finding the perpetrator of this brutal attack. DNA samples lead them straight to known-criminal George Marlow. The police think they've found their man, but things are not quite what they seem....

The charming village of Llanfair, the setting for Rhys Bowen's beloved Constable Evans mysteries, sits amid lush, rolling Welsh meadows populated with quaint cottages and is considered by many of its colorful locals to be a kind of paradise. Unfortunately, there aren't many opportunities for young people in Llanfair, so when an exciting and glamorous American woman breezes into town talking of dormant psychic powers and important social research, barmaid Betsy Edwards is quick to take her up on an offer of employment at the recently opened Sacred Grove New Age center not far away.

DI Clare Mackay receives a message from her boss, DCI Alastair Gibson, telling her to meet him in secret. She does as he asks and is taken to a secure location in the remote Scottish hills. There, she is introduced to ethical hacker Gayle Crichton and told about a critical security breach coming from inside Police Scotland. Clare already has her hands full keeping a key witness under protection and investigating the murder of a university student. When a friend of the victim is found preparing to jump off the Tay Road Bridge, it is clear he is terrified of someone.

Homicide Detective J. P. Beaumont had little to go on: a body, definitely male and decidedly dead, with strange little puncture wounds.

In this second book in the Frank Yakabuski Mystery series, Yakabuski is called in to investigate a gruesome crime scene. A body has been left hanging from a schoolyard fence. On closer inspection, Yak finds a large diamond in the murder victim’s mouth. Two criminal gangs - the Shiners and the Travellers - are fighting with each other, and Yakabuski turns to his father, a now-retired detective who has a long history with the gangs, for advice in the interrogation. And as if this weren’t enough for one detective, a serial killer is taking a deadly road trip through the United States.