Showing results by narrator "David Monteath" in All Categories

DI Jack Knox is called in to investigate a high-profile case. A local distiller’s daughter has gone missing, and when he receives a ransom note, his fears that it is a kidnapping are confirmed. Knox decides to take a serious risk to capture the abductors, but the stakes could not be higher. The father is wealthy and well-connected. If Knox’s gamble goes wrong, he’ll have hell to pay. Meanwhile in the prequel story, 'Labyrinth', the body of an attractive young woman is found in woodland on Edinburgh’s iconic Calton Hill.

Summer, 1551, and Francis Crawford of Lymond is in Malta to assist the Knights of St John defend the island from an invading Turkish fleet. But under a weak leader there is dissension in the ranks of the Knights - and the chances of repelling invasion look slim. Here Lymond meets Knight Grand Cross Graham Reid Malett - known as Gabriel - a fellow Scot famed for his virtues. It is soon clear that Gabriel's wiles in war and intrigue rival Lymond's own as he attempts to bring his new comrade in arms into the bosom of his scheming.

James Machie was a man with a genius for violence, his criminal empire spreading beyond Glasgow into the UK and mainland Europe. Fortunately, James Machie is dead, assassinated in the back of a prison ambulance following his trial and conviction. But now, five years later, he is apparently back from the grave, set on avenging himself on those who brought him down. Top of his list is his previous associate, Frank MacDougall, who unbeknownst to D.C.I. Jim Daley, is living under protection on his lochside patch, the small Scottish town of Kinloch.

When a senior Edinburgh civil servant spectacularly takes his own life in Kinloch harbour, DCI Jim Daley comes face to face with the murky world of politics. To add to his woes, two local drug dealers lie dead, ritually assassinated. It's clear that dark forces are at work in the town. With his boss under investigation, his marriage hanging on by a thread, and his sidekick, DS Scott, wrestling with his own demons, Daley's world is in meltdown.

A country in desperate need of heroes. Angostin invaders surge through the Highlands, laying waste to everything in their path. Darkness follows in their wake as a mad necromancer resurrects the eons-dead Vampyre Kings. Only the bandit Jarek Mace, and the magicker and bard Owen Odell, have the courage to fight the Angostins and the undead. Whispers soon spread that Mace is the legendary Morningstar, a saviour who will protect his country in its hour of need. Yet Mace seems nothing more than a thief and a liar.

When police constable Hamish Macbeth receives the news that there has been a murder at Arrat House, home of the relentless practical joker Arthur Trent, he doesn’t race to the scene of the crime. After all, last time he was called to investigate a death at the isolated Scottish manor, the "victim" turned out to be Trent’s manservant covered in fake blood.

In Kinloch, Hamish is having bad dreams - so bad, he won’t leave the house. In the middle of the night, Brian Scott hears his phone buzz on the nightstand. It’s a message from Jim Daley, his old friend, which chills him to the bone. When the body of a woman is discovered, Daley is arrested for murder. Scott believes he’s innocent, so who is trying to frame him? The search for answers will lead Jim and Brian on a dark journey into their past, putting them – and the people closest to them – in immediate danger.

After a romantic disappointment and an undeserved demotion, Scots village bobby Hamish Macbeth decides a week's holiday at the coastal village of Skag might be just the ticket. He's dead wrong, of course: the food is dire, and the man in the next room nags his wife so loudly and continuously that more than one person at the Friendly House bed-and-breakfast wishes him dead, though only Hamish is heard threatening him. When this chap's body is found floating in the river Skag, Hamish is the prime suspect.

After a party of Oxford students arrives in town for a camping trip before a Himalayan expedition, one of the group seeks out an illegal high and is violently assaulted. However, these students are well connected, and this brings further unexpected problems for Daley. Ultimately, he and Scott will discover crimes as disturbing in nature as anything they have ever confronted.

When Professor Francombe and her team of archaeologists find the remains of three women on a remote Kintyre hillside - a site rumoured to have been the base of Viking warlord Somerled - their delight soon turns to horror when they realise the women tragically met their end little more than two decades ago. It soon becomes clear that these are the three missing victims of the ‘Midweek Murderer’, a serial killer who was at work in Glasgow in the early 1990s. DCI Jim Daley now has the chance to put things right.

In the present, an old fisherman is found dead by the shoreline and a stranger with a mission moves into a shabby Kinloch flat/ Meanwhile, D.C.I. Jim Daley is trying to help Brian Scott stay sober, and the good people of Kinloch are still mourning the death of one of their own. As past and present collide, Daley finds himself face to face with old friends and foes. Memories can only last as long as those who keep them, and ghosts will not be silenced.

When the luxury cruiser, hastily renamed Great Britain, berths in Kinloch harbour, the pressure is on DCI Jim Daley. The UK Government are taking a high-powered group of businessmen and women on a tour of the British isles, golfing and seeing the sights, as part of a push for global trade. But when one of the crew goes missing, and an elderly local ornithologist disappears, will the pressure become too great?

The unconventional Hamish Macbeth finds that his own impetuousness places him at the center of a murder investigation. Everyone in the Scottish Highlands village of Lochdubh called Randy Duggan 'the Macho Man'. Duggan went around the village and bragged about everything he had done and said he once was a wrestler in America and an explorer in the Middle East. At first his outrageous stories drew an admiring crowd at the local pub, but soon his bullying ways lead to anger and violence.

When a light aircraft crash-lands at Machrie airport, Daley and Scott rush to the scene. But it soon becomes clear that both occupants of the plane were dead before take-off.... Meanwhile, tending to his lobster creels, Hamish finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and back at the County Hotel, Annie is beginning to suspect her new boss Ian Macmillan may not be as he first appeared.

A sudden outbreak of maliciousness strikes the town of Lochdubh in the form of a rash of poison pen letters. Things turn deadly when the local postmistress is found hanged in her room... with a vicious note beneath her dangling feet. Though his superiors call it suicide, PC Hamish Macbeth pronounces it murder. But Hamish is soon distracted by Jenny Ogilvie, a friend of his ex-fiancee, who arrives in Lochdubh to seduce him. And then he's ambushed by local reporter Elspeth Grant, who sets out to land the story - and Hamish - for herself.

A missing person report is not usually something that Hamish Macbeth sees as cause for undue distress. Should a child or a vulnerable person vanish, it's an urgent matter that needs to be treated seriously, but in Macbeth's experience, most other people who go missing tend to turn up again before long. So when Kate Hibbert disappears after having last been seen struggling along the road with a heavy suitcase, he is convinced she has gone travelling and reluctantly goes through the motions of investigating.

Amazing news is spreading like wildfire across the Scottish countryside: the most famous of all Lochdubh, remotely nestling in the Highlands, is perfectly anonymous... until well-known TV reporter Crystal French races into town in her bright new BMW. And PC Hamish Macbeth, dourly wed to duty rather than the fiancée who dumped him, promptly gives her a ticket for reckless driving. Outraged, Crystal makes Macbeth's life a misery with a TV report on policing in the Highlands...

DCI Jim Daley is sent from the city to investigate a murder after the body of a woman is washed up on an idyllic beach on the West Coast of Scotland. Far away from urban resources, he finds himself a stranger in a close-knit community. Love, betrayal, fear and death stalk the small town, as Daley investigates a case that becomes more deadly than he could possibly imagine, in this compelling Scottish crime novel infused with intrigue and dark humour.

When a woman's skeleton is discovered in a shallow grave DCI Andy Gilchrist is tasked with finding her murderer. But a psychic's warnings and markings on a rusted cigarette lighter found among the rotted remains set Gilchrist off on a trail that will take him back 35 years back. When dental records from an extracted tooth force Gilchrist to confront the unthinkable - that his brother was her killer - he keeps his fears to himself, only to be suspended on suspicion of destroying evidence. But Gilchrist battles on

Teenager Alison Doig disappeared from Kinloch more than 30 years ago under mysterious circumstances. Her reclusive family still lives in a remote part of the Kintyre peninsula, amidst rumours of wrecking, smuggling and barbaric cruelty. Now rich American hotelier Alice Wenger has arrived in town, determined to punish those who made her suffer in the past. But someone has vowed to keep hidden sins concealed forever. Daley’s team must race against time to expose long-held secrets and shameful lies before there are any more victims.