Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in International Mystery & Crime

It is 1980, and the Democratic People's Republic of Laos is proud to be competing in its first-ever Olympics. Of course half the world is boycotting the Moscow Summer Olympic Games to protest Russia's recent invasion of Afghanistan, but that has made room for athletes from countries that are usually too small or underfunded to be competitive-countries like Laos.

Dr. Siri Paiboun, the ex-national coroner of Laos, may have more experience dissecting bodies than making art, but when he manages to smuggle a fancy movie camera into the country he devises a plan to shoot a Lao adaptation of War and Peace. The only problem? The Ministry of Culture must approve the script first. That and he can't figure out how to turn on the camera. Meanwhile, the skeleton of a woman has appeared under the Anusawari Arch in the middle of the night. Siri assists his friend, the newly promoted Senior Police Inspector Phosy Vongvichai, with the ensuing investigation.

Laos, 1981: When an unofficial mailman drops off a strange bilingual diary, Dr. Siri is intrigued. Half is in Lao, but the other half is in Japanese, which no one Siri knows can read; it appears to have been written during the Second World War. Most mysterious of all, it comes with a note stapled to it: Dr. Siri, we need your help most urgently. But who is “we”, and why have they left no return address?

Winter 1944: Months after the Liberation of France, ex-Boston cop Billy Boyle finds himself in a Paris reeling from the carnage it has endured but hopeful that an end to war is in sight. When Billy finds a rare piece of artwork after a tense shoot-out in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, he thinks it could be connected to the Syndicat du Renard, a shadowy network of Nazi sympathizers known to be smuggling stolen artwork out of France. Trailing the Syndicat, Billy discovers that someone with a high level of communications clearance may be using his position to aid the thieves.

As 1995 dawns in the North of Ireland, Belfast is a city of army patrols, bombed-out buildings, and “peace walls” segregating one community from the other. But the IRA has called a ceasefire. So, it’s as good a time as any for Monty Collins and Father Brennan Burke to visit the city: Monty to do a short gig in a law firm, and Brennan to reconnect with family. And it’s a good time for Brennan’s cousin Ronan to lay down arms and campaign for election in a future peacetime government. But then a man goes off a bridge on a dark, lonely road; a rogue IRA enforcer is shot; and a series of car bombs remains an unsolved crime.

Alicia Bjelke has always been the "other sister," the foil to her beautiful sister Stella—people turn their backs when they see Alicia's disfigured face. So she created a life in the background, becoming a coding genius and founding a groundbreaking dating app company. With Stella as the face of the company, Alicia has found success. Until one day, when Stella is found dead and Alicia’s life takes the wrong turn. Soon, she realizes that she is the next target.

November 1989: Aimee Leduc is in her first year of college at Paris' preeminent medical school. She lives in a 17th-century apartment that overlooks the Seine with her father, who runs the family detective agency. But the week the Berlin Wall crumbles, so does Aimee's life as she knows it. First, someone has sabotaged her lab work, putting her at risk of failing out of the program. Then, she finds out her aristo boyfriend is planning to get engaged to another woman.

Aimee Leduc has her work cut out for her - running her detective agency and fighting off sleep deprivation as she tries to be a good single mother to her new bebe. The last thing she has time for now is to take on a personal investigation for a poor manouche (French Gypsy) boy. But he insists his dying mother has an important secret she needs to tell Aimee, something to do with Aimee's father's unsolved murder a decade ago. How can she say no?

One year after moving to his late wife’s Tuscan hometown of Gravigna, Nico Doyle has fully settled into life there, seeing friends in the course of daily errands and helping to serve and test recipes at his in-laws’ restaurant. But the town is shaken by the arrival of wine critic Michele Mantelli in his flashy Jaguar. Mantelli holds his influential culinary magazine and blog over Gravigna’s vintners and restaurateurs. Mantelli’s lavish, larger-than-life, and often vindictive personality has made him many enemies, and when he is poisoned, Maresciallo Perillo needs help....

1956: In a quiet English village, the smoldering ruins of Rosemont Abbey have set the residents’ tongues wagging, and everyone is quick to accuse troublemaker Paul Everly of the crime of arson. Paul has vanished without a trace, leaving only his plucky twin sister, Louisa, certain of his innocence. Fueling her conviction is an inexplicable connection—she felt her twin’s death an hour before the abbey went up in flames.

Laos, 1979: Retired coroner Siri Paiboun and his wife, Madame Daeng, have never been able to turn away a misfit. As a result they share their small Vientiane house with an assortment of homeless people, mendicants, and oddballs. One of these oddballs is Noo, a Buddhist monk who rides out on his bicycle one day and never comes back, leaving only a cryptic note in the refrigerator - a plea to help a fellow monk escape across the Mekong River to Thailand. Naturally, Siri can't turn down the adventure.

October 1942: it’s been two years since Kate Rees was sent to Paris on a British Secret Service mission to assassinate Hitler. Since then, she has left spycraft behind to take a training job as a sharpshooting instructor in the Scottish Highlands. But her quiet life is violently disrupted when Colonel Stepney, her former handler, drags her back into the fray for a dangerous three-pronged mission in Paris.

Facing a tight deadline on a computer security contract, Aimée responds to a telephone call from a stranger that leads her to an abandoned infant in a courtyard on the Ile Saint-Louis. She brings the baby home with her, calls her Stella, and awaits contact from the mother. But days pass, and no one reclaims the infant. Meanwhile, a group of environmental protestors is trying to stop the government from entering into a contract with an oil company notorious for pollution.

When Army Ranger Garrett Knox left behind his military career to lead wilderness expeditions, he thought he’d escaped the life-threatening missions forever. But his quiet world in the Montana mountains explodes one evening, forcing him to accept a persistent government agent’s dangerous mission: Hunt down Knox’s former military buddy accused of treason and the murder of nearly their entire platoon.

It’s 1915 and war continues to rage across Europe, but at home in England, the members of the Women Police Volunteers are more accepted and their numbers continue to grow. However, founding member, Dorothy Peto is frustrated at being consigned to office duties and training recruits. Then, early one morning, her friend Margaret finds a dead body in the garden next door.

Payatas, a 50-acre dump northeast of Manila's Quezon City, is home to thousands of people who live off of what they can scavenge there. It is one of the poorest neighborhoods in a city whose law enforcement is already stretched thin, devoid of forensic resources, and rife with corruption. So when the eviscerated bodies of preteen boys begin to appear in the dump heaps, there is no one to seek justice on their behalf. In the rainy summer of 1997, two Jesuit priests take the matter of protecting their flock into their own hands.

Secrets drove gifted surgeon Olivia Calderone away from Shadow Bay. Now that she's come home, will something more sinister be the death of her? Homicide Lieutenant Gabriel Garrett is a man well acquainted with shadows and darkness. With the discovery of a mass grave in his hometown that shines a light on an underworld no one realize existed, his second chance with a long-lost soulmate hangs in the balance. Will his pursuit of justice restore a love interrupted or will the truth destroy them both?

As a founding member of King & Co., London's most successful private investigation firm, studious Eleanor Law delights in secretly proving that women can solve crimes just as well as men. When a charming con man pretends to be her fictional boss, "Charles King," Ellie knows he's lying, but accepting the scoundrel's offer of help might just be the key to cracking her new case and recovering a priceless manuscript.

How far would you go for your best friend? If she begged you to, would you kill her? Nathan Lucius, 31, is an ad salesman at a local Cape Town newspaper. Disaffected, hard-drinking and plagued by nightmares, Nathan lives alone with only one true friend, a woman named Madge. But Madge is dying slowly of cancer, and when she asks Nathan to end her pain, she sets off a shocking string of events.

Laos, 1979: Dr. Siri Paiboun, the twice retired ex-National Coroner of Laos, receives an unmarked package in the mail. Inside is a handwoven pha sin, a colorful traditional skirt worn in northern Laos. A lovely present, but who sent it to him, and why? And, more importantly, why is there a severed human finger stitched into the sin's lining?