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.

Just days after the Liberation of Paris, US Army Detective Billy Boyle and Lieutenant Kazimierz are brought to Saint Albans Convalescent Hospital in the English countryside. Kaz has been diagnosed with a heart condition, and Billy is dealing with emotional exhaustion and his recent methamphetamine abuse. Meanwhile, Billy's love, Diana Seaton, has been taken to Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp for women, and Kaz's sister, Angelika, who he recently learned was alive and working with the Polish Underground, has also been captured and transported to the same camp.

A speeding BMW leaves a dead pedestrian in its wake and leads police to the corpse of a young girl in a cellar. Detective Inspector Irene Huss' ensuing investigation draws her into the chilling world of sex trafficking. One of Soho Crime's best-selling series, Swedish Detective Inspector Irene Huss is another example of why the Scandinavian crime fiction trend is so hot.

November, 2001: In the wake of 9/11, Paris is living in a state of fear, with constant bomb alerts and heightened ethnic tension. For Aimée Leduc, November is bittersweet: The anniversary of her father’s death and her daughter’s third birthday fall on the same day. A gathering for family and friends is disrupted when a bomb goes off at the police laboratory - and Boris Viard, the partner of Aimée’s friend Michou, is found unconscious at the scene of the crime with traces of explosive under his fingernails.

Katherine Yeboah's marriage to Solomon Vanderpuye is all the talk of Accra high society. But when it becomes apparent that Katherine is infertile, Solomon's extended family accuses her of being a witch, hounding her until the relationship is so soured Solomon feels compelled to order Katherine out of the house they shared. Alone on her last night there, Katherine is brutally murdered by an intruder wielding a machete.

He watches the women from the shadows. He has an understanding with them; as long as they follow his rules, they are safe. But when they sin, he sentences them to death. A woman is found dead in a cemetery, strangled and covered in plastic. Just a few days before her death, the victim had received a flower, an unintelligible note, and a photograph of herself.

Darko Dawson has just been promoted to chief inspector in the Ghana Police Service - the promotion even comes with a (rather modest) salary bump. But he doesn't have long to celebrate, because his new boss is transferring him from Accra, Ghana's capital, out to remote Obuasi in the Ashanti region, an area now notorious for the illegal exploitation of its gold mines. When Dawson arrives at the Obuasi headquarters, he finds it in complete disarray.

Just as things at work are slowing down for PI Emma Djan, an old friend of her boss’s asks for help locating his missing daughter. According to her father, Ngozi had a bright future ahead of her when she became secretive and withdrawn. Suddenly, all she wanted to do was be with her handsome new beau, Femi, instead of attending law school in the fall. So when she disappears from her parents’ house in Nigeria the middle of a summer night, they immediately suspect Femi was behind it and have reason to believe the pair has fled to Accra.

Jing-nan has known Peggy Lee, a bullying frenemy who runs her family's huge corporation, since high school. Peggy's father has been kidnapped, and the ransom the kidnappers are demanding is not money but IP: a high-tech memory chip that they want to sell in China. Jing-nan feels sorry for Peggy until she starts blackmailing him into helping out. Peggy is worried the kidnappers' deadline will pass before the police are able to track down the chip. But when the reluctant Jing-nan tries to help, he finds himself deeper and deeper in trouble with some very unsavory characters.

Paris, July 1999. Private investigator Aimee Leduc is walking through Saint-Germain when she is accosted by Suzanne Lesage, a Brigade Criminelle agent on an elite counterterrorism squad. Suzanne has just returned from the former Yugoslavia, where she was hunting down dangerous war criminals. Back in Paris, Suzanne is convinced she's being stalked by a ghost - a Serbian warlord she thought she'd killed. She's suffering from PTSD, and her boss thinks she's imagining things.

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.

Parisian private investigator Aimée Leduc is about to go onstage to deliver the keynote address at a tech conference that is sure to secure Leduc Detective some much-needed business contracts when she gets an emergency phone call from her daughter’s playgroup: Aimée’s own mother, who was supposed to pick Chloe up, never showed. Abandoning her hard-won speaking gig, Aimée rushes to get Chloe. But as Aimée and Chloe are leaving the playground, Aimée witnesses the body of a homeless woman being wheeled away. The last person anyone saw the woman talking to was Aimée’s mother.

It's 1989. The Troubles are raging in Ireland, bombs exploding in England. In this prequel to the Collins-Burke series, Father Brennan Burke is home in New York when news of his sister's arrest in London sends him flying across the ocean. The family troubles deepen when Brennan's cousin Conn is charged with the murder of a Special Branch detective and suspected in a terrorist plot against Westminster Abbey. The Burkes come under surveillance by the murdered cop's partner and are caught in a tangle of buried family memories.

London, 1879. Crowds have gathered at Islington's chilly Agricultural Hall to place their bets on who will become the next world champion in a six-day, 500-mile speed-walking race, the wobble. When one of the highly favored contenders dies under suspicious circumstances, Sergeant Cribb also has a race on his hands - to pursue a ruthless murderer.

Taipei is rocked by the back-to-back murders of a petty criminal and a police captain just as the city is preparing to host the big Austronesian Cultural Festival. The celebration is set to bring in indigenous performers from all around the Pacific Rim to the island nation of Taiwan. Jing-nan, the proprietor of Unknown Pleasures, a popular food stand at Taipei’s largest night market, is thrown into the intrigue. Is he being set up to take the rap, or will he be the next victim? T

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.

Twelve-year-old Bonnie MacDonald - the beloved step dancing, fiddling youngest member of Cape Breton's famed Clan Donnie band - vanishes after a family party. There was no stranger spotted lurking around, but no one thinks for one minute that Bonnie ran away. Maura MacNeil, cousin to Clan Donnie, offers her husband's legal services to the family as the police search for the missing girl. But fame attracts some strange characters, and Clan Donnie has groupies. So, it turns out, does lawyer and bluesman Monty Collins.

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.

While war and revolution continue to ravage Europe, Dorothy Peto embraces her new role at Scotland Yard as she and several detectives investigate a series of jewel thefts. Then Dorothy is tasked with assisting the inscrutable Inspector Derwent and the charming Colonel Cartier to find a missing French aristocrat. Their enquiries take them to a country house in Yorkshire, that’s been converted to a hospital for wounded soldiers and was the last place the Frenchman visited. However, the more questions they ask, the more questions they have.

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.