Traditional Police

Gin Sullivan is back in her small hometown of Trumbull, Pennsylvania, on an extended leave from her job at the Chicago medical examiner's office and rekindling an old flame with her high school sweetheart, Jake. Gin is readjusting to life at home when Jake receives harrowing news early one morning: the new housing development his construction firm is building has caught fire, and underneath one of the burnt homes is a dead body.

After being married for 25 years, I realized that I no longer wanted to be married. What should I do? The simple answer was file for divorce, but life was seldom that simple, and mine certainly wasn't. There was the house to consider, two cars, the jewelry - and the safe deposit box. I thought about the options and finally decided that murder was the best solution - not the easiest, but the best - and I knew just how to do it.

The Detective Story Club's first short story anthology is based around a London detective club and includes three newly discovered tales unpublished for 100 years, plus a story bearing an uncanny resemblance to a Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes story but written some seven years earlier.

London, April 1912. The third Irish Home Rule Bill is passing through Parliament, and the situation is growing ever more tense. Closely involved in the negotiations, cabinet minister Edmund Latimer finds himself under growing pressure, which only intensifies when his seven-month-old niece, Lucy, is snatched away in her pram in Regent's Park. Could there be a connection between Lucy’s kidnapping and the Irish talks? With her husband under intolerable strain, Edmund's wife, Alice, makes it her business to find out.

Peter Diamond is tasked to run security for a wedding. Seems a bit beneath his extraordinary detective talents, as well as his title as head of Bath's CID, but this isn't your run-of-the-mill ceremony: the bride and groom belong to families on opposite ends of the law - and someone is trying to sabotage the nuptials by taking out a hit on the father of the bride.

A wicked Scottish winter has just begun when pioneering female physician Sophia Jex-Blake calls on Detective Inspector Ian Hamilton to investigate the suspicious death of one of her patients - a railroad lineman who she believes succumbed to the horrific effects of arsenic poisoning. The most provocative aspect of the case doesn’t escape Hamilton: the married victim’s numerous sexual transgressions. Now, for the first time since the unexplained fire that killed his parents, Hamilton enters the Royal Infirmary to gain the insights of brilliant medical student Arthur Conan Doyle.

Detective Abish “Abbie” Taylor returned to the mountain town of Pleasant View, Utah, hoping for a quiet life. But that hope dissipates like a dream when she wakes up to an unsettling phone call. Arriving at the scene of a fatal car accident, she discovers that the victim was one of the most beloved leaders of the Church - and an old family friend.

The house called Sunset has been Marcia's summer home for her entire life. Both of her parents died there, and she and her brother spent their youth exploring its rambling hallways and seaside grounds. They love the old house, but Marcia's sister-in-law has never taken to it. Juliette loathes the sea, and soon comes to loathe her husband as well. After they divorce, Juliette pays a final visit to Sunset, demanding alimony. She is there for a few tense days before she disappears. It takes them a week to find her body.

Most days, the counters at Maish's Deli on Chicago's North Side are crowded with elderly Jewish men who trade stories and crack wise. But today, the mood at Maish's is grim. Someone has vandalized the local temple - the fifth in a row - and stolen a priceless Torah, and only Abe Lieberman can set things right. A veteran cop whose low-key attitude and sardonic humor conceal an intense commitment to justice, Lieberman is taking the break-in very personally - the synagogue's president just happens to be his wife.

Along the picturesque Belon River, home of the world famous oyster beds, between steep cliffs, ominous forests, and the Atlantic Ocean, a stubborn elderly film actress discovers a corpse. By the time Commissaire Dupin arrives at the scene, the body has disappeared. A little while later, he receives a phone call from the mystical hills of Monts d'Arree, where legends of fairies and the devil abound: Another unidentified body has turned up. Dupin quickly realizes this may be his most difficult and confounding case yet.

The old salt farmers have always said that the violet scent of the Fleur de Sel at harvest time on the salt marshes of the Guerande Peninsula has been known to cause hallucinations. Commissaire Dupin also starts to believe this when he's attacked out of the blue in the salt works. He had actually been looking forward to escaping his endless paperwork and taking a trip to the "white country" between the raging Atlantic Ocean and idyllic rivers.

When DS Josie Masters is called out to a house in North Oxford to investigate a serious incident, things take a personal turn. The body is Harry’s - her friend and former colleague. Josie thought Harry lived alone, but evidence suggests he’d had a lodger - a young woman who has fled the scene.

When two bodies are found sprawled at the bottom of the Devil's Kitchen in the mountains of Snowdonia, it looks like a murder-suicide. But something doesn't feel right to Detective Inspector Ian Drake, and his gut instinct has never let him down before. Drake suspects at least one of the deaths could be suspicious, but who would kill such an ordinary couple, and why? This might be Drake's first murder inquiry, but his years as a detective have taught him one thing - every murder has a motive, and every killer leaves a trace.

Brighton, 1882: Albert Moscrop spends his holiday peering at beachgoers through a telescope, piecing together disarmingly trivial observations into a compelling drama for his own amusement. A keen student of human nature, Moscrop concentrates his interest on one particular family - the Protheros, especially the beautiful Zena Prothero, whose husband appears to take her for granted. Moscrop gradually moves into the circle of the Prothero family, only to become involved in a sensational murder.

As a Category 3 hurricane bears down on Nantucket, Dionis Mather and her father have their work cut out for them. Their family business is to ferry goods and people back and forth from Tuckernuck, the private island off Nantucket’s western tip, a place so remote and exclusive that it is off the electric grid. As caretakers of the small plot of sand in the middle of the Atlantic, the Mathers are responsible for evacuating Tuckernuck’s residents, who range from an elderly native who refuses to leave her family home to the abandoned summer house pets of an absentee NFL quarterback.

Lucy Durmast waits patiently in front of the judge at her own murder trial, refusing to utter a single word. Kenneth Carline, an employee of her father's, was found poisoned to death after eating a meal that Lucy herself had prepared. Kenneth was set to marry another, and Lucy, it seems, was jealous. But what should have been an open-and-shut case of envy-driven murder becomes complicated when primary detective Trevor Porritt suffers permanent brain damage. C. D. Sloan inherits the file - and immediately begins poking holes in what looked like an airtight case.

Guillaume a disparu. Son cheval a été retrouvé sans cavalier. Au pays des lavandes et des chênes truffiers, cette disparition ne manque pas d'inquiéter sa famille et ses amis. Son oncle, Morin, débarque de Paris et de sa fraîche retraite pour aider à le retrouver. Rapidement, Morin se retrouve face à un mystère que ses années d'expérience à la P. J. ne lui permettent pas de découvrir : pas de nouvelle petite amie, pas de raison de fuguer, pas d'ennemis. Pas la moindre piste pour comprendre.

Sir Daniel Denton was NOT a nice man, and when his body is found in his study at Bywater Grange, shot through the back with his own pistol, no one sheds many tears. Scotland Yard Inspector Pinkey is sent to the country estate to investigate the crime, and quickly focuses his efforts on three suspects: the dead man's widow, Lady Adelaide Denton; his half-brother, Gerard Denton; and his secretary, Redwin, who'd recently been dismissed for "cooking" the accounts.

On the hottest day in living memory, Richard Mallory Tindall, the owner of a patent firm, does not return home to Cleete village. When a man is found crushed to death, Tindall's case goes from missing person to homicide. In the course of solving murder cases, Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan has seen all manner of ugly death. But there's something particularly gruesome about this one, the body crushed beneath the marble and iron of an old Saxon church tower. With rubble blocking off access to the crime scene, no one can get close enough to inspect the body.

After killing his wife and her lover, an unhinged and heavily armed Chicago cop named Bernie Shepard barricades himself at the top of a high-rise apartment building and sends a message to the police: Meet his demands, or he'll detonate enough explosives to blow the whole block sky high. If it's a choice between chewing the fat at his brother Maish's deli or hunting down armed lunatics, world-weary veteran cop Abe Lieberman knows where he stands. But no one's giving him a choice.