Detective Thriller

Fall 1889: Lady Rotherton has arrived from London intent on chaperoning her niece Prudence through a New York social season to find a suitable husband. It's certainly not her niece's devilishly handsome partner in Hunter and MacKenzie Investigative Law. Aunt Gillian's eye for eligible suitors is surpassed only by her ability to discern genuine gems from nearly flawless fakes. At the Assembly Ball at Delmonico's, she effortlessly determines that the stones in the spectacular diamond waterfall necklace adorning the neck of the wife of banker William De Vries are fake.

In the six volumes of the Library of the World’s Best Mystery and Detective Stories, Julian Hawthorne presents us thrilling and mysterious short stories from all corners of the world. Some of the stories appeared in this 1907 collection for the first time translated into English, and many of them come from unexpected sources, such as the letters of Pliny the Younger, or a Tibetan manuscript. In the first volume, we find stories written by American authors.

87% 3/4/5 stars on Amazon! Detective Inspector Dermot O'Hara enjoys life as a policeman in the small Irish coastal town of Kenmare where his greatest challenges are lost library tickets and how to find more time to fish. This peaceful idyll is disrupted when death comes to town. And not just any death... O'Hara's career is on the line after the corpse of a US Senator is found on a remote hillside. O'Hara discovers that the Senator, searching for his Irish roots, has uncovered an old, still burning hatred from the time of the Great Famine. Dermot needs all the help he can get to solve the ...

A reluctant psychic with a haunted past. A straight-laced FBI agent sworn to protect. A mystery they must solve together. Hailey Arquette uses ancestry rooted in the occult to hide her gifts in the small southern town of Hamchet, Texas. Experiencing a victim’s last moments when touching an object isn’t something she can turn off, but helps her to navigate the shadowy world where betrayal walks hand in hand with a smile. A threat against family forces Agent Trenton Briner back to Texas and into a mystery steeped in whispers of Vodou and magic. At each turn, he finds the raven-haired ...

Lady Rose Summer refuses to abide by her parents' insistence that she marry. Even more distressing, she wants to work. On advice from Captain Harry Cathcart - a noble-born private investigator who knows Rose all too well - her parents agree to let Rose work as a typist and live in a women's hostel. But life as a working woman isn't quite what Rose imagined: When a playboy is murdered, Rose returns to high society to follow a trail of deception, rumors, and devious plots.

Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi are approached by their part-time colleague, Mr. Polopetsi, with a troubling story: A woman, accused of being rude to a valued customer, has been wrongly dismissed from her job at an office furniture store. Never one to let an act of injustice go unanswered, Mma Ramotswe begins to investigate but soon discovers unexpected information that causes her to reluctantly change her views about the case.

Belfast, 1988. A man is found dead, killed with a bolt from a crossbow in front of his house. This is no hunting accident. But uncovering who is responsible for the murder will take Detective Sean Duffy down his most dangerous road yet, a road that leads to a lonely clearing on a high bog where three masked gunmen will force Duffy to dig his own grave. Hunted by forces unknown, threatened by Internal Affairs, and with his relationship on the rocks, Duffy will need all his wits to get out of this investigation in one piece.

Dashiell Hammett was a crime writer who elevated the genre to true literature, and The Thin Man was Hammett’s last - and most successful - novel. Following the enormous success of The Thin Man movie in 1934, Hammett was commissioned to write stories for additional films. He wrote two full-length novellas for the films that became After the Thin Man and Another Thin Man.

Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni attends a course hosted by the local chamber of commerce entitled “Where Is Your Business Going?”. But rather than feeling energized, he comes back in low spirits, unsure how to grow the already venerable and successful Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors. Then an old friend from school approaches him about a new business venture that could be just the ticket. When it turns out he will need to mortgage his property in order to pursue this endeavor, Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi wonder what this will mean for his current business - as well as their own.

Precious Ramotswe has taken on two puzzling cases. First, she is approached by the lawyer Mma Sheba, who is the executor of a deceased farmer’s estate. Mma Sheba has a feeling that the young man who has stepped forward may be falsely impersonating the farmer’s nephew in order to claim his inheritance. Mma Ramotswe agrees to visit the farm and find out what she can about the self-professed nephew. Then the proprietor of the Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon comes to Mma Ramotswe for advice.

The old salt farmers have always said that the violet scent of the Fleur de Sel at harvest time on the salt marshes of the Guerande Peninsula has been known to cause hallucinations. Commissaire Dupin also starts to believe this when he's attacked out of the blue in the salt works. He had actually been looking forward to escaping his endless paperwork and taking a trip to the "white country" between the raging Atlantic Ocean and idyllic rivers.

In England’s silent-film industry, Randolph Fflytte is king. Mary Russell is dispatched to investigate the criminal activities that surround Fflytte’s movie studio, but nothing seems amiss until the company starts rehearsals in Lisbon. There the 13 blonde-haired, blue-eyed actresses whom Mary is bemusedly chaperoning meet the swarm of real buccaneers Fflytte has recruited to provide authenticity. As movie make-believe becomes true terror, Russell and Holmes themselves may experience a final fade-out.

Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond is the last detective: a genuine gumshoe, committed to door-stopping and deduction rather than fancy computer gadgetry. So when the naked body of a woman is found floating in the weeds in a lake near Bath with no one willing to identify her, no marks, and no murder weapon, his sleuthing abilities are tested to the limit.

The year is 1897. Sherlock Holmes and his lovely young American daughter Lucy James must foil a plot to destroy Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebration, defeating the high-ranking traitor who has eluded them in their previous adventures. If they fail, the Queen and thousands of innocent people will die, and the British Empire will fall into chaos.

Once, the Lamartine Hotel was a quiet refuge for New York’s stuffy fashionable set. But by the 1890s, fashion has moved uptown, and the lobby of the Lamartine has been overtaken by natty young sports, who pass their afternoons with billiards or shows of noisy derring-do. Their preferred damsel is Lila Williams, a delicate young telegraph operator whose shyness so charms them that they resolve to defend her against any ill-behaved characters. They are about to face their fiercest challenger, who rides in the gleaming armor of a millionaire.

In the isolated villages in the north of Scotland, the villagers rely on the services of the chimney sweep, Pete Ray, and his old-fashioned brushes. Pete is always able to find work in the Scottish highlands, until the day that Police Constable Hamish Macbeth notices blood dripping onto the floor of a villager's fireplace, and a dead body stuffed inside the chimney. The entire town of Lochdubh is certain Pete is the culprit, but Hamish doesn't believe that the affable chimney sweep is capable of committing murder.

After nearly dying of a gunshot wound, Jonathan Stride has been on leave from the Duluth Police for more than a year. When his partner, Maggie Bei, gets called about a suspicious abduction involving a local lawyer, she tells Stride it’s time for him to come back.

April 1928: Daisy Dalrymple Fletcher is visited in London by her young cousins. On the list of must-see sites is the Crystal Palace. Discovering that her children's nanny, Nanny Gilpin, has never seen the Palace, Daisy decides to make a day of it - bringing her cousins, her three-year-old twins, her step-daughter Belinda, the nurserymaid, and Nanny Gilpin. Yet this ordinary outing goes wrong when Mrs. Gilpin goes off to the ladies room and fails to return. When Daisy goes to look for her, she doesn't find her nanny but instead the body of another woman dressed in a nanny's uniform.

When Cabot Cove's own Wayne Silverton wants to debut his new airline, he invites Jessica Fletcher and other locals on the inaugural flight from Boston to London. Jessica is thrilled for the opportunity to visit a dear friend, Scotland Yard inspector George Sutherland. But the reunion hits turbulence when George is called to the airport to investigate the apparent murder of Wayne Silverton.

Charlie Harris is stressed out. The Southern Academic Libraries Association is holding this year's annual meeting at Athena College. Since Charlie is the interim library director, he must deliver the welcome speech to all the visiting librarians. And as if that weren't bad enough, the keynote address will be delivered by Charlie's old nemesis from library school. It's been 30 years since Charlie has seen Gavin Fong, and he's still an insufferable know-it-all capable of getting under everyone's skin.