Showing results by publisher "Isis Publishing Ltd" in Hard-Boiled

Oslo, New Year’s Eve. The annual firework celebration is rocked by an explosion, and the city is put on terrorist alert. Police officer Alexander Blix and blogger Emma Ramm are on the scene, and when a severely injured survivor is pulled from the icy harbour, she is identified as the mother of two-year-old Patricia Smeplass, who was kidnapped on her way home from kindergarten 10 years earlier and never found. Blix and Ramm join forces to investigate the unsolved case.

Insurance mathematician Henri Koskinen has just restored order in his life, as well as in the adventure park he now owns, when a man from the past appears—and turns everything upside down again. More problems arise when the park's equipment supplier is taken over by a shady trio: Why won't Suomen Leikki Ltd sell the new Moose Jump to Henri when he needs it for the park's main attraction? At the same time, Henri's relationship with the artist Laura Helanto is reaching a breaking point.

Alexander Blix is a broken man. Convicted for avenging his daughter's death, he is being held in one of Norway's high-security prisons. Inside, the other prisoners take every opportunity to humiliate the former police investigator. Outside, Blix's former colleagues are hunting for a terrifying killer. Walter Kroos has escaped from prison in Germany and is heading north. The only lead established by the police is that Kroos has a friend in Blix's prison ward. And now they need Blix's help.

As winter closes in and the roads snow over in Dawson City, Yukon, newly arrived journalist Jo Silver investigates the dubious suicide of a local politician and quickly discovers that not everything in the sleepy tourist town is what it seems. Before long, law enforcement begins treating the death as a possible murder, and Jo is the prime suspect.

Private detective Francis Quarles visits a man with a valuable collection of manuscripts written by murderers. During his stay, the man is killed after drinking cyanide-laced port. A cryptic literary clue in the front page of a book offers the only indication of who may be responsible. 

Retired police chief Piet Pieterse has been murdered, necklaced in fact. A tyre placed round his neck, doused with petrol, set alight. An execution from the apartheid era and one generally confined to collaborators. Who would target Pieterse this way, and why now? Veteran cop Schalk Lourens is trying to forget the past. But Pieterse was his old boss, and when Schalk is put on the case, he finds the past has a way of infecting the present.

SOCO Maya Barton is called to a canal where a heavily decomposed male body has been discovered. A bank card belonging to Trevor Dawlish is found in the cadaver's pocket, and the name matches that of a missing person. All seems straightforward - until Trevor's wife phones the police to say that Trevor has returned home, leaving Maya and the team wondering who the unknown male is. When it's revealed that the male was dead before he entered the water, Maya finds herself with a murder on her hands.

DI Owen Sheen vowed to his father never to return to Ireland. But years have passed, and Sheen needs answers to the questions he has surrounding his brother’s death. He is on loan from the Met under the belief he will be helping set up a new Historical Offences Team. On arrival to Ireland, plans change, and he finds himself partnered with newly promoted DC Aoife McCusker to work on her first appointed murder investigation.

Jimmy Suttle has barely got his feet under the desk at his new job. Having flown in the face of his superiors on his first big case he now finds himself trying to track down a hugely skilled killer before another innocent dies and before the media tear the force apart. Jimmy is facing a case that could end his career. And his life.

DI Joe Faraday, badly injured on holiday in the Middle East, is convalescing in the UK. Four deaths in a suspicious farmhouse fire drag him back to work before he’s truly fit. His partner, meanwhile, wants to adopt a young Palestinian child. Both privately and professionally, Faraday is under threat. Bazza Mackenzie, Pompey drug-lord, is facing financial meltdown as property markets collapse across the globe.

A boy’s body is found in bogland along the Irish border: a case as cold as the earth that has hidden it for so long. DI Owen Sheen has sworn to get justice for the unnamed boy and digs up links to a covert British Army unit that was tasked with creating Satanic panic in the 1970s. But when a vicious murderer begins to stalk Belfast’s streets, it’s clear that someone refuses to let the past remain buried.

After a lifetime of bad decisions, PI Caleb Zelic is finally making good ones. He's in therapy, his business is recovering and his relationship with his estranged wife, Kat, who is pregnant after a devastating history of miscarriages, is on the mend after heading for divorce. However, life has other plans in store for him. Soon Caleb is drawn into the tangled world of his troubled ex-partner Frankie, whose addictions had her working with criminals and endangering Kat - and this time their pairing leads to a confrontation with the cops.

Retired PSNI cop Tom ‘Tucker’ Rodgers has a cracked ballpoint pen, one second-class stamp and no time left. The best he can do is try to get a message to DI Owen Sheen. Sheen and DC Aoife McCusker are struggling with political agendas fed to them from the Chief Constable, and now the single note from the missing Tucker is preying on Sheen’s mind. A list of four dates and a cryptic message. Tucker says that they killed his friend and now they’re coming for him.

Bazza Mackenzie, Pompey’s top criminal, is now beyond reach of DI Joe Faraday. Hungry for power and profile, Bazza decides to stand for Portsmouth North in the general election. And his campaign is taking the city by storm. But politics is an expensive business and so Bazza turns to ex-cop Paul Winter to call in a multi-million pound drug debt. Winter, though, is facing a nightmare of his own and knows his time with Bazza has to end.

No one liked Jake Kinsey. A rich man, he turned up out of nowhere, acquired Exmouth’s trophy penthouse flat, and then bought his way into the local rowing club. And now he’s dead. D/S Jimmy Suttle, a newcomer to the Devon and Cornwall force from his old job on Major Crimes in Portsmouth, is the one detective who suspects that Kinsey has been killed. His boss, beset by budget cuts and the pressure of other cases, needs to move on. The enquiry is dead in the water.

Daisy Lane's fortunes take a spectacular fall when Roy decides to run his criminal empire from London. Without him, the punters disappear and so, too, does the cash. Still, Daisy can take comfort in the fact that her son Eddie is growing up to be as courageous as his late father was. But Eddie’s younger brother, Jamie, is a deeply disturbed young man. Meanwhile, there’s a killer at work in Gosport. It’s Daisy who spots this nasty Casanova at work. She takes it upon herself to have him apprehended - with devastating consequences.

A short story from the British Library Crime Classic collection Murder by the Book. A devotee of Sherlock Holmes and prominent Sherlockian scholar, S.C. Roberts wrote several works about Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective. In this story, Holmes and Watson are tasked with discovering who is stealing large quantities of books from the circulation library of a London club. With no clear suspect or motive, Holmes must rely on clues that are hidden in plain sight. 

Private detective Philip Trent, who first appeared in E.C. Bentley’s Golden Age crime classic The Woman in Black, is called upon to solve a mystery surrounding the will of a wealthy man with a particular appreciation for the work of Lewis Carroll. A string of literary clues leads Trent to suspect there was more to the man’s dying wishes than may have first appeared.

Private detective Nigel Strangeways attends a dinner with an elite group of detective fiction writers, known as The Assassins’ Club. A room full of crime enthusiasts seems like an amusing setting for a murder...until one happens at the dinner table. With no shortage of suspects capable of thinking up a murder plot, Strangeways must quickly deduce who in the room could be responsible for the crime.

A playwright is murdered, seemingly in connection with the suspected blackmail of his friend—a rising young MP who, without explanation, disappeared from public view before his untimely death. With a number of high-profile suspects to investigate, the key to solving the case rests on a written clue left behind by the killer....