Showing results by publisher "Quercus" in Mystery

It's 1975. A baby, minutes old, is forcibly taken from its devastated mother. In 2010, the body of an elderly woman is found in a Dublin public park in the depths of winter. Detective Inspector Tom Reynolds is working the case. He's convinced the murder is linked to historical events that took place in the notorious Magdalene Laundries. Reynolds and his team follow the trail to an isolated convent in the Irish countryside. But once inside, it becomes disturbingly clear that the killer is amongst them....

Kids can be so cruel. They'll call you names. Hurt your feelings. Push you to your death. In the garden of an abandoned house, Luke Connolly lies broken, dead. The night before, he and his friends partied inside. Nobody fought, everybody else went home safely. And yet, Luke was raped and pushed to his death. His alleged attacker is now in custody. DCI Tom Reynolds is receiving the biggest promotion of his career when a colleague asks him to look at the Connolly case, believing it's not as cut and dried as local investigators have made out.

Late one night a man walks into the luxurious home of disgraced banker Harry McNamara and his wife, Julie. The man launches an unspeakably brutal attack on Harry as a horror-struck Julie watches, frozen by fear. Just an hour later the attacker, JP Carney, has handed himself in to the police. He confesses to beating Harry to death, but JP claims that the assault was not premeditated and that he didn't know the identity of his victim.

Five years ago, Erin Kennedy moved to New York following a family tragedy. She now lives happily with her detective husband in the scenic seaside town of Newport, Long Island. When Erin answers the door to Danny's police colleagues one morning, it's the start of an ordinary day. But behind her, Danny walks to the window of their 4th-floor apartment and jumps to his death.

The inspector frowned and examined the earth under the trees. As he scanned the glade, his stomach lurched. One, two, three, four. Five, counting the mound of earth disturbed under the tent. Somebody had cleared the earth of its natural layer and sown their own flowers. In five places. Five graves. A young woman, Fiona Holland, has gone missing from a small Irish village. A search is mounted, but there are whispers. Fiona had a wild reputation. Was she abducted, or has she run away?

Dr Ruth Galloway is called in when a child's bones are discovered near a prehistoric site on the north Norfolk salt marshes. Are they the remains of a local girl who disappeared ten years earlier - or are the bones much older? DCI Harry Nelson refuses to give up the hunt for the missing girl. Since she vanished, someone has been sending him creepy anonymous notes about ritual sacrifice. He knows that Ruth's expertise and experience could help him finally to put this case to rest.

Pete Riley is a stay-at-home dad; his partner, Maddie, works in advertising. After Pete drops two-year-old Theo off at nursery one morning, he's politely accosted by a man who looks just like Theo. The man, Miles Lambert, breaks the devastating news that Theo is in fact not Pete's son, but his - the two babies got mixed up at hospital and Miles and his wife, Lucy, now have the Rileys' son at home. They've already carried out DNA testing to prove it.

Christmas day, and DCI Tom Reynolds receives an alarming call. A mass grave has been discovered on Oileán na Caillte, the island which housed the controversial psychiatric institution St. Christina's. The hospital has been closed for decades, and onsite graves were tragically common. Reynolds thinks his adversarial boss is handing him a cold case to sideline him. But then it transpires another body has been discovered amongst the dead - one of the doctors who went missing from the hospital in mysterious circumstances 40 years ago.

It's June 2008 and 21-year-old Adam Lattimer vanishes, presumed dead. The strain of his disappearance breaks his already fragile family. Ten years later, with his mother deceased and siblings scattered across the globe, Adam turns up unannounced at the family home. His siblings return reluctantly to Spanish Cove, but Adam's reappearance poses more questions than answers. The past is a tangled web of deceit. And, as tension builds, it's apparent somebody has planned murderous revenge for the events of 10 years ago.

On a Dublin city street, packed with afternoon Christmas shoppers, a young woman appears, naked, traumatised and bearing burn marks. Tom Reynolds, now chief superintendent, is no longer head of the murder squad. But when it transpires the woman escaped from a house fire started deliberately and that there are more victims, including a baby, Tom is sucked in. What begins as a straightforward case of arson, soon becomes something much more sinister. The people in that house never wanted to be there in the first place. Now more of them are missing.

When young London professional Alex Evans is informed that his sister's body has been pulled from an icy lake in Northern Lapland, he assumes his irresponsible sister accidentally drowned. He travels to the wealthy winter resort where Vicky worked as a tour guide and meets Agatha Koskinen, the detective in charge. Agatha is a no-nonsense single mother of three who already thinks there's more to Vicky's case than meets the eye. As the two form an unlikely alliance, Alex also begins to suspect the small town where his sister lived and died is harbouring secrets.

Late at night, two powerful men meet in a secret location to discuss a long nurtured plan about to come to fruition. One is desperate to know there is nothing standing in their way - the other assures him everything is taken care of. Hours later, a high-ranking government official called Ryan Finnegan is brutally slain in the most secure building in Ireland - Leinster House, the seat of parliament. Inspector Tom Reynolds and his team are called in to uncover the truth behind the murder.

Ali Dawson is a police officer working on crimes so old, the joke goes, that they are not only cold but frozen. What most people don't know is that the team travels back in time to complete their research - a process pioneered by the mysterious Italian physicist, Serafina Pelligrini. So far the team has only ventured a few years back but Ali's boss has a new assignment for her. He wants her to step back to 1850, the heart of the Victorian Age, to clear the name of Cain Templeton, the eccentric great-grandfather of Tory MP Isaac Templeton.

Elly Griffiths has always written short stories to experiment with different voices and genres and to explore what some of her much-loved creations such as Dr Ruth Galloway might have done outside of the novels. This collection gathers them all together in one splendid volume. Here are bite-sized tales to please and entertain every thriller taste as well as all Elly Griffiths' fans.

Death stalked the Vale. In every corner, every whisper. They just didn't know it yet. Six neighbours, six secrets, six reasons to want Olive Collins dead. In the exclusive gated community of Withered Vale, people's lives appear as perfect as their beautifully manicured lawns. Money, success, privilege - the residents have it all. Life is good. There's just one problem. Olive Collins' dead body has been rotting inside number four for the last three months. Her neighbours say they're shocked at the discovery, but nobody thought to check on her when she vanished from sight.

Three corpses: drugged, labeled and brutally beheaded; a trail that Detective Li Yan has to follow. He and forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell have been trying to deny the attraction that nearly destroyed both their careers. But when a fourth victim is found, they have no choice but to work together to track down the truth and to hunt down a ruthless killer. The Fourth Sacrifice is the second in the acclaimed China series from Peter May, author of Runaway, Entry Island and the internationally best-selling Lewis Trilogy.

A burned corpse is a disturbing mystery for Beijing detective Li Yan until he enlists forensic pathologist Margaret Campbell. Having abandoned a broken life in Chicago for her work, she's as determined as Li to ask difficult questions about the man's death. But some questions have answers they'd rather not hear - facts that others are desperate to conceal. The Firemaker is the first in the acclaimed China series from Peter May, author of Runaway, Entry Island and the internationally best-selling Lewis Trilogy.

When Detective Sime Mackenzie boards a light aircraft at Montreal's St. Hubert airfield, he does so without looking back. For Sime, the 850-mile journey ahead represents an opportunity to escape the bitter blend of loneliness and regret that has come to characterise his life in the city. Travelling as part of an eight-officer investigation team, Sime's destination lies in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Only two kilometres wide and three long, Entry Island is home to a population of around 130 inhabitants - the wealthiest of which has just been discovered murdered in his home.

When the eight-year-old daughter of an Oxford College Master vanishes in the middle of the night, police turn to the Scottish nanny, Dee, for answers. As Dee looks back over her time in the Master's Lodging - an eerie and ancient house - a picture of a high achieving but dysfunctional family emerges: Nick, the fiercely intelligent and powerful father; his beautiful Danish wife Mariah, pregnant with their child; and the lost little girl, Felicity, almost mute, seeing ghosts, grieving her dead mother.

Bruno, Chief of Police in the charming French town of St Denis, is already busy with a case when the body of an undercover French Muslim cop is found in the woods, a man who called Bruno for help only hours earlier. But Bruno's sometime boss and rival, the Brigadier, doesn't see this investigation as a priority - there are bigger issues at stake. Bruno has other ideas. Meanwhile, a Muslim youth named Sami turns up at a French army base in Afghanistan hoping to get home to St Denis. One of Bruno's old army comrades helps to smuggle Sami back to France, but the FBI aren't far behind.