International Police Procedurals

Iceland, 1934. Two boys playing see something they shouldn't have. The consequences will haunt them and their families for generations. Iceland, 2009. The credit crunch bites. The currency has been devalued, savings annihilated, lives ruined. Grassroots revolution is in the air, as is the feeling that someone ought to pay.... And in a country where everyone knows everybody, it isn't hard to draw up a list of exactly who is responsible. And then, one by one, to cross them off.

Porfiry Rostnikov was one of the top detectives in Moscow - until he crossed the KGB. On the orders of the secret service, this bulldog cop is busted down to the minor crimes unit, where his talents are utterly wasted. When a drunk climbs the statue of Nikolai Gogol in Arbat Square and threatens to kill himself, Rostnikov tries to talk the man down. But with a perfect somersault, acrobat Valerian Duznetzov leaps from the statue - the final jump of a storied career.

The Moscow Film Festival is in town, and the elite artists of the East and West have convened at the legendary Metropole Hotel to drink, gossip, and flirt. But the party is about to come crashing down. Four men - one American, one Japanese, and two Russians - will all be dead by morning, poisoned. To keep the killings under wraps, the Kremlin hands the investigation over to the famously discreet police investigator Porfiry Rostnikov.

When Harold Merefield returned home in the early hours of a winter morning from a festive little party at that popular nightclub, the Naxos, he was startled by a gruesome discovery. On his bed was a corpse. There was nothing to show the identity of the dead man or the cause of his death. At the inquest, the jury found a verdict of ‘death from natural causes’ - perhaps they were right, but yet?

A top police investigative unit breaks an illegal gambling operation in the context of rampant police corruption and drug-fueled gangster violence in the city. Lead detective Jeremy Ryder is a physically powerful, quiet and meticulous investigator. His partner Navi Pillay is a small and exceptionally strong Tamil martial arts instructor, and she provides the speed and physical power to complement Ryder's incisive sleuthing abilities.

The discovery of a corpse washed up on a beach in an Icelandic backwater sparks a series of events that propels the village of Hvalvik's police sergeant Gunnhildur into deep waters. Although under pressure to deal with the matter quickly, she is suspicious that the man's death was no accident and once she has identified the body, sets about investigating his final hours. The case takes Gunnhildur away from her village and into a cosmopolitan world of shady deals, government corruption and violence.

A man is found poisoned by the deadly toxin aconite. A note found at the scene leads Detective Sergeant Jack Mackinnon to a University of Oxford laboratory, where staff and students are desperate to hide their association with the victim. As Mackinnon gets closer to the truth, he finds his own family could be at risk.

When two teenage gangs are arrested after clashing violently in one of Venice’s campi, the son of a local hero is implicated. But when Commissario Guido Brunetti is asked by a wealthy foreigner to vet this man, Monforte, for a job, he discovers that Monforte might not be such a hero after all. This seeming contradiction, and a brutal attack on one of Brunetti’s colleagues by a possible gang member, concentrate Brunetti’s attentions. Soon, he discovers the sordid hypocrisy surrounding Monforte’s past, culminating in a fiery meeting of two gangs and a final opportunity for redemption.

Shots ring out at a Salvation Army Christmas concert in Oslo, leaving one of the singers dead in the street. The trail will lead Harry Hole, Oslo’s best investigator and worst civil servant, deep into the darkest corners of the city and, eventually, to Croatia.

The cunning incendiary device that blew the roof off a Stockholm apartment not only interrupted the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, it nearly took the lives of the building's 11 occupants. And if one of Martin Beck's colleagues hadn't been on the scene, the explosion would have led to a major catastrophe because, for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain, a regulation fire truck has vanished. Was it terrorism, suicide, or simply a gas leak?

When the Berebury Footpaths Society created their locally infamous motto, "Every walk a challenge," they couldn't have known just how apt it would be. Avid hikers Wendy Lamport and Gordon Briggs suffer from a good walk spoiled when, while reclaiming a public footpath from the greedy barbed-wire fences of encroaching farmers, a crow drops a severed human finger at their feet. And where there's a finger, thinks Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan, a body can't be far behind.

Six months have passed since Jessica’s encounter with the mysterious serial-killing coven of witches and the death of her mentor. Her nightmares about her mother and the witchcraft that undid her have only gotten worse, but she’s doing what she can to stay focused. Her homicide squad, now under new leadership, has been given a murder case and a new series of disappearances to investigate. A young woman’s corpse has washed up on an icy beach, and two famous Instagram influencers have gone missing at the same time.

On a gloomy morning in Vigàta, a call from Fazio rouses Inspector Montalbano from a nightmare. A man called Giugiù Nicotra has been found dead in the skeletal workings of a construction site, a place now entombed by a sea of mud from recent days of rain and floods. Shot in the back, he had fled into a water supply system tunnel. The investigation gets off to a slow start, but all the evidence points to the world of construction and public contracts, a world just as slimy and impenetrable as mud.

Commissario Ricciardi is the undisputed wizard of Neapolitan crime scenes. He solves every crime with an uncanny swiftness that leaves his colleagues dumbfounded. Indeed, there are those who think his abilities are the work of the devil, an unnatural and ungodly gift to be exorcised. And maybe they're right. Ricciardi sees the dead; he sees and hears the final moments in the lives of those who have suffered violent deaths. It may be a talent, or it may be a curse, but it is nonetheless a kind of black magic.

Hamburg 1947: It is the year of extremes. After a bitterly cold winter of starvation, the bombed city groans under excruciating heat. And Chief Inspector Frank Stave is confronted with a new case. In the ruins of a shipyard, the corpse of a boy is found and Stave's hunt for the killer leads him into the world of "wolf children" - orphaned children who have fled from the Occupied Eastern Territories and are now united in gangs. When two more bodies are discovered Stave is under even increasing pressure....

When Viktor Palmgren, a powerful Swedish industrialist, is shot during his after-dinner speech in the luxurious Hotel Savoy, it sends a shiver down the spine of the international money markets and puts the tiny town of Malmö on edge. No one can identify the gunman when Martin Beck takes over the scene and finds a web so despicable that it's hard to imagine who wouldn't want Palmgren dead.

young woman is murdered in her Oslo flat. One finger has been severed from her left hand, and behind her eyelid is secreted a tiny red diamond in the shape of a five-pointed star – a pentagram, the devil’s star. Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case with his long-time adversary Tom Waaler and initially wants no part in it. But Harry is already on notice to quit the force and is left with little alternative but to drag himself out of his alcoholic stupor and get to work. A wave of similar murders is on the horizon. An emerging pattern suggests that Oslo has a serial killer on its hands....

Against all the odds, Dolly Rawlins and her gangland widows managed the impossible: a heist their husbands had failed to pull off - at the cost of their lives. But though they may be in the money, they're far from easy street. Shocked by her husband's betrayal, Dolly discovers Harry Rawlins isn't dead. He knows where the four women are and he wants them to pay. And he doesn't just mean getting his hands on the money. The women can't keep running. They have to get Harry out of their lives for good. But can they outwit a criminal mastermind who won't hesitate to kill?

An old case from his LAPD past threatens Bosch's reputation in a gripping new thriller. Harry Bosch is back as a volunteer working cold cases for the San Fernando police and is called out to a local drug store where a young pharmacist has been murdered. Bosch and the town's three-person detective squad sift through the clues, which lead into the dangerous big-business world of prescription drug abuse. Meanwhile, an old case from Bosch's LAPD days comes back to haunt him.

Two nights ago a young woman brought her husband into the emergency room of the Sriphat Hospital in Thailand, where he passed away. A guard thinks she remembers her coming in before but with a different husband - one who also died. Ladarat Patalung, for one, would have been happier without a serial murderer - if there is one - loose in her hospital. Then again, she never expected to be a detective in the first place.