The story opens with the apparently accidental drowning of a sixth form student in the Norfolk countryside. As a matter of routine, or so it seems, the case passes across the desk of Detective Sergeant Smith, recently returned to work after an internal investigation into another case that has led to tensions between officers at Kings Lake police headquarters. As an ex-DCI, Smith could have retired by now, and it is clear that some of his superiors wish that he would do so.

After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, creditors are calling, and after a breakup with his longtime girlfriend, he’s living in his office. Then John Bristow walks through his door with a shocking story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry - known to her friends as the Cuckoo - famously fell to her death a few months earlier.

Detective Sergeant Chris Waters got the call at 05.29 that July morning. This is it, said DCI Reeve, you'll be first there, it's all yours, you're the crime scene manager. Suddenly, after months of waiting and wondering, Waters finds himself in at the deep end, and alone at the scene of a puzzling murder. As the investigation proceeds, the detectives at Kings Lake Central find themselves visiting familiar places and talking to some familiar faces, while old enmities reappear in the incident room. Before this is over, Chris Waters will need to make a career-changing decision.

Profoundly deaf since early childhood, Caleb has always lived on the outside - watching and picking up tell-tale signs people hide in a smile, a cough or a kiss. When a childhood friend is murdered, a sense of guilt and a determination to prove his own innocence sends Caleb on a hunt for the killer. But he can’t do it alone....

As the third wave of the virus hits, all inhabitants of Melbourne are given until 8pm to get to their homes. Wherever they are when the curfew hits, they must live for four weeks and stay within a 5km radius. When Lou’s son Samuel doesn’t arrive home by nightfall she begins to panic. He doesn’t answer his phone. He doesn’t message. His social media channels are inactive. Lou is out of her mind with worry, but she can’t go to the police, because she has secrets of her own. Secrets that Samuel just can’t find out about. Lou must find her son herself and bring him home.

Gemma Hayden has returned to her hometown of Alice Springs for a new job as a primary school teacher. It's been six years since her family broke apart following the disappearance of her twin brother. And the scars still run deep. Hard on the heels of her homecoming, Saul Pearce, the man she once loved, is reposted from Parks and Wildlife in Darwin back to Alice. When an old car wreck is uncovered, washed down the river to Ruby Gap, Saul investigates only to find that the wreck belonged to Ethan, Gemma's twin - and there's a coded note for her in the glovebox.

1987: It's late summer and a time of change when a 17-year-old girl leaves the local shopping center in the sleepy town of Lowbridge and is never seen again. Her unsolved disappearance is never far from the town's memory. There's those who grew up in the shadow of her loss whose own lives were altered forever, and those who know more than they're saying. It just takes an outsider to ask the right questions.

DS George Cross can be rude, difficult and awkward with people. But his unfailing logic and dogged pursuit of the truth means his conviction rate is the best on the force. So when his police colleagues dismiss the death of a man as a squabble among Bristol's homeless community, Detective Sergeant George Cross is not convinced.

Northern Ireland, spring 1981. Hunger strikes, riots, power cuts, a homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera, and a young woman’s suicide that may yet turn out to be murder: on the surface, the events are unconnected, but then things—and people—aren’t always what they seem. Detective Sergeant Duffy is the man tasked with trying to get to the bottom of it all. It’s no easy job—especially when it turns out that one of the victims was involved in the IRA but was last seen discussing business with someone from the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force.

When a landslip on Pembrokeshire’s stunning coastal path reveals the harrowing remains of two bodies, ex-DCI Evan Warlow’s quiet retirement is shattered.

A weekly newspaper dedicated to the weird and the wonderful (but mostly the weird), The Stranger Times is the go-to publication for the unexplained and inexplicable. At least that's their pitch. The reality is rather less auspicious. Their editor is a drunken, foul-tempered and foul-mouthed husk of a man who thinks little of the publication he edits. His staff are a ragtag group of misfits. And as for the assistant editor...well, that job is a revolving door - and it has just revolved to reveal Hannah Willis, who's got problems of her own.

One year ago, Lucy’s sister, Nicki, left to meet friends at a pub in Dublin and never came home. The third Irish woman to vanish inexplicably in as many years, the agony of not knowing what happened that night has turned Lucy’s life into a waking nightmare. So, she’s going to take matters into her own hands. Angela works as a paper-pusher in the Missing Persons Unit, but wants nothing more than to be a fully fledged member of An Garda Síochána, the Irish police force. With the investigation into the missing women stalled, she begins pulling on a thread that could break the case wide open.

A local schoolteacher is found taped to a tree and stoned to death. Suspicion instantly falls on the refugees at the new detention centre on Cobb's northern outskirts. Tensions are high, between whites and the local Indigenous community, between immigrants and the townies. Still mourning the recent death of his father, Detective Sergeant George Manolis returns to his childhood hometown to investigate. Within minutes of his arrival, it's clear that Cobb is not the same place he left. Once it thrived, but now it's a poor and derelict dusthole, with the local police chief it deserves.

The tiny outback town of Nannine lies in the harsh red interior of Australia. Once a thriving center of stockyards and sheep stations, years of punishing drought have petrified the land and Nannine has been whittled down to no more than a stoplight, a couple bars, and a police station. And it has another, more sinister claim to fame: the still-unsolved disappearance of young Evelyn McCreery nineteen years ago.

All Bunny McGarry wants is a spot of breakfast and a decent cup of tea. So imagine how annoyed he gets when two masked men attempt to rob the New York diner he is in. Unfortunately, dealing with that problem just leads to a whole lot more. One of the diner’s other customers isn’t who she appears to be, and the odds aren’t great that she is going to live to see another breakfast.