International Crime Thrillers

Hoping to put behind him tragedy in his professional life and to resolve the turmoil in his personal life, Reykjavik police officer Guðgeir Fransson has moved as far away from home as he can, marking time in a dead-end job in a small town in eastern Iceland.

Delia Williamson, a waitress and mother of two young girls, is reported missing. She is soon found in a public park, hanging from the crossbar of a children's swing set. The postmortem reveals that she has been murdered. Her current partner, her ex-husband, and a traveling salesman who frequented her restaurant are all suspects. Before Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond can solve the mystery, more will die. But even as he pursues a killer, he finds himself pursued by a secret admirer.

In a Sussex town on the south coast of England, a widely disliked art teacher at a posh private girls' school disappears without explanation. None of her students miss her boring lessons, especially since her replacement is a devilishly hunky male teacher with a fancy car. But then her name shows up on a police missing persons list. What happened to Miss Gibbon, and why does no one seem to care?

John Mountjoy has escaped from prison and kidnapped the chief constable's daughter. The only person he'll parley with is Detective Peter Diamond, who arrested him four years earlier for the murder of a young journalist. Mountjoy, who still maintains his innocence, has a simple request for Diamond. All the detective has to do is find the real killer and clear Mountjoy's name, and the hostage will be free to go.

A murder without motive. A bombing. The sins of the past revisited.... DI Nathaniel Caslin is heading up a specialist unit, an opportunity to make a real difference. Little does he know, decisions taken decades previously are about to threaten all that he holds dear.... Gangland tensions are on the rise as an uneasy peace is fractured in spectacular fashion. Two warring factions are lining up to unseat the other. Old adversaries rekindle their passion to exact revenge whilst the next generation seek to make a name for themselves.

In the wake of an earthquake, the water level of an Icelandic lake drops suddenly, revealing the skeleton of a man half-buried in its sandy bed. It is clear immediately that it has been there for many years. There is a large hole in the skull. Yet more mysteriously, a heavy communication device is attached to it, possibly some sort of radio transmitter, bearing inscriptions in Russian. The police are called in and Erlendur, Elinborg, and Sigurdur Olii begin their investigation, which gradually leads them back to the time of the Cold War when bright, left-wing students would be sent from Iceland to study in the "heavenly state" of communist East Germany.

The Christmas rush is at its peak in a grand ReykjavIk hotel when Inspector Erlendur is called in to investigate a murder. The hotel Santa has been stabbed to death, and Erlendur and his fellow detectives find no shortage of suspects between the hotel staff and the international travelers staying for the holidays. As Christmas Day approaches, Erlendur must deal with his difficult daughter, pursue a possible romantic interest, and untangle a long-buried web of malice and greed to find the murderer.

"Action thrillers are a fun genre as they're often page-turners, and The Forgotten Alphabet is definitely that. It's the 17th book in The Blackwell Files series, but it's the first one for me. Steven F. Freeman is such a talented author that he skillfully mentions critical parts of previous novels so the reader new to the series is not left behind. I loved every second of this book; the events are plausible, the flawed characters are all relatable, and the revelation of the mastermind shocked me. There's nothing to fault in this story—it's heart-racingly brilliant. I'm already a new fan ...

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.

After Hamas’s brutal massacre against Israel in October 2023, the Mossad goes after the terrorist group’s leaders wherever they are. When one of Israel’s targeted killings occurs on Turkey’s soil, that country’s president promises severe retaliation. Now, Nir Tavor’s team is in a race against time, alliances, and deadly threats to stop this attack from the skies that could annihilate Israel’s gas fields and destroy their economy.

When the body of a young woman is discovered in the cowshed of Cricket Farm, the tranquility of the British countryside is shattered. Inspector Jess Campbell is on the case, but with few leads, a grumbling partner, and the new superintendent Ian Carter piling on the pressure, she's beginning to wonder why she chose to be a detective in the first place.

Chief Inspector Van Veeteren knew that murder cases were never as open-and-shut as this one: Janek Mitter woke one morning with a brutal hangover and discovered his wife of three months lying facedown in the bathtub, dead. With only the flimsiest excuse as his defense, he is found guilty of a drunken crime of passion and imprisoned in a mental institution.

Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside. The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organization that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths.

A young "national model worker," renowned for her adherence to the principles of the Communist Party, turns up dead in a Shanghai canal. As Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Special Cases Bureau struggles to trace the hidden threads of her past, he finds himself challenging the very political forces that have guided his life since birth. Chen must tiptoe around his superiors if he wants to get to the bottom of this crime, and risk his career-perhaps even his life-to see justice done.

When Inspector Ben Ross is called to Newgate Prison by a man condemned to die by the hangman's noose, he isn't expecting to give any credence to the man's testimony. But the account of a murder he witnessed over 17 years ago is so utterly believable that Ben can't help wondering if what he's heard is true. It's too late to save the man's life, but it's not too late to investigate a murder that has gone undetected for all these years.

Detective Ulf Varg from the Department of Sensitive Crimes is often called upon to investigate unusual matters. But rarely is he asked to conduct an inquiry on behalf of his own family. Is such a thing ethical? Adding to Ulf's moral discomfort is the fact that he does not exactly see eye to eye with his younger brother Bjorn - a leading player in one of Sweden's right-wing parties, the Moderate Extremists. Still, family is family, so Ulf finds himself working to uncover the mole leaking secrets to a rival party, the Extreme Moderates.

Great Britain, 1923: When Detective Inspector John Redfyre is invited to attend the annual St. Barnabas College Christmas concert in his Aunt Henrietta's stead, he is expecting a quiet evening. But he arrives to witness a minor scandal: Juno Proudfoot, the trumpeter of the headlining musical duo, is a woman, and a young one at that - practically unheard of in conservative academic circles. When she suffers a near-fatal fall after the close of the show, Redfyre must consider whether someone was trying to kill her.

DCI Evan Warlow believes that murder is a cardinal sin. Even when the victim is a drug dealing, money-laundering criminal. But when a police officer is shot in the same incident at a tranquil beach near Tenby in South Pembrokeshire… Suddenly it’s personal. What appears, on the surface, to be a falling out between partners in crime soon spirals into an operation involving gang warfare and a great deal of money. But even Warlow is not prepared for what lurks beneath the surface of this most terrible of crimes.

When Gideon Oliver and his wife, Julie, are in Tuscany visiting the Cubbiddu family, the renowned Skeleton Detective is asked to reexamine the remains of a mysterious family tragedy. Pietro Cubbiddu, former patriarch of the Villa Antica wine empire, is thought to have killed his wife and then himself in the remote mountains of the Apennines. It does not take long for Gideon to deduce that, whatever happened, a murder-suicide it was not. Soon Gideon finds himself in a morass of family antipathies, conflicts, and mistrust, to say nothing of the local authority's resentment.

Mourning the loss of his wife, Rita, former NYPD homicide detective Nico Doyle moves to her hometown of Gravigna in the winesoaked region of Chianti. Half Italian and half Irish, Nico finds himself able to get by in the region with the help of Rita’s relatives, but he still feels alone and out of place. He isn’t sure if it’s peace he’s seeking, but it isn’t what he finds. Early one morning, he hears a gunshot and a dog's cries near his cabin and walks out to discover a dead body in the woods, flashily dressed in gold tennis shoes.