Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Crime Fiction

The ninth title in Paul Finch's thrilling Detective Mark Heckenburg series.

In post-war Britain, Avonby estate is a crumbling relic hiding deadly secrets. Lady Melinda 'Mel' Greenway, a former army mechanic and the family’s poor relation, seeks solace in its overgrown gardens—until she unearths a body beneath the roses. The discovery drags Mel into a tangled web of lies, resentments, and buried truths, forcing her to clash with Inspector Derrin Bradley, her wartime lover turned investigator.

Growing up in one of Manchester's roughest council estates Mark (Macca) McNeil's life seems already written for him until joining forces with rough boy Todd Brown to form a gang offers him a way out. He is finally changing his life but then, there is Joanne… She is more than a fling and although they come from the same estate, but she is heading places. She loves his lavish gifts and the life he is promising her, but she doesn't want to see what Macca is capable of.

Two years on from the start of a devastating pandemic, food shortages are becoming critical, and rationing looms. So it's more than embarrassing when a truck full of luxury food for Scottish Virus Minister's banquet goes missing. When Bernard and Maitland from the HET team find it, the food is missing—but there is a dead body.

In the dying days of 1850, the young detective Charles Maddox takes on a new case. His client? The only surviving son of the long-dead poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his wife Mary, author of Frankenstein. Charles soon finds himself being drawn into the bitter battle being waged over the poet's literary legacy. When a chance discovery raises doubts about the death of Shelley's first wife, Harriet, he starts to question whether she did kill herself—or whether what really happened was far more sinister…

When an armed man massacres several people in central London, Claudine witnesses the whole thing. To her horror, one of the victims is her brother, Jethro. Riven by grief, Claudine retreats to the house in the Fens where she and Jethro grew up. When the police contact her, she is left reeling when they tell her Jethro orchestrated the attack. Why would a gentle, if troubled, middle-aged man cause such bloodshed – and why would he include himself in the list of victims? Claudine finds herself down a rabbit hole of mystery, caught up in Jethro's research on a medieval cult.

The public think Ava's a monster. Ava thinks she's blameless. In prison, they called her Butcher Bird—but Ava's not in prison any more. Released after 25 years to a new identity and a new home, Ava finally has the quiet life she's always wanted. But someone knows who she is. The lies she's told are about to unravel.

Southern Brooklyn, July 1996. Fire hydrants are open and spraying water on the sizzling blacktop. Punk kids have to make their own fun. Bobby Santovasco and his pal Zeke like to throw rocks at cars getting off the Belt Parkway. They think it's dumb and harmless until it's too late to think otherwise. Then there's Jack Cornacchia, a widower who lives with his high school age daughter Amelia and reads meters for Con Ed but also has a secret life as a vigilante, righting neighbourhood wrongs through acts of violence.

City banker Joseph Ashcroft has stolen £1.34 billion from his own bank. He has given it - untraceably - to impoverished strangers worldwide and has fled. Why has he done this? And will he get away with it? Joseph knows that if he leaves the country, he will easily be tracked down. So he opts for hiding close by - first in the city, then in the woods near the home of his estranged family. An ex-soldier, he's adept at the art of camouflage. On Joseph's trail is Ben Lancaster, the bank's head of security and, as it happens, a former army friend with whom he shares a violent, guilt-ridden past. The hunt is on.

In his Cornish hideaway, retired Detective Inspector Frank Elder's solitary life is disturbed by a call from his estranged wife, telling him his 17-year-old daughter, Katherine, is running wild, unbalanced by a rape he feels he should have prevented. Meanwhile, in London, the capture of a violent criminal goes badly wrong, and Detective Sergeant Maddy Birch is uneasy about the reasons why, an uneasiness that is compounded when she starts to believe she is being stalked.

Mia Cosgrove is a high-flying psychotherapist with a thriving practice, but when she receives a desperate phone call from her oldest friend, Lysette, she puts her life on hold to rush to her side. A friend of Lysette's, Sarah, has plunged to her death from the top of a multistorey car park, an unsent text message on her phone, simply saying 'I'm sorry x.' At first the police are convinced it's a suicide, but as more deaths rock the rural community, the police aren't so certain....

Sir Leonard Wallace, the famous chief of the Secret Service, finds that the peace of Europe is threatened by a gang engaged in the theft and sale of national secrets. Wallace gets busy and is assisted by the gang leader's own fear of him as well as his anxiety to get the Englishman into his power. Wallace's investigations, his startling discoveries and his escapes from death make this one of the most exciting books ever written by Alexander Wilson.

Paul and Mikey are on the run, apparently from the press surrounding their house after Mikey's release from prison. His crime: child murder, committed when he was a boy. As they travel, they move from one disturbing scenario to the next, eventually involving themselves with a bizarre religious cult. The power between the brothers begins to shift, and we realise there is more to their history than Paul has allowed us to know.

February 14, 1993: Sheffield United supporters remember it as the day their team won a famous victory against Manchester United. The date is lodged in Anna Young's brain for a different reason. That was the day her sister, Jessica, was abducted. Fast forward 20 years. The case has long since gone cold. But Anna made a promise to look after her little sister. And it's a promise she intends to keep no matter how long it takes....

Sir Leonard is not a man to desire fame or notoriety. His chronicler has been forced to fall back on office records and information supplied by various members of the secret service to tell of the struggles of Wallace and his intelligence officers: of their battles against the Soviet Union, terrorism and subversion in the British Empire, Nazi Germany and the tentacles of global organised crime.

Sir Leonard is not a man to desire fame or notoriety. His chronicler has been forced to fall back on office records and information supplied by various members of the secret service to tell of the struggles of Wallace and his intelligence officers and their battles against the Soviet Union, terrorism and subversion in the British Empire, Nazi Germany and the tentacles of global organised crime.

"You have to bide your time when you live a life of crime. That's what we discovered when we founded The Cherry Sundae Company. It seemed to us there was only so much money in the world, and some people had too much. Others hadn't enough. You could say we were vigilantes."

A young woman is brutally murdered on an island near Stockholm. Suspicion falls first on a family of Iraqi refugees. But then the victim's story begins to unfold. Lena Sundman was rude, dysfunctional, and young. Everything Dan Byrne disliked. Hiding out on the island after the sudden death of his wife, Dan finds himself drawn to the troubled girl, starting from the moment he rescues her from a gathering snowstorm.

Would you break the law to see justice done? In Sheffield, a bankrupt businessman has murdered his family. It seems like an open-and-shut case: A desperate man resorting to desperate measures. In Middlesbrough, a woman named Angel is heading south. She is a woman alone. A prostitute. Now a murderer. And she has only one thing on her mind: Revenge. Two crimes, a hundred miles apart, but a terrible secret connects them.

Thirty years ago, the Miners' Strike threatened to tear the country apart, turning neighbour against neighbour - enmities which smoulder still. Resnick had run an information-gathering unit at the heart of the dispute. Now, in retirement, and grieving over the death of his partner, the discovery of the body of a woman who disappeared during the Strike brings Resnick back, and forces him to confront his past.