Private Police

Why we think it’s a great listen: When it comes to author/narrator pairings, nobody tops James Lee Burke and Will Patton in the Robicheaux thrillers. Beloved Burke hero Detective Dave Robicheaux here returns to New Iberia to solve a series of grisly murders. Seven young women in neighboring Jefferson Davis Parish have been brutally murdered. While the crimes have all the telltale signs of a serial killer, the death of Bernadette Latiolais, a high-school honor student, doesn’t fit.

Nate doesn’t want to listen. He’s between missions and just wants to relax, not to travel hundreds of miles and hunt for the driver of the car that hit someone he doesn’t even know. But ignoring the call is not an option. What Nate had hoped would be a simple mission turns into something much more sinister, when he discovers a wide-reaching evil, festering in a small Northern California town. To confront it, he will need all the skills he’s learned working in the shadow world.

LA-based artist Laurie Simmonds disappeared two months ago, her camper van abandoned on the isolated Twentynine Palms Highway, miles from anything - or anyone. With the police investigation stalled, her parents put all their faith in private investigator Jessica Shaw to find out the truth of what happened. Jessica and her partner Matt Connor discover that two other women are missing, their disappearances connected to the same highway.

Six minutes in the wrong place at the wrong time—that’s all it took to ruin Sydney detective Ted Conkaffey’s life. Accused but not convicted of a brutal abduction, Ted is now a free man—and public enemy number one. Maintaining his innocence, he flees north to keep a low profile amidst the steamy, croc-infested wetlands of Crimson Lake. There, Ted’s lawyer introduces him to eccentric private investigator Amanda Pharrell, herself a convicted murderer.

DS Lucas Walker is off duty. He's supposed to be showing his little sister Grace the Australian outback, on her visit from Boston, but instead they're headed out bush- where Walker's cousin has been mining for boulder opal. Something seemed off when Walker heard that Blair wanted to get out of Kanpara, so he and Grace are en route to bring him home to Caloodie. But Kanpara is in Channel Country, and a major flood is on the way.

In the heart of Wyoming, Private Detective Brian Koski and his tenacious investigations team embark on a harrowing journey to uncover the truth behind a devastating tragedy. Three brothers—convicted of murdering their parents and younger siblings—are languishing in prison, their youth stolen at just 15, 13, and 10 years old. With an airtight case against them, the evidence seems insurmountable, but Brian senses something amiss. These were good boys. Boy Scouts and Honor Roll students. Could they really be capable of such horror? As he delves deeper into their case, Brian is also faced ...

Sometimes murder is just a game... When budding journalist Laura Rockford stumbles across a bizarre murder scene in downtown Vegas she finally gets her chance to advance her journalism career from fluff pieces to serious news. Laura has a lead that even the police don’t know about and she flings herself head-first into digging up everything she can to break the case, including confronting her number one suspect the reclusive computer nerd who invented the video game that the murders are staged to mimic. But Laura gets more than she expected in computer genius Mike McQuade. As a bond forms...

Panama City PIs Burke and Blade are back! When Brooklyn Hill goes missing while on a pub crawl during her bachelorette weekend on Panama City Beach, Burke and Blade are called in to do what no one else has been able to—find her. Or at least figure out what happened to her. The seeming impossible vanishing has everyone baffled—Brook walked into Jungle Jim’s and never walked out again. Every entrance and exit is covered by surveillance cameras and the hundreds of people in the club saw her enter but never exit. And extensive searches, including both scent and cadaver dogs, prove she’s...

On the day he retires, Inspector Ashwin Chopra inherits two unexpected mysteries. The first is the case of a drowned boy, whose suspicious death no one seems to want solved. And the second is a baby elephant. As his search for clues takes him across the teeming city of Mumbai, from its grand high rises to its sprawling slums and deep into its murky underworld, Chopra begins to suspect that there may be a great deal more to both his last case and his new ward than he thought.

Running made him look guilty. A manipulative killer will do anything to keep it that way. A brutal murder pits an innocent man against a killer in a manipulative game of cat and mouse that ends in a shocking twist. Freedom tastes sweet to Chase Evans, especially after serving a five-year jail sentence for a crime he didn’t commit. Aided by a new security job from his old Buddy Blake Rockford, he vows to stay out of trouble and get his life back on track ... until he ends up accused of killing the very man he was assigned to protect on his first day on the job. With the deck stacked ...

It was their darkest secret. Three schoolgirls made a promise - to take the horrible truth of what they did to the grave. Thirty years later, Beth and Sally have tried to put the trauma behind them. Though Carol has distanced herself from her former friends, the three are adamant that the truth must never come to light, even if the memory still haunts them. But when some shocking news threatens to unearth their dark secret, Beth enlists the help of private investigator Matthew Hill to help her and Sally reconnect with estranged Carol.

No longer a chief inspector, Chen Cao finds himself as director of the Shanghai Judicial System Reform Office. To outsiders, it’s a promotion, but Chen knows he’s being removed from the spotlight as he’s immediately placed on involuntary "convalescence leave" to stop him interfering with any cases. However, with various high-profile crimes making headlines and fears escalating over vigilante reprisals, Chen’s superiors know he must at least appear active.

“Chilling...satisfying...offers up tasty tidbits of San Francisco lore . . . [Russell] has a gift for dialogue, slyly using it to reveal character.”—New York Times Book ReviewSan Francisco P.I. Stuart Winter looks into the death of a young, deaf heiress who volunteered as a sign language instructor—for a gorilla who may have witnessed her murder. “Polished and provocative...a California mystery of the hard-boiled school...very well written, with a corking good plot and fine characters.”—Booklist “Remarkable...[hops] from avant-garde theater to a deaf school, from winos’ ...

How much of the past do you carry with you? It's a question FBI Agent Emma Griffin has dealt with throughout her career. This time is different. Months after a case brought her face to face with her own past and an unresolved disappearance that haunted her, she finds herself delving into the past of one of those closest to her. She learns about the turning moment of Dean's life and the torment that still follows him as they try to find closure for him. The investigation brings up another question possibly more difficult than the first.

Gil and Max are hired by a high-ranking politician to find a kidnapped little girl. But things take a deadly twist when the kidnapper turns out to be an assassin for a sect of the notorious Bloods street gang. The action is fast and the characters real as Gil races from Aurora to Chicago, fighting villains and time, praying that he can save the child and unravel the strange reasons for her abduction, all while keeping his K9 partner Max from eating him.

Twenty years ago, four teenagers went exploring in the local woods, trying to find the supposed home of the Bone Keeper. Only three returned. Now, a woman is found wandering the streets of Liverpool, horrifically injured, claiming to have fled the Bone Keeper. Investigating Officer DC Louise Henderson must convince skeptical colleagues that this urban myth might be flesh and blood. But when a body is unearthed in the woodland the woman has fled from, the case takes on a much darker tone. The disappeared have been found. And their killer is watching every move the police make.

Boston, 1982. Private investigator Andy Roark has spent the past decade trying to rediscover his place in the world. In Vietnam, there was order and purpose. Everything - no matter how brutal - happened for a reason. Deborah Swift, wealthy wife of an aspiring California politician, is trying to trace her father, last seen on Cape Cod, who walked out on her and her mother long ago. Other investigators have turned up nothing, but Roark's local connections might give him an edge.

When former police detective Ted Conkaffey was wrongly accused of abducting Claire Bingley, he hoped the Queensland rainforest town of Crimson Lake would be a good place to disappear. But nowhere is safe from Claire's devastated father. Dale Bingley has a brutal revenge plan all worked out—and if Ted doesn't help find the real abductor, he'll be its first casualty.

Belated justice can be the most satisfying. For almost ten years, Nikki Drake struggled to deal with her sister’s mysterious disappearance. When another teen vanishes from the same riding stable, the details are too eerily similar to ignore, and she vows to uncover the truth. No longer a child but a newly minted private investigator, she has additional weapons in her arsenal now, including a re-homed police dog and an enigmatic detective with ties to the horse stable. However, digging into her sister’s case erodes old trusts and brings dark secrets bubbling to the surface. And this time...

When you search for the missing, there’s no telling what you’ll find. PI Jessie Cole learned that painful truth firsthand when her sister disappeared. Now a new case will test Jessie and Ben once again. Owen Shepard, the public face of one of the country’s biggest health insurance companies, has become the target of a vengeful father. The man blames Shepard for his child’s death and plans to make the CEO know what it’s like to live with a broken heart - and watch others die.