Showing results by publisher "Quercus" in International Mystery & Crime

Berlin, March 1943. The mood in Germany is bleak after their stunning defeat at Stalingrad. Private Investigator Bernie Gunther is at work in the German War Crimes Bureau - weary, cynical but well aware of the value of truth in a world where that's now a rarity. When human remains are found deep in the Katyn Forest, Bernie is sent to investigate. Rumour has it that this mass grave is full of Polish officers murdered by the Russians. For Josef Goebbels, proof of Russian involvement is sure to destroy the Western Alliance, giving Germany a chance to reverse its devastating losses.

The event of the Périgord tourist season is to be the re-enactment of the liberation of the historic town of Sarlat from the English in 1370. But it all goes wrong when the man playing the part of the French general is almost killed in the heat of the action. The immediate question for chief of police Bruno Courrèges is was this an accident - or deliberate? The stakes rise when Bruno learns that the man, Kerquelin, was running Frenchelon, the secret French electronic intelligence base nearby, after being recruited from a brilliant Silicon Valley career.

Bruno, now Chief of Police for the whole Vézère valley, has an unusual challenge to rise to: teaching at his friend Pamela's new cookery school. It is a daunting prospect - the disappearance of one of the school's pupils almost serves as a welcome distraction. When the woman's body is discovered in one half of a double homicide, the evidence points to something far out of the ordinary. The other murder victim is a man, covered in combat scars and with a false passport. Investigations reveal a list of enemies as long as Bruno's arm.

A missing art student. An international investigation. A secret that will shatter Bruno's charming village of St Denis. A rich American art student is found dead at the bottom of a well in an ancient hilltop castle. The young woman, Claudia, had been working in the archives of an eminent French art historian, a crippled Resistance war hero, at his art-filled chateau.

Bruno Courreges is chief of police of the lovely town of St Denis in the Dordogne. His main wish is to keep the local people safe and his town free from crime. But crime has a way of finding its way to him. For 30 years, Bruno's boss, chief of detectives Jalipeau, known as J-J, has been obsessed with his first case. It was never solved and Bruno knows that this failure continues to haunt J-J. A young male body was found in the woods near St Denis and never identified. For all these years, J-J has kept the skull as a reminder. He calls him 'Oscar'.

Eighteen mutilated women in a Shanghai mass grave. But this is only the beginning of a horrific case for Investigator Li Yan and Mei Ling, head of Shanghai's serious crime squad. Ling is a formidable woman, and she appears to threaten Li Yan's relationship with pathologist Margaret Campbell. But when Campbell discovers that the victims were subjected to live autopsies, she knows she'll need all the help she can get.

It is summer in St Denis and Bruno is busy organising the annual village concert. He's hired a local Périgord folk group, Les Troubadours, to perform their latest hit 'A Song for Catalonia'. But when the song unexpectedly goes viral, the Spanish government, clamping down on the Catalonian bid for independence, bans Les Troubadours from performing it. The timing couldn't be worse, and Bruno finds himself under yet more pressure when a specialist sniper's bullet is found in a wrecked car near Bergerac.

The victim carries no identification and her fingerprints are not known to the French Police or Interpol.The only clue to the woman's identity is that her dentistry looks American, but Bruno's inquiries at local hotels and gites yield no trace of a missing foreign woman. The chateau of Commarque, begun in the 11th century, was founded by a Bishop of Sarlat and entrusted to the Knights Templar. In the rocks beneath it are caves.

In 1965, five teenage friends fled Glasgow for London to pursue their dream of musical stardom. Yet before year's end three returned, and returned damaged. In 2015, a brutal murder forces those three men, now in their 60s, to journey back to London and finally confront the dark truth they have run from for five decades. Runaway is a crime novel covering 50 years of friendships solidified and severed, dreams shared and shattered and passions lit and extinguished.

1957, Munich. Bernie Gunther's latest move in a long string of varied careers sees him working for an insurance company. It makes a kind of sense: both cops and insurance companies have a vested interest in figuring out when people are lying to them, and Bernie has a lifetime of experience to call on. Sent to Athens to investigate a claim from a fellow German for a ship that has sunk, Bernie takes an instant dislike to the claimant. When he discovers the ship in question once belonged to a Greek Jew deported to Auschwitz, he is convinced the sinking was no accident.

Following the funeral of a local farmer, Bruno gets a phone call from his son. He tells Bruno that before his father's sudden death, he had signed over his property to an insurance company in return for a subscription to a luxury retirement home. Bruno discovers that both the retirement home and the insurance company are scams with links to a Russian oligarch whose dealings are already being tracked by the French police.

America, 1960. In Washington, DC, John F. Kennedy has just been elected president. In Havana, Fidel Castro has been in office for a year, and with Cold War tensions rapidly heating up and the Soviets leading the space race, the thought of a Communist leader so close to home is already raising American blood pressure. Anti-communist fever is rampant in the USA, with a paranoid establishment seeing reds under every bed. Nevertheless, the decision to snuff out the threat of Castro by hiring Tom Jefferson, America's best assassin, to kill him comes from an unusual quarter: the Mafia.

Berlin, 1928, the height of the Weimar Republic. Bernie is a young detective working in Vice when he asked to investigate the Silesian Station killings: four prostitutes murdered in as many weeks, and in the same gruesome manner. Bernie hardly has time to acquaint himself with the case files before another murder occurs. Until now, no one has shown much interest in these victims—there are plenty in Berlin who'd like the streets washed clean of such degenerates.

'A man doesn't work for his enemies unless he has little choice in the matter.' So says Bernie Gunther, when he finds himself working for French Intelligence - it was either that or hang for murder. His job is to meet and greet POWs returning to Germany and to find a French war criminal and member of the French SS who has been posing as a German Wehrmacht officer. The French are anxious to catch up with this man and deal with him in their own ruthless way. But Bernie's past is about to catch up with him - in a way he could never have foreseen.

France, 1956. Bernie Gunther is on the run. If there's one thing he's learned, it's never to refuse a job from a high-ranking secret policeman. But this is exactly what he's just done. Now he's a marked man, with the East German Stasi on his tail. Fleeing across Europe, he remembers the last time he worked with his pursuer: in 1939, to solve a murder at the Berghof, Hitler's summer hideaway in the Bavarian Alps. Hitler is long dead, the Berghof now a ruined shell and the bizarre time Bernie spent there should be no more than a distant memory.

At the end of a deadly bear hunt across the wilderness of Northern Sweden, the successful hunters are shaken by a grisly discovery. Across in Kurravaara, a woman is murdered with frenzied brutality: crude abuse scrawled above her bloodied bed, her young grandson nowhere to be found. Only Rebecka Martinsson sees a connection.

On a deserted road in Calabria, Greek aid worker Anastasia Cristakos is driving alone to visit one of the new refugee centres funded by billionaire Denis Hisami, whom she has recently married. She slows down to greet two African migrants she recognises. Too late she realises they are not her friends. This is an ambush. She manages a desperate phone call to Hisami before her Mafia kidnappers silence her with a powerful drug. Hours later she wakes up in the pitch dark on a container ship powering eastwards across the Mediterranean.

Lydia Grajauskas will never forget the face. The face of the trafficker who brought her to Stockholm: the man responsible for three unrelenting years of forced prostitution and slavery. DCI Ewert Grens will never forget the name. The name of the prisoner the day his life was destroyed: the man responsible for 25 years of torturous heartache. Sweden will never forget their revenge....

Nordland. A region in the Norwegian Arctic; a remote valley that stretches from the sea up to the mountains and the glacier of the Blue Man. It is May. In Nordland it's a time of spring and school-leavers' celebrations - until Daniel, a popular teenage boy, goes missing. Conflicting stories circulate among his friends, of parties and wild behaviour. As the search for Daniel widens, the police open a disused mine in the mountains. They find human remains, but this body has been there for decades, its identity a mystery.

They killed Robert Harland today, and they're going to kill the rest of you. This is the warning private investigator Paul Samson receives right after Joni Fremantle, the woman he has been guarding for a mysterious client, gives him the slip. No time to worry about that now: his life, and those of Denis Hisami, Anastasia Christakos and even the young Syrian Naji, is on the line. Samson is sure he knows why - to expose a company supplying funds to far-right groups across Europe is to paint a target on your own back.