Showing results by publisher "----RM Alexander" in Mystery

young woman is murdered in her Oslo flat. One finger has been severed from her left hand, and behind her eyelid is secreted a tiny red diamond in the shape of a five-pointed star – a pentagram, the devil’s star. Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case with his long-time adversary Tom Waaler and initially wants no part in it. But Harry is already on notice to quit the force and is left with little alternative but to drag himself out of his alcoholic stupor and get to work. A wave of similar murders is on the horizon. An emerging pattern suggests that Oslo has a serial killer on its hands....

The young man with the shock of white-blond hair lay spread-eagled on the floor, surrounded by fallen books. His hand reached out to the scattered pages, as though he was trying to tell her something. But who is he? How did he come to be killed in Flora’s ordinary little bookshop? Flora finds out he was staying at the Priory Hotel, and when the gardener suddenly dies in its beautiful grounds only a few days later, she is certain that something untoward is happening in her quiet village by the sea.

DI Jan Talantire is called to a cottage in Ilfracombe, where the female occupant is found dead, impaled with a crucifix. The woman, who had been renting the house for a few months, is well known locally, but the documents at the house indicate her real name is Ruth Lyle. The name means nothing to the young PC who found her, DI Talantire knows this cannot be the body of Ruth Lyle.

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.

It’s Halloween, and when an elderly billionaire is discovered dead in the locked study of his stately Highland home, DCI Jack Logan and his team must race the worsening weather to get to the scene of the crime. There, among the victim’s extended family and staff, Jack finds no shortage of suspects. Everyone, it seems, had reason to want the old man dead, and they all have something to hide.

Richard is a middle-aged Englishman who runs a B&B in the fictional Val de Follet in the Loire Valley. Nothing ever happens to Richard, and really that’s the way he likes it. One day, however, one of his older guests disappears, leaving behind a bloody handprint on the wallpaper. Another guest, the exotic Valérie, persuades a reluctant Richard to join her in investigating the disappearance. Richard remains a dazed passenger in the case until things become really serious and someone murders Ava Gardner, one of his beloved hen...and you don’t mess with a fellow’s hens!

As the sun sets into the sea over the pretty Cornish town of St Ives, a young woman, Freya Kempston, hasn’t returned home after a day out in the mall at St Austell. Panicking, her husband begs Detective Lauren Pengelly and her team to find her. Has Freya run out on her stable, loving marriage, or has something more sinister taken place? Grainy security footage from the mall provides the first break in the case—capturing Freya talking intently with a well-known local mechanic on the day she disappeared. But when cornered, the mechanic denies even knowing her.

Sami Kierce, a young American backpacker, wakes up. He is covered in blood. There’s a knife in his hand. Beside him, the body of a woman. Anna. Dead. He doesn’t know what happened to her. He begins to scream. Kierce, now a disgraced detective, is teaching night classes when he recognises a familiar face in the crowd. Anna. It’s unmistakably her. As soon as she sees Kierce, she runs.

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.

Sports Agent Myron Bolitar is in his new office on the top of a skyscraper in New York when two FBI agents ask him this very question. The man they refer to is a top basketball player and Myron's former client and old rival. Greg's DNA, they tell him, has been found at the scene of a high-profile double-murder, and he is now their main suspect. It can't be Greg, Myron tells the two agents: the reason he is Myron's 'former' client is because Greg is dead. He died three years ago of a heart attack. Myron went to his funeral and gave the eulogy.

Aslan Kennedy has an idyllic life as leader of a spiritual retreat for wealthy holidaymakers on one of the Caribbean's most unspoilt islands, Saint Marie. Until he's murdered, that is. The case seems open and shut: when Aslan was killed, he was inside a locked room with only five other people, one of who has already confessed to the murder. Detective Inspector Richard Poole is hot, bothered, and fed up with talking to witnesses who'd rather discuss his aura than their whereabouts at the time of the murder.

She is the perfect assassin. A Russian orphan, saved from the death penalty for the brutal revenge she took on her gangster father's killers. Ruthlessly trained. Given a new life. New names, new faces - whichever fits. Her paymasters call themselves The Twelve. But she knows nothing of them. Konstantin is the man who saved her and the one she answers to. She is Villanelle. Without conscience. Without guilt. Without weakness. Eve Polastri is the woman who hunts her. MI5, until one error of judgment costs her everything.

Someone is committing random murders across Chicago—and making sure detectives Billy Harney (Aaron Paul) and Patti Harney (Krysten Ritter) are first on the crime scene. What connects the victims, and why is the killer leaving clues behind with each body? Billy and Patti are scrambling to stop the next killing when their father, Chief of Detectives Dan Harney (Beau Bridges), is kidnapped. But in their race to track him down, they uncover pieces of his past that simply can’t be true. Could their own flesh and blood be covering up a dark secret?

Gripping and packed with twists and turns, this stunning thriller will make you question whether we can ever really trust the ones we love.... What if your whole life was based on lies? When Joe Lynch stumbles across his wife driving into a hotel car park while she's supposed to be at work, he's intrigued enough to follow her in. And when he witnesses her in an angry altercation with family friend Ben, he knows he ought to intervene.

In a country town, an arsonist is burning homes down. Their signature move is placing an identical model of the house on the front porch before setting the fire. But no one is there to witness this in the silence of each dark winter night. A happy couple is out celebrating their anniversary when they receive a chilling phone call—a recorded children's verse warning them their house is on fire and their children are gone. They race home to an inferno and missing children.

In this novel from number-one New York Times-best-selling author J. D. Robb, the newly promoted captain of the NYPSD and his wife return a day early from their vacation, looking forward to spending time with their bright and vivacious 16-year-old daughter, who stayed behind. Not even their worst nightmares could have prepared them for the crime scene that awaits them inside.

It is the Edinburgh Festival. People queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road-rage incident--an incident which changes the lives of everyone involved. Jackson Brodie, ex-army, ex-police, ex-private detective, is also an innocent bystander--until he becomes a suspect. With Case Histories, Kate Atkinson showed how brilliantly she could explore the crime genre and make it her own. In One Good Turn, she takes her masterful plotting one step further.

India Steele is desperate. Her father is dead, her fiancé took her inheritance, and no one will employ her, despite years working for her watchmaker father. Indeed, the other London watchmakers seem frightened of her. Alone, poor, and at the end of her tether, India takes employment with the only person who’ll accept her–an enigmatic and mysterious man from America. A man who possesses a strange watch that rejuvenates him when he’s ill.

For Maddog, the killer who had Minneapolis in a grip of chilled terror, satisfaction came from the thrill of the contest. After each grisly murder he would leave behind one of the rules he had devised: Never kill anyone you know. Never have a motive. Never follow a discernible pattern. He was no textbook psychopath. But Lieutenant Lucas Davenport was no ordinary detective. To bring an end to Maddog's trail of death, he would have to play by his own rules.

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.