Time Detectives

Today we think statistics are the enemy, numbers used to mislead and confuse us. That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics - we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us”.

Grant McAllister, a professor of mathematics, once sat down and worked all the rules out – and wrote seven perfect detective stories to demonstrate. But that was 30 years ago. Now Grant lives in seclusion on a remote Mediterranean island, counting the rest of his days. Until Julia Hart, a brilliant, ambitious editor knocks on his door. Julia wishes to republish his book, and together they must revisit those old stories: An author hiding from his past and an editor keen to understand it.

Jean Sheridan, a college dean and prominent historian, sets out to her hometown to attend the 20-year reunion of Stonecroft Academy alumni, where she is to be honored along with six other members of her class. There is something uneasy in the air: one woman in the group about to be feted, Alison Kendall, a beautiful, high-powered Hollywood agent, drowned in her pool during an early-morning swim. Alison is the fifth woman in the class whose life has come to a sudden, mysterious end.

How do you stop a serial killer who can escape from any prison? On December 11, fifteen-year-old Helen Hinton is brutally murdered in an abandoned house. Her killer, Edward Phillips, is caught and sentenced to death. Helen's blood was on Edward's clothes and shoes, the murder weapon has his fingerprints on it. Edward claims he's innocent. He's telling the truth. Two months after Edward Phillips is transferred to death row, a murder similar to Helen's occurs in another city. The victim is eighteen-year-old Laura Sumner. On an October morning, Mark Hinton, Helen's father, visits Edward in ...

Have you ever wondered how peas, kale, asparagus, beans, squash, and corn have ended up on our plates? Well, Adam Alexander has. In The Seed Detective, Adam shares his own stories of seed hunting, with the origin stories behind many of our everyday food heroes. Taking us on a journey that began when we left the life of the hunter-gatherer to become farmers, he tells tales of globalization, political intrigue, colonization, and serendipity—describing how these vegetables and their travels have become embedded in our food cultures.

When Kate Rosetti returns from a rare week of vacation in Hawaii, she finds herself immediately immersed in a case more complicated than any she’s faced before. A man’s body has been stuffed into the back of an ice-cream truck, and it seems like everyone—including his three girlfriends—had a reason to kill him. But when the case blows up into a bigger sensation than Kate could ever have anticipated, she finds herself forced to work side by side with her ex-boyfriend, FBI Agent Jack Russo…and his very new, very attractive female partner.

In The Crash Detectives, veteran aviation journalist and air safety investigator Christine Negroni takes us inside crash investigations from the early days of the jet age to the present, including the search for answers about what happened to the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. As Negroni dissects what happened and why, she explores their common themes and, most important, what has been learned from them to make planes safer.

Beatrice Fletcher is obsessed with unsolved murders in her small town of Cabot Cove, Maine like her great-aunt Jessica, the famous mystery writer. But when her best friend Jackson goes missing, this time the mystery is personal. Then Jackson fails to show up for a late night meet-up, and instead, Bea stumbles upon three students from the elite Broadmoor Academy: overly-friendly and slightly vicious Leisl, her aloof twin brother, Leif, and Carlos, who knows more about, well, everything than he's letting on.

Moonstone Bay is in a tizzy. Not only has a new village been discovered—it was hidden by magic for hundreds of years—but family members long thought dead are back and infiltrating lives that had changed in their absence. It is not all smooth sailing. Hadley Hunter is trying to keep things under wraps but she’s as excited to explore the village as anybody. There’s just one little problem. How did a body make it into the village when it was magically warded to keep people out?

Archie Goodwin has his hands full when three baffling murders make him the recipient of a poisonous lunch, the fall guy for a beautiful woman, and the target of the U.S. Federal Government.

Late at night on a deserted Chester ring road, a man is run down and killed. But is it an accident, suicide, or murder? First thing next day Inspector Walter Darriteau is on the case. The dead man was a lay preacher up for promotion. Surely that couldn’t be relevant, but they are zealous and jealous in that game. Or could it be something more sinister? Why didn’t the driver stop? And the wife doesn’t seem too upset about it. Her main concern is the insurance policy that should pay off their mortgage. Where was she when it happened? “The Murder Diaries – Seven Times Over” is the ...

The Greatest Female Crime Writers of All Time is a collection of 17 classic detective novels and stories, read by three award-winning narrators. Included here are stories by some of the greatest female crime writers of the 20th century: Agatha Christie; Dorothy L. Sayers; and Josephine Tey.

An office-bound agent gets one chance—one—to go out into the field and live her dream. But she may be sent right back to her desk if she fails to rein in a roguish, impulsive Ripperologist. Agent Artful Doyle, the Bureau's expert on Reports and Regulations, has been unexpectedly given an assignment after three years doing paperwork. She's been sent to "bring to heel" their foremost Ripperologist, Agent Darrish Fox, who shows dangerous signs of going rogue. But when she finally arrives in Victorian London and discovers what Agent Fox has been investigating, she realizes that situations ...

A congressman's daughter who has to be perfect. A star quarterback with a secret. A guy who's tired of being ignored. A clarinet player who's done trying to fit in. An orphaned rebel who wants to teach someone a lesson. A guy who wants people to see him, not his religion. They couldn't be more different, but before the morning's over, they'll all be trapped in a school that's been rocked by a bombing. When they hear that someone inside is the bomber, they'll also be looking to one another for answers.

When Kendra Donovan is approached by Mrs. Gavenston with an unusual request - to find her business manager, Jeremy Pascoe, who recently vanished - the FBI agent is eager to accept the challenge. To Kendra's way of thinking, spending her time locating a missing person suits her more than perfecting her embroidery, painting watercolors, practicing on the pianoforte, or any of the other activities that are socially acceptable for young ladies in the early 19th century. Unfortunately, the missing person's case turns into a murder investigation after Kendra finds the man stabbed to death.

Two novellas set in Aliette de Bodard’s award-winning, critically acclaimed Xuya universe, a timeline where Asia became dominant, and where the space age has Confucian galactic empires of Vietnamese and Chinese inspiration. Contains The Citadel of Weeping Pearls and The Tea Master and the Detective.

DI Louise Blackwell is still reeling from her brother Paul's murder when she is brought back from enforced leave and tasked with solving a strange new case - the slaughter of wild sheep at Cheddar Gorge, a place shrouded in mystery and folklore. When a man is brutally attacked with a machete on the clifftop and a young girl disappears, Louise realises that the horror is just beginning. Rumours of a mythical presence near the gorge are spreading fast, and why is a local environmental cult resisting all attempts to solve the case?

Small-time stoolie Jake "The Spinner" Jablon made a lot of new enemies when he switched careers from informer to blackmailer. And the more "clients," he figured, the more money - and the more people eager to see him dead. So he's greedy but scared, and he turns to his old acquaintance Matthew Scudder, who used to pay him for information back in Scudder's days as a cop. Scudder's his insurance policy - if anything happens to "The Spinner," Scudder can check up on the people who wanted him dead. No one is too surprised when the pigeon is found floating in the East River....

In Los Angeles in 1988, a 16-year-old girl disappeared from her home and was later found dead of a gunshot wound to the chest. The death appeared at first to be a suicide, but some of the evidence contradicted that scenario, and detectives came to believe this was in fact a murder. Despite a by-the-book investigation, no one was ever charged.

When information vital to Britain's national security is stolen, both M and Bond suspect that the Union is behind it. The trail leads Bond from one of England's most exclusive golf clubs to the cosmopolitan city of Brussels and finally to an expedition up the icy heights of the legendary mountain Kangchenjunga, the third tallest peak in the world.