Showing results by publisher "Isis Publishing Ltd" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

A cure for Alzheimer’s would be worth billions. And well worth killing for. Simon Ayot is an Englishman working for Revere Partners, one of Boston’s top venture-capital firms. The firm’s star investment, worth millions of dollars for each of its partners, is BioOne, which is working on a cure for the disease. Frank, one of Simon’s bosses and his father-in-law, is found murdered at his summer house in the marshes, and Simon is in the frame. To stay alive, and to save his marriage, Simon must figure out who killed Frank. And who will be the next to die.

It’s already dark when Stephanie Miller returns to her lakeside home on Vashon Island. Remote and isolated with a view over the water, it’s the way Stephanie has chosen to live since her husband died. Calling out her daughter’s name as she closes the door, she hears her phone buzz inside her purse. She doesn’t have to look to know what it says. Someone knows her biggest secret. Someone wants to kill her for it. The messages have been coming all day, but this one is different. This one knows she’s just walked through the door.

Margaret Woodruff is slowly dying in a care home. When her son is presented with the chance of exceptional care in her final months, he finds the offer hard to resist. Winifred is assigned to Margaret’s care. She’s a Helper: a new kind of carer that’s capable, committed and completely tireless - because she’s a synthetic human being. Under Winifred’s care Margaret’s health improves beyond everyone’s expectations, and Winifred begins to learn from Margaret what it means to be alive. But how will Winifred use what she learns from Margaret - and what does she truly want from her?

Jen is climbing in the mountains near Alajar, Spain. And it's nothing to do with the fact that an old acquaintance, Nick Crawford, may have suggested that she meet him there. But when things don't go as planned with Nick and her brother calls to voice concerns over the whereabouts of Morwenna - their estranged, free-spirited mother - Jen winds up travelling to a refugee camp on the south coast of Malta.

When a local lad that vicar's wife Jodie Welsh employed to help in her garden disappears, along with Jodie's expensive camera, nearly everyone assumes the worst. But Burble's disappearance marks the start of a series of increasingly disturbing incidents - until the body shows up, and Jodie must use all her skills to unmask a ruthless killer.

The female private detective has been a staple of popular culture for over 150 years. But what about the real-life women behind these fictional tales? Dismissed as 'Mrs Sherlock Holmes' or amateurish Miss Marples, mocked as private dicks or honey trappers, they have been investigating crime since the mid-nineteenth century - everything from theft and fraud to romance scams and murder. In Private Inquiries, Caitlin Davies traces the history of the UK's female investigators.

Janey Hallahan was born into the criminal life. After the death of her father, she became head of the family business - every day making dark decisions that make her family firm richer, no matter how dangerous. While Janey rules gangland with an iron fist, she always sticks to her own code of honour, and the innocent never get hurt. One of her workers, Danny McInroy runs an exclusive club in Glasgow - the kind of place where the ultra-wealthy can fulfil their darkest desires, for a hefty cost.

Winter 1946. One cold dark night, as a devastated London shivers through the transition to post-war life, a young nurse goes missing from the South London Hospital for Women & Children. Her body is discovered hours later behind a locked door. Two women from the hospital join forces to investigate the case. Determined not to return to the futures laid out for them before the war, the unlikely sleuths must face their own demons and dilemmas as they pursue - The Midnight Man.

Finally with some time off, Jack Nightingale decides to take a scenic tour of some haunted sites on the American East coast. But when a strange doll is dumped in the road in front of him, what was meant to be a break for rest and relaxation turns into a battle for life and death; the doll is powerful, murderous and evil. And Nightingale may have unwittingly made himself its next target....

A parent's worst fear is realised when seven-year-old Libby Hallforth goes missing at a funfair; no witnesses, no leads, and no trace. Months later, human remains are found, but they're too old to be Libby. It's the tip of a gruesome iceberg - bodies, buried in pairs, carefully laid to rest in a ritualistic manner. For DI Jake Porter and DS Nick Styles, the trail for Libby is cold, and everyone is a suspect.

London, Christmas 1999. The world is on edge. With the new millennium just days away, fears of the Millennium Bug are spiralling – warnings of computer failures, market crashes, even global catastrophe. But 50 miles east, on the frozen Blackwater Island, a different kind of mystery unfolds. A child's body is discovered on the bracken, untouched by footprints, with no sign of how he died. And no one has come forward to claim him. At the International Tribune, reporter Jonny Murphy senses something is off. Police are appealing for relatives, not suspects.

Cheryl Davidson was happy with husband Leo, watching her beloved son, Dean, grow into a handsome young man, dreaming of the paths his life would take. Until the day that Dean was murdered, his body dumped in an isolated scrapyard with a bullet in his head, and Cheryl's world exploded. Discovering that Dean had been mixed up in the Glasgow underworld, and worst of all, that Leo had brought him in, means that Cheryl's sanity is hanging by a thread. Overwhelmed by grief and with no one left to trust, Cheryl plans to take deadly retribution on the family that caused her son to be killed.

In Wilhelmsburg, Hamburg's so-called 'problem area', an American couple is found brutally murdered in a derelict villa. Prosecutor Chastity Riley is assigned the case, and quickly finds herself waist-deep in a murky tangle of city planners, shady investors and vanishing officials. The gentrification machine is rolling on, and someone is sending a very clear message...

Highway roadhouse waitress Holly Duncan's life is on hold - until she can accept her mother's disappearance of five years ago, decide where her future lies, and move on. Loner truck driver Tom Searle's life would sure be looking up, and close to blessed, if the stunning roadhouse redhead didn't seem so uncertain about his approaches. When new information and revelations rock Holly's world, Tom seizes the opportunity to step up and offer support.

1957. A catastrophe occurs at the pharmaceutical lab in Coventry where 16-year-old Wilf is working for the summer. A catastrophe that needs to be covered up at all costs. 2017. Phiney is shocked by the death of her grandfather, Wilf, who has jumped from a railway bridge at a Coventry station. Journalist Mat Torrington is the only witness. Left in utter disbelief, with a swarm of unanswered questions, Phiney, Mat and Wilf's wife, Dora, begin their own enquiries into Wilf's death.

John Tyler has gone rogue, pursuing an international vendetta against those responsible for killing his brother. But he's lured back by the CIA for one final mission. Simple, for a man like Tyler: journey to an old Soviet-era hotel in the frozen wastes of Siberia to obtain information from a Russian scientist about a double agent within NATO. But strange things are afoot, events related to the hotel's grisly past and the KGB's Cold war experiments into psychic phenomena.

Escaping personal upheaval, city accountant Billie Gibbs takes a break in a friend's country lakeside shack. Local farmer Noah Sutton arrives at the shack to investigate the unexpected visitor on a neighbouring property. He wants her to stay, but needs her to leave. Resisting an instant attraction in the face of mysterious happenings around the lake, Billie believes Noah is not all he seems, and sets out to discover why.

Nothing bad ever happens in the small seaside town of Castle Bay - until the body of missing tourist Bethany Haliwell is found in the bush, buried in a shallow grave. News crews and journalists from all over the country descend as old secrets are dragged up and gossip is taken as gospel. Among them is Miller Hatcher, a reporter battling her own demons, who arrives intent on gaining a promotion by covering the grisly murder. Following an anonymous tip, Miller begins to unravel the mystery. When another woman goes missing, she finds herself getting closer to the truth. But at what cost?

If Professor Maxie Reddick is honest with herself, there’s a very personal reason she pursued a career in criminology: the unsolved murder of her sister, Susan, nearly 30 years before, and her belief that the local police force let her family down. Now Maxie has been drafted in to help investigate a murder – nothing particularly unusual about that, except when a fingerprint at the scene provides a shocking and unexpected link to her sister’s suspicious death.

This short story features Baroness Orczy’s most intriguing sleuth, 'The Old Man in the Corner', as he explains how he solved a high-profile case: the theft of an actress' pearls.