Fiction - Fiction - Crime

Friday rush hour, Auckland city. A lone shooter fires across a packed street and kills a man. Detective Sergeant Sean Devereaux is assigned the case. He's not complaining - his Friday nights are seldom better spent. But the inquiry is not straightforward. Witness accounts are conflicting. The dead man appears to be an unintended victim, with the true target unknown. It's a homicide that leaves police with no initial suspects and no apparent motive. Devereaux's former colleague, John Hale, is in no position to help. Hale is on his o... read more

Glen Barber isn't the only person in the small town of Milford with things on his mind. The recession has been bad for his construction business, especially after a mysterious fire destroys one of his buildings. But everyone else in Milford seems to have problems too, as the financial pressures begin to pinch. Glen's troubles, however, are about to escalate to a whole new level. His wife Sheila has her own plans for getting them out of their financial jam, but these come to an abrupt halt when her car is found at the scene o... read more

A boy is lying on the floor of an Oslo apartment. He is bleeding and will soon die. In order to place his life and death in some kind of context he begins to tell his story. Outside, the church bells toll. Autumn. Former police inspector Harry Hole returns to Oslo after three years abroad. He seeks out his old boss at Police Headquarters to request permission to investigate a homicide. But the case is already closed: the young junkie was in all likelihood shot dead by a fellow addict. Yet, Harry is granted permission to visit the b... read more

This is a spellbinding, sui generis, detective fiction focusing on the swirling vortex of sex, death, and intrigue surrounding a beautiful Spanish figure skating champion. Rife with political corruption, sex, jealousy and frustrated passion, "The Skating Rink" is a darkly atmospheric chronicle of one summer season in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona. The story revolves around the beautiful figure-skating champion Nuria Marti. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team a besotted admirer builds a... read more

A BRUTALISED VICTIM IN THE WILDS - A solitary tent is found to contain the body of a half-buried woman. She's been stoned to death. There are lash marks across her back. One of her hands has been cut off. A LONE VOICE - Two years earlier internet reporter Henning Juul lost his son, Jonas, in a domestic fire. As he returns to work, physically and emotionally scarred, Henning struggles to escape this past and to be taken seriously again as a reporter - by his colleagues, his ex-wife and the police. A MYSTERY IGNITED - Told to cover... read more

Night is falling as murder detective Jack Caffrey arrives to interview the distraught victim of a car-jacking. What he hears horrifies him. The car was taken by force, and on the back seat was a passenger. An eleven-year-old girl. Who is still missing. Before long the jacker starts to communicate with the police. And Caffrey becomes certain that he is planning to take another car. And another child. Who is the car-jacker? How is he choosing his targets? And - most urgent of all - can Caffrey find the child? Before it's too late...

1950's Ireland. As a deep, bewildering fog cloaks Dublin, a young woman is found to have vanished. When Phoebe Griffin, still haunted by the horrors of her past, is unable to discover news of her friend; Quirke, fresh from drying out in an institution, responds to his daughter's request for help. But as Phoebe, Quirke and Inspector Hackett speak with those who knew April, they begin to realise that there may have been more behind the young woman's discretion and secrecy than they could have imagined. And while Quirke finds h... read more

Malcolm Fox returns in the stunning second novel in Ian Rankin's new series...
Malcolm Fox and his team from Internal Affairs are back. They've been sent to Fife to investigate whether fellow cops covered up for a corrupt colleague, Detective Paul Carter. Carter has been found guilty of misconduct with his own uncle, also in the force, having proved to be his nephew's nemesis. But what should be a simple job is soon complicated by intimations of conspiracy and cover-up - and a brutal murder, a murder committed with a weapon... read more

It is snowing, she's barefoot, but Galya runs. Her captors are close behind her, and she won't go back there, no matter what. Tricked into coming to Belfast with the offer of a good job, all she wants now is to go home to her family. Her only hope is a man who gave her a cross on a fine chain and a phone number, telling her to call if she escapes. He seems kind. She puts herself at his mercy, knowing she has nowhere else to turn. Detective Inspector Jack Lennon wants a quiet Christmas with his daughter. When an apparent turf war be... read more

At the heart of French gastronomy lies the famed black truffle of the Perigord. But France's truffles are being adulterated with cheaper ones from China, and it seems that Chinese organised crime is behind the fraud. In St Denis market, a Vietnamese family has been selling their dishes for years, until their stall is wrecked by attackers who look Chinese. Again it appears that organised crime is behind the outrage, firing the opening shots of a Viet-Chinese triad war. When vicious murder, illegal immigration and the importation of ... read more

Monday, the lowest point of the week. A day of dark impulses. A day to snatch a child from the streets... The abduction of five-year-old Matthew Farraday provokes national outcry and a desperate police hunt. And when his face is splashed over the newspapers, psychotherapist Frieda Klein is left troubled: one of her patients has been relating dreams in which he has a hunger for a child. A child he can describe in perfect detail, a child the spitting image of Matthew. Detective Chief Inspector Karlsson doesn't take Frieda's c... read more

Under the Gun is the long-awaited sequel to the bestselling novel, Gun Shy, continuing the story of St. Paul Police Officers Dez Reilly and Jaylynn Savage. Picking up just a couple weeks after Gun Shy ended, the sequel finds the two officers continuing to adjust to their relationship, but things start to go downhill when they get dispatched to a double homicide - Jaylynn's first murder scene. Dez is supportive and protective toward Jay, and things seem to be going all right until Dez's nemesis reports their personal relationship, a... read more

The third psychological thriller from No 1 bestselling Swedish crime sensation Camilla Lackberg. The remote resort of Fjallbacka has seen its share of tragedy, though perhaps none worse than that of the little girl found in a fisherman's net. But the post-mortem reveals that this is no case of accidental drowning! Local detective Patrik Hedstrom has just become a father. It is his grim task to discover who could be behind the methodical murder of a child both he and his partner, Erica, knew well. He knows the real question - and... read more

Time has moved on for Quirke, the world-weary Dublin pathologist first encountered in Christine Falls. It is the middle of the 1950s, that low, dishonourable decade; a woman he loved has died, a man whom he once admired is dying, while the daughter he for so long denied is still finding it hard to accept him as her father. When Billy Hunt, an acquaintance from college days, approaches him about his wife's apparent suicide, Quirke recognises trouble but, as always, trouble is something he cannot resist. Slowly he is drawn into a twi... read more

Whether it be the London of Sherlock Holmes or the Ystad of the Swedish Wallander, Dashiell Hammett's San Francisco or Donna Leon's Venice, the settings chosen by crime fiction authors have helped those writers to bring their fictional investigators to life and to infuse their writing with a sense of danger and mystery. "Following the Detectives" follows the trail of over 20 of crime fiction's greatest investigators, discovering the cities and countries in which they live and work. Edited by one of the leading voices in crime ficti... read more

It's Moscow, 1936 and Stalin's Great Terror is beginning. In a deconsecrated Church, a young woman is found dead, her mutilated body displayed on the altar for all to see. Captain Alexei Dimitrevich Korolev of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Moscow Militia, is asked to investigate. But when he discovers that the victim is an American citizen, the NKVD - the most feared organisation in Russia - becomes involved. As more bodies are discovered and the pressure from above builds, Korolev begins to question who he can trust; ... read more

Celeste is thirteen years old. The only thing that really matters to her is the wild animals of her homeland - the Laurentian Mountains in Canada - which are dying out, one by one. She has spent recent years quietly fighting the local hunters and poachers, but they've finally caught up with her, beaten her to a pulp and left her for dead. When a wanderer by the name of Nile, who is hiding out, escaping the law in the US, finds her in a ditch, she is barely breathing. Through a drug-fuelled haze, he nurses Celeste back to health and... read more

The gritty new standalone crime novel from the No. 1 bestselling author of Shatter the Bones and Dark Blood. Detective Constable Ash Henderson has a dark secret! Five years ago his daughter, Rebecca, went missing on the eve of her thirteenth birthday. A year later the first card arrived: homemade, with a Polaroid picture stuck to the front - Rebecca, strapped to a chair, gagged and terrified. Every year another card: each one worse than the last. The tabloids call him The Birthday Boy. He's been snatching girls for twelve years, al... read more

Through years of success in Hollywood composing music for Oscar-winning films, Chris Lowndes always imagined he would come full circle, home to Yorkshire with his beloved wife Laura. Now he's back in the Yorkshire Dales, but Laura is dead, and Chris needs to make a new life for himself. The isolated house he buys sight unseen should give him the space to come to terms with his grief and the quiet to allow him to work. Kilnsgate House turns out to be rather more than he expected, however. A man died there, sixty years ago. His wife ... read more

One fateful summer morning in 1986, two eleven-year-old girls meet for the first time and by the end of the day are charged with murder. Twenty-five years later, journalist Kirsty Lindsay is reporting on a series of sickening attacks on young female tourists in a seaside town when her investigation leads her to interview funfair cleaner Amber Gordon. For Kirsty and Amber, it's the first time they've seen each other since that dark day when they were just children. But with new lives - and families - to protect, will they really be ... read more