Action, Thriller & Crime

Winter in South Dakota. Blowing snow, icy roads, a tired driver. A bus skids and crashes and is stranded in a gathering storm. There's a small town twenty miles away, where a vulnerable witness is guarded around the clock. There's a strange stone building five miles further on, all alone on the prairie. There's a ruthless man who controls everything from the warmth of Mexico. Jack Reacher hitched...

In the tiny South African town of Jacob's Rest, detective Emmanuel Cooper is sent to investigate the murder of an Afrikaner police officer, Captain Willem Pretorius. Cooper, an 'English' South African, is viewed with suspicion by both the Boer Afrikaners and the dead man's prominent family. But as Cooper pursues his own inquiry, he discovers that Pretorius had led a deadly double life. The more...

Venetia Aldridge QC is a distinguished barrister. When she agrees to defend Garry Ashe, accused of the brutal murder of his aunt, it is one more opportunity to triumph in her career as a criminal lawyer. But just four weeks later, Miss Aldridge is found dead. Commander Adam Dalgliesh, called in to investigate, finds motives for murder among the clients Venetia has defended, her professional...

A half-starved young Russian man in a long black overcoat is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse round his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? He says his name is Issa. Annabel, an idealistic young German civil rights lawyer, determines to save Issa from deportation. Soon her client's survival becomes more important to her than her...

The new-look series of Miss Marple books for the 21st century. Rex Fortescue, king of a financial empire, was sipping tea in his 'counting house' when he suffered an agonising and sudden death. On later inspection, the pockets of the deceased were found to contain traces of cereals. Yet, it was the incident in the parlour which confirmed Jane Marple's suspicion that here she was looking at a case...

Joseph Vaughan's life has been dogged by tragedy. Growing up in the 1950s, he was at the centre of series of killings of young girls in his small rural community. The girls were taken, assaulted and left horribly mutilated. Barely a teenager himself, Joseph becomes determined to try to protect his community and classmates from the predations of the killer. Despite banding together with his...

Washington, embroiled in the mid-term elections, did not want to hear about serial killings. But when the newspapers reported a fourth murder, when they gave the killer a name and details of his horrendous crimes, there were few people that could ignore it. Detective Robert Miller is assigned to the case, and rapidly uncover a complication. The victims do not officially exist. Their personal...

This book includes an introduction by Mark Billingham. When Dr Watson ends up renting rooms in Baker Street with the eccentric Sherlock Holmes, he finds that he has let himself in for a great deal more than he imagined. He is called upon to help the budding detective solve a perplexing mystery, involving a dead body found in a locked room. Although the body shows no signs of having been attacked,...

Two men lie in a welter of blood in the vestry of St Matthew's Church, Paddington, their throats brutally slashed. One is Sir Paul Berowne, a baronet and recently resigned Minister of the Crown, the other an alcoholic vagrant. Dalgliesh and his team, set up to investigate crimes of particular sensitivity, are faced with a case of extraordinary complexity as they discover the Berowne family's...

Around the true story of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the 1840s is wound this tale of sexuality, cruelty and mystery. Was Grace Marks a female fiend? A femme fatale? Or a weak and unwilling victim? The accusation of murderess follows her "like a taffeta skirt along the floor".

A killer is stalking young lovers. Taking their lives ...and leaving just one tantalising clue ...When the bodies of young courting couples start turning up in remote woodlands areas, Dr Kay Scarpetta's task as Chief Medical Examiner is made more difficult by the effects of the elements. Eight times she must write that the cause of death is undetermined. But when the latest girl goes missing...

Summer, 1944 After almost five years of conflict, London's exhausted inhabitants, pounded by the menace of Hitler's V1 bombs, are living in a world of dereliction. War-weary DI Ted Stratton is no exception, but he cannot help being drawn in by his latest case. Called on to investigate when a doctor is found dead in Fitzrovia's Middlesex Hospital, Stratton soon realizes that someone involved is...

In 1944, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs were charged as accessories to murder. One of their friends, Lucien Carr, had stabbed another, David Kammerrer, whose sexual advances he'd seemingly grown tired of rejecting. Carr, still in bloodstained clothes, had come to each of them and confessed; Kerouac helped him get rid of the weapon - neither told the police. For this failing they were...

On an icy January day the Reykjavik police are called to a block of flats where a body has been found in the garden: a young, dark-skinned boy, frozen to the ground in a pool of his own blood. The discovery of a stab wound in his stomach extinguishes any hope that this was a tragic accident. Erlendur and his team embark on their investigation with little to go on but the news that the boy's Thai...

A foundered Victorian ship looking for the fabled Northwest Passage holds a secret in its icy grave ...When Dirk Pitt of NUMA is almost blown to pieces in a lab explosion, he suspects sabotage. The lab in question belongs to a scientist hoping to use a rare mineral to combat greenhouse gases - but who would want to destroy our one chance to save the planet? But there are those who will do...

It is 1913 and ex-soldier turned professional big game hunter, Leon Courtney, is in British East Africa guiding rich and powerful men from America and Europe on safaris in the Masai tribe territories. One of his clients, German industrialist Count Otto Von Meerbach, has a company which builds aircraft and vehicles for the Kaiser's burgeoning army. But Leon had not bargained for falling...

The new-look series of Miss Marple books for the 21st century. When Miss Marple comes up from the country for a holiday in London, she finds what she's looking for at Bertram's Hotel: traditional decor, impeccable service and an unmistakable atmosphere of danger behind the highly polished veneer. Yet, not even Miss Marple can foresee the violent chain of events set in motion when an eccentric...

He's a doctor with a past...He's a hit man with a conscience...And he's got 24 hours to beat the reaper. Meet Peter Brown, a young Manhattan hospital intern with an unusual past that is just about to catch up with him. His morning begins with the quick disarming of a would-be mugger, followed by the steamy elevator encounter with a young female pharmaceutical rep, topped off by a visit with a new...

The terrifying new psychological thriller featuring Tony Hill, criminal profiler and hero of TV's Wire in the Blood. The race is on to uncover the identity of a murderer with nothing to lose -- and everything to kill for. When Robbie Bishop, star midfielder for the Bradfield Vics, is poisoned by a rare and deadly toxin, profiler Dr Tony Hill and trusted colleague DCI Carol Jordan have their work...

Twelve-year-old Steven Lamb digs holes on Exmoor, hoping to find a body. Every day after school, while his classmates swap football stickers, Steven goes digging to lay to rest the ghost of the uncle he never knew, who disappeared aged eleven and is assumed to have fallen victim to the notorious serial killer Arnold Avery. Only Steven's Nan is not convinced her son is dead. She still waits for...

When Chicago Private Investigator V.I. Warshawski checks out reports of an intruder at derelict Larchmont Hall, she doesn't expect to stumble over a dead man. But the murdered journalist is about to lead V.I. deep into the heart of a dark mystery, involving a terrified young Muslim boy, two of Chicago's most powerful families, and a generation of shameful secrets political and sexual. It seems...

When Sienna Hegarty turns up at his family home one night, covered in blood and frozen in shock, psychologist Joe O'Loughlin finds himself drawn deep into her world, trying to unearth the dark secrets her mind has buried. The police find a major piece of the puzzle at Sienna's house: her father, a retired cop, is face-down in a pool of his own blood, his throat slashed and his skull caved in. The...

The new Logan McRae thriller set in gritty Aberdeen, from the bestselling author of Cold Granite and Flesh House. Aberdeen's growing Polish community is under attack from a serial offender who leaves mutilated victims to be discovered on building sites -- eyes gouged out and the sockets burned. Detective Sergeant Logan McRae is assigned to the investigation, codenamed Operation Oedipus, but with...

Alice Ferry is a retired Wellington scientist, a mycologist (fungi is her thing). One day a young man knocks on her door. Adrian is a great-nephew she never knew she had, the grandson of her brother Gordon. As her story unfolds we learn of her childhood with Gordon in West Auckland and of the divergent paths their lives have taken. While Alice has gone on to have a successful career, Gordon has...

The spine-chilling serial killer thriller featuring Carson Ryder - the homicide detective with a hidden secret that could destroy his career These brothers have murder in their veins. Detective Carson Ryder's sworn duty is to track killers down. He's never revealed the fact that his brother, Jeremy, is one of America's most notorious killers -- now imprisoned. Secretly, Ryder has used Jeremy's...

In the small village of Hawkins Hollow, three best friends who share the same birthday sneak off into the woods for a sleepover the evening before turning 10. But a night of celebration turns into a night of horror as their blood brother oath unleashes a three-hundred-year-old curse.Twenty-one years later, Cal Hawkins and his friends have seen their town plagued by a week of unexplainable evil...

When a dead body is found in a North London flat, it seems like a straightforward domestic murder until a bloodstained sliver of X-ray is found clutched in the dead woman's fist - and it quickly becomes clear that this case is anything but ordinary. DI Thorne discovers that the victim's mother had herself been murdered fifteen years before by infamous serial killer Raymond Garvey. The hunt to...

When hordes of eighteen-year-old schoolies descend on the Mornington Peninsula to celebrate the last of their exams, the overstretched police of Waterloo expect reports of party drugs and underage drinkers. Maybe even drink-spiking and sexual assault. They don't count on a brutal bashing that attracts political attention. The victim is connected, and now Detective Inspector Hal Challis is facing...

After her resignation as Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner and the horrifying events which threatened her life in THE LAST PRECINCT, Kay Scarpetta has abandoned her elegant home in Richmond and is quietly living in Florida, beginning to get some balance back in her life and slowly establishing herself as a private forensic consultant. But her past won't let her rest, and her grief for Benton...

A twelve-year-old girl and her younger brother go on the run in the woods of northern Idaho, pursued by four men they have just watched commit murder - four men who know exactly who William and Annie are, and where their desperate mother is waiting for news of her children's fate.The kids soon find they don't know whom they can trust among their L.A. transplant neighbors, including hundreds of...

A reclusive writer is dead. And her final manuscript has disappeared ...Someone is stalking Beryl Madison. Someone who spies on her and makes threatening, obscene phone-calls. Terrified, Beryl flees to Key West - but eventually she must return to her Richmond home. The very night she arrives, Beryl inexplicably invites her killer in ...Thus begins for Dr Kay Scarpetta the investigation of a crime...

An Alex Delaware thriller -- compulsive, intriguing and unputdownable A woman's body is found in marshland outside LA. By the next morning the police have discovered the decaying corpses of three more women. They were all prostitutes except for the most recent victim; a classically trained pianist employed by a wealthy family, Selena Bass seems out of place in the grim tableau. Psychologist Alex...

The 'book of the dead' is the morgue log, the ledger in which all cases are entered by hand. For Kay Scarpetta, however, it is about to have a new meaning. Fresh from her bruising battle with a psychopath in Florida, Scarpetta decides it's time for a change of pace. Moving to the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, she opens a unique private forensic pathology practice, one in which she...

Captain Bruno Courreges goes by the grand title of Chief of Police, though in truth he's the only municipal policeman on staff in the small town of St Denis in the beautiful Perigord region of south west France. Bruno sees his job as protecting St Denis from its enemies, and these include the capital's bureaucrats and their EU counterparts in Brussels. Today is market day in the ancient town....

A cargo ship is apprehended by the authorities off the coast of Spain, loaded to the gunwales with enough arms and ammunition to start a war ...Twenty years later, an unknown aggressor seems intent on eradicating those responsible for the treachery, one by one. The last victim was brutally tortured with a Black & Decker drill, then shot through the head. And Nick Stone - ex-SAS, tough,...

Luke Mullen, sixteen-year-old son of a former high-ranking police officer, has disappeared, presumed kidnapped. While no-one quite dares to voice the fear that he could also be presumed dead, Detective Inspector Tom Thorne is brought in to beef up the squad dedicated to locating the missing boy. The first thing the team looks for is anyone with a grudge against Luke's father, a man who has put a...

An old woman in a nursing home speaks of a child buried behind the fireplace...When Tommy and Tuppence visited an elderly aunt in her gothic nursing home, they thought nothing of her mistrust of the doctors; after all, Ada was a very difficult old lady. But when Mrs Lockett mentioned a poisoned mushroom stew and Mrs Lancaster talked about 'something behind the fireplace', Tommy and Tuppence found...

It is barely three months since the murder of his wife and Thomas Lynley takes to the South-West Coast Path in Cornwall, determined to walk its length in an attempt to distract himself from his loss. On the forty-third day of this walk, he sees a cliff climber fall to his death, apparently witnessed by a surfer in a nearby cove. Shortly afterwards, Lynley encounters a young woman from Bristol...

From the internationally NO.1 bestselling master of suspense comes a fast-paced, emotion-packed novel about guilt, grief, and our capacity to forgive. Seventeen-year-old Haley McWaid is a good girl, the pride of her suburban New Jersey family, captain of the lacrosse team, headed off to college next year with all the hopes and dreams her doting parents can pin on her. Which is why, when her...

An investigative reporter is found dead in Virginia's icy waters ...New Year's Eve and the final murder scene of Virginia's bloodiest year takes Scarpetta thirty feet below the Elizabeth River's icy surface. A diver, Ted Eddings, is dead, an investigative reporter who was a favourite at the Medical Examiner's office. Was Eddings probing the frigid depths of the Inactive Shipyard for a story, or...

Some secrets won't stay buried ...A standard exhumation becomes anything but for private investigator Theodore Tate when bodies begin bubbling to the surface of the cemetery lake. Tate knows he has to let it go and let his former colleagues in the police deal with it. But when the coffin is opened and its occupant is not the old man supposed to be inside, he knows he cannot walk away. But he...

This thriller by the author of "The Hunt for Red October" and "The Cardinal of the Kremlin" is set in Colombia where drug lords have assassinated the American Ambassador and the head of the FBI.

This title is set in 1976, in war-torn Beirut. Under the cover of a massive firefight, an unknown band of armed men blast their way into the Imperial Bank of Beirut. Over the next 48 hours they load up three trucks with gold bullion, and the raiders and the loot disappear forever. Two weeks earlier, a young SAS Major newly arrived in The Regiment had tasked his men with scoping out just such a...

When you find the body of your murdered lover, what do you do? Bonnie Graham calls her best friend and asks for help getting rid of it. But is that the action of an innocent woman? Bonnie is devastated by the death of Hayden, an enigmatic musician with a mysterious, unknown past. And hiding her part in his disappearance is taking its toll. How much longer can she keep up appearances before she...

Vanda Symon's third novel features the feisty young policewoman Sam Shephard who was the central character in her two previous books Overkill and The Ringmaster. In Containment, Sam is training as a detective at Dunedin Central when she is assigned to investigate what seems to be a routine diving accident off the Otago coast. But the forensics reveal that the man didn't die from drowning. And...

St Cedd's Church fete had been held in the grounds of Martingale manor house for generations. As if organizing stalls, as well as presiding over luncheon, the bishop and the tea tent, were not enough for Mrs Maxie on that mellow July afternoon, she also had to contend with the news of her son's sudden engagement to her new parlour maid, the sly single mother, Sally Jupp. On the following morning...

1st May 1926 Dear Alec, Just when those who should be working are all downing tools for this wretched strike (and I still can't believe it - I mean to say: riots, Alec - in Edinburgh of all places) guess who is setting her virgin shoulder to its very first wheel? I am dressed in serge and sensible footwear, sleeping in an iron bed and dining off pickled tongue at six o'clock each day. I am, in...

Allan Prime looked ready to die of fright, even before the bright, shining spear with the blood-soaked tip reached his head ...The death mask of the poet Dante is to be exhibited at the premiere of a controversial new film, "Inferno". But at the grand unveiling this priceless artefact is replaced by a macabre death mask of the film's star, Allan Prime. Minutes later the leading actress,...

Dexter Morgan isn't exactly the kind of man you'd bring home to your mum. At heart, he's the perfect gentleman: he has a shy girlfriend, and seems to lead a quiet, normal life bordering on the mundane. Despite the fact that he can't stand the sight of blood, he works as a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami police. But Dexter also has a secret hobby: he is an accomplished serial killer. So far,...

Re-inventing the spy story for the 21st Century. John Le Carre meets Jason Bourne! Daniel Marchant, a suspended MI6 officer, is running the London Marathon. He is also running out of time. A competitor is strapped with explosives. If he drops his pace, everyone around him will be killed, including the US ambassador to London. Marchant tries to thwart the attack, but is he secretly working for the...