Showing results by publisher "Hodder & Stoughton" in Thriller & Suspense

Dark Isle off the Florida coast is said to be cursed: drownings, disappearances and hauntings have been the fate of intruders. The people who lived there were once enslaved. Now abandoned, it is the target of greedy developers. Lovely Jackson is the last survivor and claims to be its legal owner. But there is not a shred of evidence to prove that is true. It's unlikely that the developers will be deterred by the claims of one old woman. They have millions; Lovely only has Steve Mahon, a pro bono environmental lawyer, and Mercer Mann, a floundering novelist, to fight in her corner.

The Duke of Denver, accused of murder, stands trial for his life in the House of Lords. Naturally, his brother Lord Peter Wimsey is investigating the crime - this is a family affair. The murder took place at the duke's shooting lodge and Lord Peter's sister was engaged to marry the dead man. But why does the duke refuse to co-operate with the investigation? Can he really be guilty, or is he covering up for someone?

Camilla Haven sends a letter home during her quiet holiday in Athens. But when a stranger begs her to drive a car to Delphi, swearing that it is a matter of life and death, Camilla impulsively takes the opportunity she's been offered. Before long she is caught up in a whirlwind of intrigue, deceit and murder as she spins along the dusty Greek roads in a race against time to solve a 14-year-old mystery.

Rome, the very end of December. The Field of Mars is packed with monuments, none more beautiful than Domitian's new Odeon and Stadium. But the area has been overtaken by ugly events: elaborately staged murders. Someone bears a spectacular grudge against the theatrical community and intends to get revenge in the most spectacular way possible. The killer's method is to re-enact bloody scenes from the gruesome side of popular theatre, where characters in plays really die on stage.

The 26th instalment of the internationally best-selling DCI Banks series. When the body of a teenage boy is found stuffed into a wheely bin on the East Side Estate, Banks and Annie have a homegrown murder case to solve. But Banks' attention is also on Zelda, who, in helping him track down his old enemy, has put herself in danger and alerted the stone-cold Eastern European sex traffickers who brought her to the UK.

There is a secret from our history - 500 years old - startling in its revelations and devastating in its political impact. A secret that has, thankfully, stayed hidden. Until now. Former Justice Department agent Cotton Malone travels to England and finds himself caught in a dark conspiracy born long ago, in the time of the Tudors. Now both the CIA and MI6 seem to be competing to uncover the mystery, and for Malone, supposedly on holiday with his son, Gary, it's not just the action which comes thick and fast.

Friendships forged in the heat of combat can be stronger than anything. So when SAS trooper Matt Standing is told that the former Navy SEAL who saved his life is in trouble, he doesn't hesitate to go to his aid - even if that means flying halfway around the world to Los Angeles. Navy SEAL-turned-bodyguard Bobby-Ray Barnes has been accused of killing the man he was supposed to be protecting. Three other bodyguards were also killed, and now Bobby-Ray is on the run. The dead client was a Russian oligarch with connections to the Kremlin.

On a lonely moor in the northeast of England, the body of a young woman is discovered near the site of a vanished church. In the south, a girl lies buried beneath a Saxon mound. To the southeast, the ruins of a priory hide a human skull. Each is a sacrifice, a summons. And something in the darkness has heard the call. But another is coming: Parker the hunter, the avenger.

A young local student has apparently committed suicide. Her body is found in an abandoned car on a lonely country road. She didn't own a car. Didn't even drive. How did she get there? Where did she die? Who moved her, and why? Meanwhile a man in his 60s is found dead in a gully up on the wild moorland. He is wearing an expensive suit and carrying no identification. Post-mortem findings indicate he died from injuries sustained during the fall. But what was he doing up there? And why are there no signs of a car in the vicinity?

When the body of a young girl is found in a remote countryside lane, evidence suggests she was drugged, abused and thrown from a moving van - before being beaten to death. While DI Annie Cabbot investigates the circumstances in which a 14-year-old could possibly fall victim to such a crime, newly promoted Detective Superintendent Alan Banks must do the same - but the crime Banks is investigating is the coldest of cases.

When Gwendy Peterson was 12, a stranger named Richard Farris gave her a mysterious box for safekeeping. It offered treats and vintage coins, but it was dangerous. Pushing any of its seven coloured buttons promised death and destruction. Years later, the button box re-entered Gwendy's life. A successful novelist and a rising political star, she was once more forced to deal with the temptations that the box represented - an amazing sense of well-being, balanced by a terrifyingly dark urge towards disaster.

Britannia has been subdued - and an epic new chapter in Marcus Valerius Aquila's life begins. The murderous Roman agents who nearly captured Marcus have been defeated by his friends. But in order to protect those very friends from the wrath of the emperor, he must leave the province that has been giving him shelter. As Marcus Tribulus Corvus, centurion of the second Tungrian auxiliary cohort, he leads his men from Hadrian's Wall to the Tungrians' original home in Germania Inferior.

High in the rugged Pyrenees lies the Valley of the Storms, where a tiny convent clings to the beautiful but lonely mountainside. Jenny Silver arrives seeking her missing cousin, and is devastated when she learns of Gillian's death following a terrible car accident. But Jenny's suspicions are aroused when she's told the blue flowers ornamenting her cousin's grave were Gillian's favourite. Jenny knows Gillian was colour-blind - and so starts her mission to uncover what really happened to her.

It is deep winter. The darkness is unending. The private detective named Jaycob Eklund has vanished, and Charlie Parker is dispatched to track him down. Parker's employer, Edgar Ross, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has his own reasons for wanting Eklund found. Eklund is no ordinary investigator. He is obsessively tracking a series of homicides and disappearances, each linked to reports of hauntings.

In the depths of the Maine woods, the wreckage of an aeroplane is discovered. There are no bodies, and no such plane has ever been reported missing, but men both good and evil have been seeking it for a long, long time. What the wreckage conceals is more important than money: it is power. Hidden in the plane is a list of names, a record of those who have struck a deal with the Devil.

The office of the public defender is not known as a training ground for bright young litigators. Clay Carter has been there too long and, like most of his colleagues, dreams of a better job in a real firm. When he reluctantly takes the case of a young man charged with a random street killing, he assumes it is just another of the many senseless murders that hit D.C. every week. As he digs into the background of his client, Clay stumbles on a conspiracy too horrible to believe.

Four people's lives are dramatically torn apart by a single terrifying event. Two days before Christmas the express train to Strasbourg crashes into a local train in the winter darkness outside Paris. On board is Gilles Malroux, a man with a shady past and a strong reason to avoid the police. In the mayhem of the crash he is badly injured but to avoid capture by the police he swaps identity papers with one of the other victims of the impact. Gilles tries to flee in the dark but finds himself taken to the house of a woman he doesn't know but who calls him Davide.

On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There's no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a pair of local newspapermen and a graduate student in forensics turns up any clues. But that's just the beginning of the mystery. Because the more they learn about the man and the baffling circumstances of his death, the less they understand. Was it an impossible crime? Or something stranger still.

Seventeen is a hitman, the best in the world, so-called because there were 16 before him, stretching back through the decades. Every government organisation in the world wants his services and every other high-level hitman has placed a target on his back. Because to be the best, you have to beat the best. When Seventeen is ordered to find and kill his predecessor, the hit goes wrong and hunter turns to hunted. An ultraviolent duel develops between two assassins at the height of their powers, but when they fight themselves to a standstill, the real target of the hit emerges.

One by one the seven precious relics of the Arma Christi, the weapons of Christ, are disappearing from sanctuaries across the world. After former Justice Department agent Cotton Malone witnesses the theft of one of them, he learns from his old boss, Stephanie Nelle, that a private auction is about to be held where incriminating information on the president of Poland will be offered to the highest bidder - blackmail that both the United States and Russia want, but for vastly different reasons.