Showing results by publisher "Hodder & Stoughton" in Crime Fiction

In A Presumption of Death, Jill Paton Walsh tells how World War II changed the lives of Peter, Harriet and their growing family. The story opens in 1940. Harriet Vane - now Lady Peter Wimsey - has taken her children to safety in the country. But the war has followed them: glamorous RAF pilots and even more glamorous land-girls scandalise the villagers; the blackout makes the nighttime lanes as sinister as the back alleys of London.

A killer flees the scene of a homicide at a prestigious Manhattan music school and locks himself in a classroom. Within minutes the police have him surrounded. Then a scream rings out, followed by a gunshot. The police break down the door. The room is empty. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to investigate. For the ambitious Sachs, solving the case could earn her a promotion.

When Karen Drew is found sitting in her wheelchair staring out to sea with her throat cut one chilly morning, DI Annie Cabbot, on loan to Eastern Area, gets lumbered with the case. Back in Eastvale, that same Sunday morning, 19-year-old Hayley Daniels is found raped and strangled in the Maze, a tangle of narrow alleys behind Eastvale's market square, after a drunken night on the town with a group of friends, and DCI Alan Banks is called in. Banks finds suspects galore, while Annie seems to hit a brick wall - until she reaches a breakthrough....

When Navy SEALS track down and kill Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan, it's obvious there was a traitor on the inside. After the false friends are revealed to be two British students, Malik and Chaudhry - former Islamic fundamentalists recruited by MI5 - they become targets themselves. Dan 'Spider' Shepherd must teach the pair how to survive undercover with al-Qaeda closing in. But Spider is not used to playing the handler.

A dark and suspenseful novel of lies, betrayal, and identity - perfect for fans of Big Little Lies and Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror. It was meant to be an evening to honour and celebrate Evelyn Caldwell's award-winning, career-making scientific research - but Evelyn has things on her mind. Things like Nathan, her husband, who has left her for a younger, better, newer woman. A woman who is now pregnant - but shouldn't be - and is strikingly familiar. Too familiar to be a coincidence. A woman who shouldn't exist.

When a young Vietnamese girl goes missing in Scotland, DI Birch knows there is more to the case than meets the eye. Her colleagues won't take it seriously - but Helen's instinct tells her that Linh is in mortal danger. Beatrice knows something terrible has happened to three young people in Edinburgh. She can see them in her mind's eye - frightened and alone, desperate for help. Ever since she was a child, she's had visions of the future - and she's ignored them before, with dangerous consequences. This time, she must help the police find Linh.

Thirteenth in the 'series of superb novels built around the haunted private detective Charlie Parker' ( Daily Mail), A Song of Shadows sees Parker revisit the crimes of a WWII concentration camp while he struggles to regain his health after the near-fatal shooting in The Wolf in Winter. Grievously wounded private detective Charlie Parker investigates a case that has its origins in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War.

Barbara Havers puts her career on the line while DI Thomas Lynley attempts to straighten her out before it's too late. When Hadiyyah Upman disappears from London in the company of her mother, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers is as devastated as the girl's father. They are her close friends as well as neighbours, but since the child is with her mother, nothing can be done. Five months later, Hadiyyah is kidnapped from an open air market in Lucca, Italy, and this triggers an investigation in the full glare of the media spotlight.

Alex Mullins knows she is one of the lucky ones. When a fatal coach crash at her school reunion killed several of her classmates, she was saved from a grisly fate. She is haunted by what she thinks she saw that night - a vision of a skeletal woman, known by the locals as the Bonehead - a woman who brings bad luck to all that see her. Now a police officer in Gloucestershire, Alex fights to overcome the past by helping other people. But when her path crosses with someone who was there that fateful night, her new life begins to unravel at the seams.

The Knights of the Golden Circle was the largest and most dangerous clandestine organization in American history. It amassed billions in stolen gold and silver, all buried in hidden caches across the United States. Since 1865 treasure hunters have searched, but little of that immense wealth has ever been found. Now, 160 years later, two factions of what remains of the Knights of the Golden Circle want that lost treasure - one to spend it for their own ends, the other to preserve it.

It is spring, and the mummified body of a young Jewish woman is discovered buried in the Maine woods. It is clear that she gave birth shortly before her death. But there is no sign of a baby. Private detective Charlie Parker is engaged by the lawyer Moxie Castin to shadow the police investigation and find the infant, but Parker is not the only searcher. Someone else is following the trail left by the woman, someone with an interest in more than a missing child, someone prepared to leave bodies in his wake.

Jerome Burnel was once a hero. He intervened to prevent multiple killings and in doing so damned himself. His life was torn apart. He was imprisoned, brutalized. But in his final days, with the hunters circling, he tells his story to private detective Charlie Parker. He speaks of the girl who was marked for death but was saved; of the ones who tormented him and an entity that hides in a ruined stockade. Parker is not like other men. He died and was reborn. He is ready to wage war.

Did Grace Peltier commit suicide? When a mass grave in northern Maine reveals the final resting place of a religious community that disappeared almost 40 years earlier, private detective Charlie Parker, hired to investigate the circumstances of her death, realises that their deaths and the violent passing of Grace Peltier are part of the same mystery, one that has its roots in her family history and in the origins of the shadowy organisation known as the Fellowship.

1945. In the waning months of World War II, Japan hid vast quantities of gold and other stolen valuables in boobytrapped underground caches all across the Philippines. By 1947 some of that loot was recovered, not by treasure hunters, but by the United States government, which told no one about the find. Present day. Retired Justice Department operative, Cotton Malone, is in Switzerland doing a favor for a friend. But what was supposed to be a simple operation turns violen.

The locked library of St Agatha's College, Cambridge, houses an unrivalled and, according to certain scholars, deeply uninteresting collection of 17th-century volumes. It also contains one dead student. Tragic and accidental, of course, even if malicious gossip hints that Philip Skellow had been engaged in stealing books rather than acquiring knowledge when he'd slipped, banged his head, and bled to death overnight.

When Megan discovers photographs of her estranged identical twin sister on her husband's phone, she wants answers. Leah already has everything Megan has ever wanted. Fame, fortune, freedom to do what she wants. And when Megan confronts Leah, an argument turns to murder. The only way Megan can get away with killing her twin is to become her. But then lockdown hits. How can she continue living two lives? And what happens if someone else knows her secret too?

All that was left of the garage was a heap of charred and smouldering beams. In the driving seat of the burnt-out car were the remains of a body.... An accident, said the police. An accident, said the widow. She had been warning her husband about the danger of the car for months. Murder, said the famous detective Lord Peter Wimsey - and proceeded to track down the killer.

A luxury yacht arrives in Reykjavik harbour with nobody on board. What has happened to the crew, and to the family who were on board when it left Lisbon? Thora Gudmundsdottir is hired by the young father's parents to investigate, and is soon drawn deeper into the mystery. What should she make of the rumours saying that the vessel was cursed, especially given that when she boards the yacht she thinks she sees one of the missing twins? Where is Karitas, the glamorous young wife of the yacht's former owner? And whose is the body that has washed up further along the shore?

In the hushed aftermath of a total eclipse, Laura witnesses a brutal attack. She and her boyfriend, Kit, call the police, and in that moment it is not only the victim's life that is changed forever. Fifteen years on, Laura and Kit live in fear. And while Laura knows she was right to speak out, the events that follow have taught her that you can never see the whole picture: something - and someone - is always in the dark....

The SAS are used to deaths during combat—it goes with the turf. But when one of their own is said to have committed suicide in Thailand, red flags are raised. Pete Green wasn't the sort of soldier who would ever take his own life—and no one is more sure of that than his twin brother, Davie. Davie is determined to fly to the Land Of Smiles to find out what really happened to his twin brother. But if he is going to find out the truth he'll need help—the sort of help only SAS Sergeant Matt Standing can provide.