Woman Detective Mysteries

Deputy Mattie Cobb is in a dark place and has withdrawn from Cole Walker and his family to work on issues from her past. When she and her K-9 partner, Robo, get called to track a missing junior high student, they find the girl dead on Smoker's Hill behind the high school, and Mattie must head to the Walker home to break the bad news. But that's only the start of trouble in Timber Creek because soon another girl goes missing - and this time it's one of Cole's daughters.

Meg's neighbors, the Smetkamps', have won a makeover for their old home from Marvelous Mansions, a flashy, yet dubious company, focused on making historic homes more "modern." The company already several days into its makeover of the Smetkamps' house, and tensions are running high—not only between the officious, demanding Mrs. Smetkamp and her neighbors, but also between her and the renovation crew.

Recently transferred to the London borough of Camden from Scotland Yard headquarters, Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and his new murder investigation team are called to a deadly bombing at historic St. Pancras Station. By fortunate coincidence, Melody Talbot, Gemma's trusted colleague, witnesses the explosion. The victim was taking part in an organized protest, yet the other group members swear the young man only meant to set off a smoke bomb.

With the country in the grip of economic malaise, and worried about her business, Maisie Dobbs is relieved to accept an apparently straightforward assignment from an old friend to investigate certain matters concerning a potential land purchase. Her inquiries take her to a picturesque village in Kent during the hop-picking season, but beneath its pastoral surface she finds evidence that something is amiss. Mysterious fires erupt in the village with alarming regularity, and a series of petty crimes suggests a darker criminal element at work.

August 1911. Emily Hardcastle and her inimitable lady’s maid Florence Armstrong are enjoying a fine summer until Harry, Lady H’s brother, turns up out of the blue with a mystery for them to solve. A routine parachute test at a local aeroplane factory has gone horribly wrong - with pilot Dickie Dupree plummeting to his death. Harry is certain there is more to this ‘tragic accident’ than meets the eye, having discovered that someone at the airfield is leaking top secret intelligence to foreign rivals.

Out of bail skippers and rent money, Stephanie Plum throws caution to the wind and follows in the entrepreneurial bootsteps of Super Bounty Hunter, Ranger, engaging in morally corrupt and marginally legal enterprises. So, a scumbag blows himself to smithereens on her first day of policing a crack house and the sheik she was chauffeuring stole the limo. But hey, nobody’s perfect!

Seven years ago, Mia Briscoe was at a college frat rave with her best friend, Serena, when a fire broke out. Everyone was accounted for except Serena, who was never seen nor heard from again. Now an investigative journalist covering the political scene in New York City, Mia discovers old photos taken the night of Serena’s disappearance and begins to uncover a sinister string of events going all the way back to that disastrous party. Working with Sherlock, the secrets begin to unravel.

When the body of a young woman is found, tied to her bed and the victim of a brutal attack in her own home, Detective Morgan Brookes is sickened by what she finds as she searches the house, and unprepared for the nightmares it inspires about her childhood. When the DNA collected gives a positive ID, Morgan can’t wait to put the attacker behind bars. But the person it matches to is already in prison. How could the DNA of someone who has been locked up for over 20 years have shown up in Morgan’s crime scene? And then they make another close match - to Morgan herself.

Upon finding a mysterious note at the scene of an accident, spunky Ann Beddingfeld throws caution to the wind and sets sail for an adventure to South Africa. She gets more thrills than she bargained for when she finds herself embroiled in a crooked diamond scheme, a murder, and in the clutches of the mysterious “Colonel".

Casey Duncan, Rockton's only detective on a police force of three, has already faced murder, arson, and falling in love in the several months she's lived there. Yet even she didn't think it would be possible for an outsider to locate the town and cause trouble in the place she's come to call home. When a US marshal shows up demanding the release of one of the residents but won't say who, Casey and her boyfriend, Sheriff Eric Dalton, are skeptical. And yet only hours later, the marshal is shot dead, and the only possible suspects are the townspeople and Casey's estranged sister....

Feisty, passionate Beatrice Steele has never fit the definition of a true lady, according to the strict code of conduct that reigns in Swampshire, her small English township—she is terrible at needlework, has absolutely no musical ability, and her artwork is so bad it frightens people. Nevertheless, she lives a perfectly agreeable life with her marriage-scheming mother, prankster father, and two younger sisters— beautiful Louisa and forgettable Mary. But she harbors a dark secret: She is obsessed with the true crime cases she reads about in the newspaper.

Amelia and Emerson leave the calm of Victorian England in search of an estranged father's son and a lost kingdom buried deep in Sudan.

When private detective Agatha Raisin comes across a severed leg in a roadside hedge, it looks like she is about to become involved in a particularly gruesome murder. Looks, however, can be deceiving, as Agatha discovers when she is employed to investigate a case of industrial espionage at a factory where nothing is quite what it seems. The factory mystery soon turns to murder and a bad-tempered donkey turns Agatha into a national celebrity, before bringing her ridicule and shame.

Alexander McCall Smith’s internationally best-selling and award-winning series starring Botswana’s leading lady detective continues with this 11th charming tale. Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi travel to the Okavango Delta to visit a safari lodge beset by unexplained events. There they are awestruck by the breathtaking scenery, but also troubled by the region’s many difficulties—not the least of which is the occasional grumpy hippopotamus.

In the past... On a blisteringly hot August afternoon in Crystal Palace, once home to the tragically destroyed Great Exhibition, a solitary 13-year-old boy meets his next-door neighbor, a recently widowed young teacher hoping to make a new start in the tight-knit South London community. Drawn together by loneliness, the unlikely pair forms a deep connection that ends in a shattering act of betrayal. In the present... On a cold January morning in London, Detective Inspector Gemma James is back on the job....

A bomb threat at Middlehampton’s Powerhouse music venue sends DS Kat Ballantyne spiralling into a nightmare—her husband and son are inside. As the city reels in terror, Kat fights to keep her family safe while being pulled into another deadly case that may well be connected… A journalist investigating a controversial football club takeover makes a chilling 999 call before collapsing. Hours later, he’s dead. His apparent murder marks the beginning of a dangerous trail of corruption leading to a foreign royal family. Or is the killer closer to home?

After years of bullying and cajoling others as a high-flying public relations boss, Agatha Raisin’s early retirement to the picture-postcard village of Carsley in the Cotswolds is a dream come true. And how better to begin making herself a local leading light than by entering the village quiche-making competition? Unburdened by old-fashioned ideas of fair play, the ruthless Agatha decides to ensure she wins by buying her entry from a London delicatessen.

"G" Is for Gumshoe: Kinsey Millhone's 33 birthday brings about final renovations to her apartment, a new case, and the top slot on Tyrone Patty's hit list. "H" Is for Homicide To the cops, the death of claims adjuster Parnell Perkins looked like a robbery gone sour; to Kinsey Millhone, it looks strangely suspicious. "I" Is for Innocent Kenneth Voight thought that justice had not been served when David Barney was acquitted in the shooting death of Voight's ex-wife, Isabelle. Five years later, Voight is the plaintiff in a civil suit in which Barney stands accused of Isabelle's wrongful death.

Ruby Young's new Boston apartment comes with all the usual perks. Windows facing the brick wall of the next-door building. Heat that barely works. A malfunctioning buzzer. Noisy neighbors. A dead body on the sidewalk outside. And of course, a ghost. Since Cordelia Graves died in her apartment a few months ago, she's kept up her residency, despite being bored out of her (non-tangible) skull and frustrated by her new roommate. When her across-the-hall neighbor, Jake Macintyre, is shot and killed in an apparent mugging gone wrong outside their building, Cordelia is convinced there’s more to it.

For an instant the two trains ran together, side by side. In that frozen moment, Elspeth witnessed a murder. Helplessly, she stared out of her carriage window as a man remorselessly tightened his grip around a woman's throat. The body crumpled. Then the other train drew away. But who, apart from Miss Marple, would take her story seriously? After all, there were no suspects, no other witnesses...and no corpse. This title was previously published as What Mrs. McGrillicuddy Saw!