Police Procedural Thriller

Detective Esa Khattak is in the midst of his evening prayers when he receives a phone call asking that he and his partner Detective Rachel Getty look into the death of a local man who has fallen off a cliff. At first Christopher Drayton's death - which looks like an accident - doesn't seem to warrant a police investigation, especially not from Khattak and Rachel's team, which handles minority-sensitive cases.

What Ian Rankin is to Edinburgh David Mark is to the seaport of Hull in Northern England. This is the beginning of a dynamic, thrilling series featuring detective Sgt. Aector McAvoy, a psychologically-probing investigator who finds patterns and motives in seemingly unrelated deaths in his hardscrabble town.

When Jess Harris moved back to her Alabama hometown, she thought she'd left her past behind her. But the blood bath the new Major Crimes deputy chief finds at a murder scene is beyond even the savagery of Eric Spears, the serial killer who now haunts Jess's life with terrifying text messages. Amid eerie echoes of the Charles Manson - like massacre, Jess investigates the dismemberment of a cop's wife, carried out while the woman's baby lay sleeping down the hall.

Anthropology Professor Gideon Oliver would prefer to keep his mind on his beautiful new bride, Julie, during their English honeymoon, but one intrusive question will not stop nagging at him: Who would want to steal a 30,000-year-old parieto-occipital calvarial fragment? Yet someone has lifted this chunk of prehistoric human skull from a musty museum in Dorchester. Then, 30 miles away, an archaeology student is murdered, increasing tension and suspicion at a dig that had already seethed with suspicion, rivalry, and mistrust.

It’s a cold winter evening, and rain is sweeping in from the Atlantic when a young woman, having braved the weather to visit her sick mother in a remote part of Ireland, comes across an obstacle in the road. She clears the highway of stones from a damaged bridge only to see the body of a woman in a ditch. With no phone reception, she travels to the nearest police station to report what she has found. The local Garda waste no time in attending the scene of the crime.

Deke Gilbert was a legend on the central Texas demolition derby circuit, until a suspicious late-night crash ended his life. Unfortunately, Deke left behind a teenage daughter, Christie, who now has nowhere to go. That’s when good ol’ boys Red O’Brien and Billy Don Craddock step up and, in a rare moment, do the right thing. They give Christie a place to stay until her 18th birthday, just a few months away. But things get complicated when Christie brings home gossip that draws Red and Billy Don into an investigation of Deke’s death.

A detective on the edge. A hit-and-run. A dangerous truth. DI Joe Hogarth's private troubles have exploded out of control. When reformed villain Benny Spencer becomes the victim of a hit-and-run, a new case opens—one that threatens to be the end of DI Hogarth in more ways than one. ★★★★★ “Fast paced - difficult to put down!” As Hogarth grapples with his secret crisis, he's forced to investigate the hit-and-run. Stretched to his limits, Hogarth's bad choices and mistakes could cost him his job—or his life. ★★★★★ “Gripping… He writes so vividly that it's almost...

In a hushed Vatican reading room, the scene was shocking: a crazed professor shot dead after brandishing evidence of a grisly crime. Moments later, two bodies are found in a nearby church, each with a gruesome calling card from the killer.

It was very surprising that Mrs. Song had died unexpectedly—although she’d been through the wringer, poor thing, what with her terrible luck in picking husbands. Officer Gabriel suspected there might be a murder afoot, but they hadn’t the whisper of a suspect—it was one of those locked-room mysteries.

In a Sussex town on the south coast of England, a widely disliked art teacher at a posh private girls' school disappears without explanation. None of her students miss her boring lessons, especially since her replacement is a devilishly hunky male teacher with a fancy car. But then her name shows up on a police missing persons list. What happened to Miss Gibbon, and why does no one seem to care?

In the wake of an earthquake, the water level of an Icelandic lake drops suddenly, revealing the skeleton of a man half-buried in its sandy bed. It is clear immediately that it has been there for many years. There is a large hole in the skull. Yet more mysteriously, a heavy communication device is attached to it, possibly some sort of radio transmitter, bearing inscriptions in Russian. The police are called in and Erlendur, Elinborg, and Sigurdur Olii begin their investigation, which gradually leads them back to the time of the Cold War when bright, left-wing students would be sent from Iceland to study in the "heavenly state" of communist East Germany.

When the body of a young woman is found in her own backyard, a week after her disappearance, evidence leads investigators to a chilling conclusion. She is not the first victim of a serial killer no one knew existed. She most definitely is not the last. FBI Special Agent Tess Winnett joins the local detectives assigned to the case and searches for answers in the intriguing investigation that offers a plethora of forensic evidence, yet no viable leads. When another body is found, the search intensifies, and details about the killer's unusual signature emerge.

When Inspector James Hardy learns the body of a young woman discovered in the River Thames is that of a friend, his life goes into a tail-spin. The victim’s flatmate is on the run for her life. She could be the key to catching the killer. In a race against time, Hardy must track her down before the killer does. As the truth behind the investigation unfolds, Hardy’s own family come under threat. With two young daughters to protect and an investigation that twists and turns, Hardy finds himself pushed to the limit.

When Detective Rebecca North left her rural hometown, she vowed never to return. Her father’s apparent suicide has changed that. The official report is that retired cop Noah North shot himself, knocked over a lantern, and set his isolated cabin ablaze. But Rebecca cannot believe he killed himself. To prove it, she needs the help of Ash Haugen, the man she left behind. But Rebecca and Ash share more than broken hearts. Something darker lies between them, and the investigation is stirring it back to life.

When Nigel Baxter, a middle-aged married banker with an unremarkable past, is found dead in the bath of a plush hotel suite, his wrists slit, it looks as if he's taken his own life. At first. But when Detective Inspector Daniel Riley is assigned to the case, he soon realises all isn't as it first appears to be. When a postmortem shows Baxter was poisoned, Riley suspects foul play. And then there's the odd addition of a teddy bear left at the crime scene....

Cecil Younger, local Alaskan investigator, is neither good at his job nor great at staying sober. When an old Tlingit woman, unimpressed by the police's investigation, hires him to discover why her son, a big-game guide, was murdered, he takes the case without much conviction that he'll discover anything new.

Detective Dillon Storm is headed back to Naples for the first time in a dozen years, and the occasion is not a happy one. The illegitimate son of the richest man in America's richest city, Dillon spent his entire life in the shadow of a family that would never accept him. Now, he's come to bury the man who neglected him and, in doing so, put that part of his life behind him forever. But when the lawyer dealing with his father's estate is murdered and Dillon's number is found on his phone, it sets the detective on a path that will unearth family secrets.

The Department of Sensitive Crimes, renowned for taking on the most obscure and irrelevant cases, led by Ulf Varg, their best detective, is always prepared to take on an investigation, no matter how complex. So when Ulf is approached by the girlfriend of Trig Oloffson, who claims her beau (the infamous bad boy of Swedish letters) is being blackmailed, Ulf is determined to help. It turns out that this wild bear of a man may be more of a teddy.

The thrills being with THE DEAD OF NIGHT, as DS Townsend arrives in Buckinghamshire after relocating from Merseyside with his family. Thrust into the Thames Valley Police's Specialist Crime Unit, he finds himself investigating the murder of a young woman. But when a second body is found, Townsend and the SCU realise they are hunting a serial killer.

Get three absolutely gripping crime thrillers set on the UK's atmospheric north Norfolk coast from number one best-selling British author J M Dalgliesh in this great value collection.