Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Traditional Detectives

Fresh from her first murder case, Nantucket detective Merry Folger is unwillingly sucked into her second. When Joe Duarte, a fishing boat captain with decades of experience on the wild seas off Nantucket, is swept overboard during a spring storm, his death is pronounced accidental. But his estranged daughter, Del, is convinced it's murder. She moves back to Nantucket to get closer to the truth and enlists her old friend, Detective Merry Folger, to help. But Del is also hiding secrets of her own.

Private investigator Sarah Booth Delaney and her friends are celebrating New Year's Eve at the party of the year, a smashing Winter White Garden party at the newly renovated King Cotton Boutique Hotel. It's a dazzling success, until Frangelica "Sister" McFee walks through the door. Sarah Booth knew Sister in college, before Sister became a best-selling author and moved to New York, and fame and fortune don't seem to have tempered her arrogance and cruelty.

As a Category 3 hurricane bears down on Nantucket, Dionis Mather and her father have their work cut out for them. Their family business is to ferry goods and people back and forth from Tuckernuck, the private island off Nantucket’s western tip, a place so remote and exclusive that it is off the electric grid. As caretakers of the small plot of sand in the middle of the Atlantic, the Mathers are responsible for evacuating Tuckernuck’s residents, who range from an elderly native who refuses to leave her family home to the abandoned summer house pets of an absentee NFL quarterback.

In this second book in the Frank Yakabuski Mystery series, Yakabuski is called in to investigate a gruesome crime scene. A body has been left hanging from a schoolyard fence. On closer inspection, Yak finds a large diamond in the murder victim’s mouth. Two criminal gangs - the Shiners and the Travellers - are fighting with each other, and Yakabuski turns to his father, a now-retired detective who has a long history with the gangs, for advice in the interrogation. And as if this weren’t enough for one detective, a serial killer is taking a deadly road trip through the United States.

Catherine Wynne's introduction reappraises the stories by looking at Conan Doyle's medical background and its influence on the creation of the famous detective.

While working one afternoon on the Northern Divide, a young tree-marker makes a grisly discovery: in a squatter's cabin near an old mill town, a family has been murdered. An army vet coming off a successful turn leading a task force that took down infamous biker criminals, Detective Frank Yakabuski arrives in Ragged Lake, a nearly abandoned village, to solve the family's murder. But no one is willing to talk. With a winter storm coming, Yakabuski sequesters the locals in a fishing lodge as he investigates the area with his two junior officers.

Thirteen authors, including Gail Z. Martin, David Gerrold, and Jonathan Maberry, come together to pen short stories innovating Sherlock Holmes, adapting and revolutionizing the iconic character. Sherlock Holmes is one of the most iconic and lasting figures in literature. His feats of detection are legendary, and he continues to capture audiences today in stories, movies, and on TV. In this new anthology, authors present the celebrated detective in more than a dozen different, wildly entertaining new ways.

The third book in the recently revamped Nantucket mystery series. When two children make a grisly discovery on Sconset beach, Detective Meredith Folger finds herself with a perplexing case on her hands. The crime lab can tell her only that the newly unearthed skeletal remains belonged to a woman who was strangled to death somewhere between two and 10 years ago - a conclusion that sends Merry sifting through old missing-persons files. But then a shocking piece of news changes everything.

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.

Like most women, Elizabeth Miles assumes many roles; unlike most, hers have made her a woman on the run. Living on the edge of society, Elizabeth uses her guile to relieve so-called respectable men of their ill-gotten gains. But brutal and greedy entrepreneur Oscar Thornton is out for blood. He's lost a great deal of money and is not going to forgive a woman for outwitting him. With his thugs hot on her trail, Elizabeth seizes the moment to blend in with a group of women who have an agenda of their own.

From mysterious origins through the Victorian sleuths and the "Golden Age" of the genre (the 1920s through the 1940s) and to the present day, detective fiction, mysteries, and spy thrillers have consistently topped best-seller lists around the world. Professor M. Lee Alexander provides listeners with a lively discussion of groundbreaking authors from Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, and modern writers such as Nevada Barr and Jonathan Kellerman.

Forbidden in Victorian England, the grim and violent world of bare-knuckle fighting has gone underground. So when a headless body is found floating in the Thames, his hands "pickled" for fighting, Sergeant Cribb knows he is facing a challenge. Desperate for information, they select the young constable Henry Jago to infiltrate the gang, subjecting him to a rigorous program of purging, pickling, and training. Cribb is certain that the losing fighters are being killed, or worse, so getting Jago out just in time is crucial....

It's October 1814. London suddenly finds itself in the grip of a series of heinous murders eerily similar to the Ratcliffe Highway murders of three years before. In 1811, two entire families were viciously murdered in their homes. A suspect - a young seaman named John Williams - was arrested. But before he could be brought to trial, Williams hanged himself in his cell. The murders ceased. But when the lead investigator is killed in the same brutal way three years later and others possibly connected to the original case meet violent ends, the city is paralyzed with terror once more.

Spencer Murphy is a national treasure. A famous correspondent during the Vietnam War who escaped captivity in Southeast Asia, he made a fortune off of his books and television appearances. But Spence is growing forgetful with age; he's started to wander and even fails to come home one night. When a body is discovered at Step Above, the sprawling Murphy house near Steps Beach, Nantucket police detective Meredith Folger is called in to investigate.

Three cell phones ring in an opulent London suite. The calls go unanswered, because their recipients are dead. Earlier that night, four old friends and lovers meet for a reunion dinner. Miko and Robert haven't seen each other in 10 years; Miko hates Robert for the money he's made with shady ethics. Unbeknownst to Miko, his wife, Veera, also slept with Robert the last time everyone was together. Robert's young trophy wife, Elise, has no old grudges to bear, but will be swept up in the murderous fray.

Merry Folger is more than ready for a romantic vacation with her fiancé, Peter, when fate - and her police chief father - intervenes. Twenty-one-year-old Jay Santorski never should have drowned in the frigid waters off the Nantucket shore. What was the athlete, Harvard scholar, and part-time scalloper doing out alone in the storm-churned bay? At her father's insistence - and over Peter's objections - Merry returns to the island to investigate.

When a teenager disappears from an elite boarding school, local police throw the seemingly innocuous case to their neighborhood PI. Enter Jack Dixon: college dropout, ex-cop, and ex-cook. What should be a simple case quickly turns sour, pushing Jack into the path of Nordic biker cultists and vicious drug dealers. But the houseboat-dwelling PI is determined to find the truth - and the missing kid - even though his persistence leads him into a thorny tangle of drugs and violence that could rip his sleepy waterfront life apart.

Father Brennan Burke is struggling, and he’s been coping the only way he knows how: self-medicating with drink. He’s barely managing, but his troubles intensify when the body of one of his parishioners washes up on the coast of Halifax. Meika Keller came to Canada after escaping past a checkpoint in the Berlin Wall. An army colonel is charged with her murder, and defense lawyer Monty argues that Meika’s death was a suicide, which is the last thing Father Burke wants to hear.

London, 1888. Though the beautiful Miriam Cromer has confessed to the murder of her husband’s assistant, she is still confident of her acquittal. But then, she is sentenced to hang. She blames her husband, but he has an alibi. Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackeray must discover what really happened at Park Lodge on 12th March, 1888, and quickly.

Toni L.P. Kelner has been writing thoughtful mysteries for over thirty years. She won an Agatha Award for her short story "Sleeping With the Plush" and her story "Baby Trap" was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, edited by S.A. Cosby and Steph Cha. Kelner's short fiction has also been nominated for the Anthony, the Macavity, and the Derringer.