Women Sleuth Police

As a violent thunderstorm rages in Painters Mill, Kate Burkholder receives a call from a frantic young Amish woman: Her two-year-old son is missing. Kate and her officers brave the downpour to search for the toddler, fearing he may have been swept away in the rising creek waters. But an explosive family secret leads Kate to believe this disappearance may be more complicated than anyone is letting on. Can she find the boy and uncover the truth before darkness falls?

New York Times best-selling author Linda Castillo is known as a “master of the genre” (People) for her pulse-pounding mystery series set in Amish country. Now, together for the first time in print, A Simple Murder features six original short stories starring whip-smart chief of police, Kate Burkholder.

The second book in the thrilling new DI Haig crime series, by best-selling author David J. Gatward.

FBI agent Ava James has endured many heart-wrenching periods in her life. After the recent trauma of escaping a twisted serial killer, Ava is just thankful to be alive and is trying to recover. In hopes of taking her mind off her own troubles, she immerses herself further in her work. Everything in Fairhaven is seemingly normal, until a young librarian is found dead. The mystery deepens when her husband and young children are nowhere to be found.

Life seems perfect in the quiet community of Valley Farm. Then a shocking discovery shatters the silence. The owners of a big country house have employed a house sitter, a young ecologist, to look after the place while they're away. But his dead body is found by the side of the lane - a lonely place to die. When DI Vera Stanhope arrives on the scene, she finds the body of a second man. What the two victims seem to have in common is a fascination with studying moths - and with catching these beautiful, intriguing creatures.

DI Marnie Rome knows this better than most. Five years ago, her family home was the scene of a shocking and bloody crime that left her parents dead and her foster brother in prison. Marnie doesn't talk much about her personal life - not even her partner, DS Noah Jake, knows much about Marnie's past. Now Marnie and Noah are tackling a case of domestic violence and a different brand of victim. Hope Proctor stabbed her husband in desperate self-defense. A crowd of witnesses in the domestic violence shelter where she's staying saw it happen, but none of them are telling quite the same story.

It should be the happiest weekend of Officer Stevie Taylor's life. She's finally going to marry Police Chief Zane Duncan and live happily ever after in Solitude, Oregon. But all wedding plans grind to a halt when a dead body is found at a nearby campground. A vacationing A-list TV actor has been murdered...and all hell is about to break loose.

Every night, while the street lamps shed the only light on Wisconsin’s most crime-ridden city, police transcriber Hazel Greenlee listens as detectives divulge Black Harbor’s gruesome secrets. An aspiring novelist, Hazel believes that writing a book could be her only ticket out of this frozen hellscape, but her life isn’t exactly brimming with inspiration. Until her neighbor confesses to hiding the corpse of an overdose victim. With an insider’s look at the investigation, Hazel becomes spellbound by the lead detective, Nikolai Kole, and the chilling narrative he shares with her.

In Brian Klingborg's Thief of Souls, a brutal murder in a rural village in Northern China sends shockwaves all the way to Beijing - but seemingly only Inspector Lu Fei, exiled to this tiny town, is interested in finding justice for the murdered village girl....

Mary DiNunzio has been slaving away for the past eight years trying to make partner in her cutthroat Philadelphia law firm. She's too busy to worry about the crank phone calls she's been getting - until they fall into a sinister pattern. The phone rings as soon as she gets to work, then as soon as she gets home. Mary can't shake the sensation that someone is watching her, following her every move. The shadowboxing turns deadly when her worst fears are realized, and she has to fight for something a lot more important than partnership: her life.

When Patrol Officer Lauren Starkly finds an unconscious teenage girl posed as a corpse, she learns that the offense mirrors two other recent assaults. The attack is intensely personal to Lauren—the girl is her daughter’s close friend. Lauren feels compelled to do some off-duty investigation. The perpetrator is intelligent and methodical, and essentially invisible. But Lauren has uncanny detection skills, and routinely finds evidence missed by the detectives. She earns official trouble for her effort, but the warnings from her superiors don’t keep her from tugging at elusive clues. As ...

Inspector Thomas Lynley is mystified when he's sent undercover to investigate the death of Ian Cresswell at the request of the man's uncle, the wealthy and influential Bernard Fairclough. The death has been ruled an accidental drowning, and nothing on the surface indicates otherwise. But when Lynley enlists the help of his friends Simon and Deborah St. James, the trio's digging soon reveals that the Fairclough clan is awash in secrets, lies, and motives.

On a hot summer on the Northumberland coast, Julie Armstrong arrives home from a night out to find her son murdered. Luke has been strangled, laid out in a bath of water and covered with wild flowers. This stylized murder scene has Inspector Vera Stanhope and her team intrigued. But now, Vera must work quickly to find this killer who is making art out of death. As local residents are forced to share their private lives, sinister secrets are slowly unearthed. And all the while the killer remains in their midst, waiting for an opportunity to prepare another beautiful, watery grave....

All communities have their secrets...but on Widow’s Island, there’s a skeleton in every closet, as Deputy Tessa Black knows all too well. When Tessa stumbles upon a half-buried body in the woods, a peaceful morning hike suddenly turns into a race to catch a killer. Tessa identifies the skeletal corpse as Aurora Franklin, a young college student and aspiring actor. She’d come to Widow’s Island for a summer job, only to be strangled and discarded. Aurora has been dead for over a month - and not a single islander has reported her missing.

When Mercy’s grandmother Patience marries her longtime beau Claude Renault at the five-star Lady’s Slipper Inn, it promises to be the destination wedding of the year. Just as the four-day extravaganza is due to begin, the inn’s spa director Bodhi St. George disappears—and Mercy’s mother Grace sends Mercy and Elvis to find him. But what they discover instead is a stranger skewered by a pitchfork in the barn on the goat farm where St. George lived.

Earth’s oceans are so vast, not even merfolk have explored everywhere. And for good reason. An unexpected call from the CIA seems initially like a routine job, but Agent Michaels has a surprise for her. At a nondescript Agency warehouse, Alex discovers something she never imagined possible and soon finds herself on the way to Atlantis, deep on the ocean floor halfway around the world. Worse, the denizens of the fabled city are locked in a desperate fight for survival against an adversary older than human civilization... and they’re losing. If Alex gets caught up in the undersea war, she...

Fresh from maternity leave, Detective Elma finds herself confronted with a complex case, when a man is found murdered in a holiday cottage in the depths of the Icelandic countryside - the victim of a frenzied knife attack, with a shocking message scrawled on the wall above him.

At first it appears a mugging gone horribly wrong: one man dead and a woman left in a coma one Friday night in Washington, D.C. The woman is Arlington police detective Frank Mancini's niece and lives in the boarding house run by retired FBI-agent-turned-landlady Ethel Fiona Crestwater. Ethel and Frank are old friends, and so she volunteers to investigate the crime on Frank's behalf, as his hands are tied by jurisdictional issues. But what appears at first a random robbery soon proves more diabolical.

When Inspector Vera Stanhope finds the body of a woman in the sauna room of her local gym, she wonders briefly if, for once in her life, she's uncovered a simple death from natural causes. But a closer inspection reveals bruises around the victim's throat, and Vera quickly realizes she has a murder on her hands.

Kenni Lowry likes to think the zero crime rate in Cottonwood, Kentucky is due to her being sheriff, but she quickly discovers the ghost of her grandfather, the town's previous sheriff, has been scaring off any would-be criminals since she was elected. When the town's most beloved doctor is found murdered on the very same day as a jewelry store robbery and a mysterious symbol ties the crime scenes together, Kenni must satisfy her hankerin' for justice by nabbing the culprits.