Women Sleuths Detective

A shrill scream pierced the night air. She caught the fluttering bedroom curtain and held it aside. Her little sister stared over her shoulder, trembling. A figure they knew, in a dark coat and ski hat, emerged from the bushes and stared at the window. If they tried to stop him, they’d end up in the ground… When the skeletal remains of a teenage girl are discovered buried in a deserted graveyard it’s a chilling case for Detective Ellie Reeves. Her heart catches with emotion as she examines the grave for clues and uncovers a haunting detail.

When Detective Kim Stone rushes to the scene of a house fire, she’s shocked to discover it’s claimed the lives of two teenage children and their parents. But this tragedy is not quite as it seems. Each body is marked by a gunshot wound, and the mother, Helen Daynes, is holding the gun. The case sparks painful childhood memories for Kim, who suffered at the hands of her own abusive mother, but it just makes her more determined to uncover the truth. As Kim untangles Helen’s past, she finds a history of clinical depression. But did it drive Helen to murder her loved ones?

When two young girls disappear from their primary school, the village of Heighington is put on high alert—and not for the first time. Called in to investigate, Detective Karen Hart is sure that parallels with a previous disappearance are anything but coincidental. DS Hart is still reeling from a case she tried and failed to solve eighteen months ago, when a young woman vanished without a trace. She’s no nearer to the truth of what happened to Amy Fisher, but with two children missing now, too, the stakes have never been higher.

When a young woman is found murdered in the woods, Detective Mackenzie Price and her partner are first on the scene. The harrowing discovery leaves them both breathless—the victim’s left eye has been removed. Mackenzie identifies the victim as Whitney Smythe, a lost soul with troubled past, and makes another shocking discovery—Whitney recently gave birth. Reeling from the scene, Mackenzie and her team soon discover that this case is very similar to a murder that happened thirty years ago. But the killer was captured and died behind bars, so how can the two murders possibly be connected?

Detective Margot Phalen knows the mind of a serial killer better than most. She learned from the worst: her father, Ed Finch. When bodies keep appearing in the tranquil Muir Woods, California, and a woman is killed in Chinatown, Margot begins to realize these are no ordinary homicides. The eerie similarities to her infamous father's crimes send chills down her spine. But Ed’s been behind bars for years now—surely he couldn’t mastermind this from his cell, could he?

It's a stormy December morning when seal-watchers find the body on the beach at Winterton-on-Sea. His clothes have been torn to shreds on the rocks. The bright-orange life jacket didn't save him in the end. Detective Sara Hirst races to the scene. The washed-up body turns out to be a deckhand who got swept overboard in a storm.

Recently engaged and deeply ensconced in her third year of surgical residency in Chicago, Emily Hartford gets a shock when she is called home to Freeport, Michigan, the small town she fled a decade ago after the death of her mother. Her estranged father, the local medical examiner, has had a massive heart attack. At the hospital, she finds her father in near total denial of the seriousness of his condition. He insists that the best thing Emily can do to help him is to take on the autopsy of a senator's teen daughter whose sudden, unexplained death has just rocked the sleepy town.

On a bright Saturday in early spring, Detective Gemma Monroe responds to a missing person call at Lost Lake, near the small town of Cedar Valley, Colorado. With its sapphire waters and abundance of wildflowers, the lake is a popular camping destination in the summer. But for now, ice still grips the lake and snow buries the flowers.

When the body of a retired police superintendent is found murdered at Hull Fair, Detective Hollie Turner is thrust into a case that will force her to confront her own painful history. Twenty-five years ago, Hollie's university friend Moira vanished without a trace at the very same fairground. Now, as she investigates the superintendent's death, long-buried secrets from that fateful night begin to surface.

It’s Oscar night in Hollywood, and after years of climbing the entertainment ladder, media darling Meredith Johansen has finally taken home a gold statue. Across town, rookie Detective Patricia Norelli is working late with hopes of breaking through her own glass ceiling with a promotion in the LAPD. Their paths unexpectedly collide when Johansen is discovered dead in her Bel Air home, only hours after Oscar night festivities ended. With one note but few clues, authorities rule it a suicide; however, Norelli’s instinct says murder.

First-year detective Kathleen Doyle is a plucky Irish redhead of humble origins and modest means. Chief Inspector Michael Acton is her antithesis: a British lord turned cop. He's tall, handsome, and enigmatic - to a fault. He also has a knack for solving London's most high-profile crimes. Acton selects Doyle out of the newbie squad to partner with him on a series of investigations because she always knows when someone is lying - a trait that comes in handy when interviewing suspects and witnesses.

Narrated by acclaimed British actor Edward Petherbridge. On the eve of war, Sherlock Holmes is asked by the Prime Minister of England to recover a new British superweapon that has fallen into the wrong hands. But Lucy James, an actress and Holmes's recently discovered grown daughter, has inherited the family sleuthing skills and strong-willed nature. Despite her father's objections, she insists on helping him, although several horrific murders have been linked to the weapon's disappearance.

Narrated by acclaimed British actor Edward Petherbridge, The Last Moriarty is set in London, 1895. On a cold November morning, a young American actress visits 221B Baker Street, desperate for Sherlock Holmes to protect her from the threats of a mysterious, menacing man who has recently appeared in her life. Holmes agrees to help, even though he has just promised the Prime Minister to solve the murder of John D. Rockefeller's security agent before the incident can derail an upcoming British-American summit.

Stella Darnell is a cleaner. But when she isn't tackling dust and dirt and restoring order to chaos, Stella solves murders. Her latest case concerns a man convicted of killing his mistress. His daughter thinks he's innocent, and needs Stella to prove it. As Stella sifts through piles of evidence and interview suspects, she discovers a link between the recent murder and a famous case from forty years ago: the shocking death of six-year-old Sarah Ferris, killed in the shadows of an empty playground. Stella knows that dredging up the past can be dangerous.

Erin Coleridge's used bookstore in Kirkbymoorside, North Yorkshire, England, is a meeting place for the villagers and, in particular, for the local Jane Austen Society. At the Society's monthly meeting, matters come to a head between the old guard and its young turks. After the meeting breaks for tea, persuasion gives way to murder with extreme prejudice when president Sylvia Pemberthy falls dead to the floor. Poisoned? Presumably, but by whom? And was Sylvia the only target?

The death of Lake Williams, a former football player at Central Montana State, in his squalid tent in a homeless camp looks to Seagate and Miner like a routine heroin overdose. Soon, however, they discover that someone hired a courier to deliver the uncut heroin, knowing that Lake would shoot up and die instantly. When a second body turns up, and then a third, the evidence points to the head coach and the other leaders of the football program.

Paul Worthington just confessed to a murder that never happened. Magdalene Lynton died 40 years ago: a vivacious teenager who fell victim to a grotesque, accidental drowning. The coroner's office issued a verdict of death by misadventure and filed her case. The farming commune she'd lived within, splintered apart. Her body was left behind in a small, private cemetery encircled by acres of fallow ground. Until Paul Worthington confessed to her murder.

The sisters of Gwenafwy Abbey have cherished their contemplative life - days spent in prayer, reflection, tending the convent's vegetable gardens and making their award-winning organic cheese, Heavenly Gouda. Life seems perfect, except for Sister Agatha, a die-hard mystery fan who despairs of ever finding any real life inspiration for her own novel. That is, until the abbey's sexton is found dead under an avalanche of gouda. Despite the reservations of the local constable, Sister Agatha is convinced it's murder and the game is afoot.

Since she bought her rambling fixer-upper of a house, Jacobia Tiptree has gotten used to finding things broken. But her latest problem isn't so easily repaired. Along with the rotting floor joists and sagging support beams, there's the little matter of the dead man in Jake's storeroom, an ice pick planted firmly in his cranium. Jake's unknown guest turns out to be local boy turned billionaire Threnody McIlwaine.

Mma "Precious" Ramotswe sets up a detective agency in Botswana on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, making her the only female detective in the country. At first, cases are hard to come by. But eventually, troubled people come to Precious with a variety of concerns. Potentially philandering husbands, seemingly schizophrenic doctors, and a missing boy who may have been killed by witch doctors all compel Precious to roam about in her tiny van, searching for clues.