Robert Blair was about to knock off from a slow day at his law firm when the phone rang. It was Marion Sharpe on the line, a local woman of quiet disposition who lived with her mother at their decrepit country house, The Franchise. It appeared that she was in some serious trouble: Miss Sharpe and her mother were accused of brutally kidnapping a demure young woman named Betty Kane. Miss Kane's claims seemed highly unlikely, even to Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, until she described her prison – the attic room with its cracked window, the kitchen, and the old trunks – which sounded remarkably like The Franchise. Yet Marion Sharpe claimed the Kane girl had never been there, let alone been held captive for an entire month! Not believing Betty Kane's story, Solicitor Blair takes up the case and, in a dazzling feat of amateur detective work, solves the unbelievable mystery that stumped even Inspector Grant.

The Franchise Affair is the third novel in Josephine Tey’s Inspector Alan Grant series.

All the bets are off when Detective Madden ignores the odds in a racetrack kill — and enters an automatic and his two hard fists!

The new psychological thriller from No 1 bestselling Swedish crime sensation Camilla Läckberg.A woman is found dead, apparently the victim of a tragic car crash. It's the first in a spate of seemingly inexplicable accidents in Tanumshede and marks the end of a quiet winter for detective Patrik Hedstrom and his colleagues.At the same time a reality TV show is being shot in the town. As cameras shadow the stars' every move, relations with the locals are strained to breaking point. When a drunken party ends with a particularly unpopular contestant's murder, the cast and crew are obvious suspects. Could there be a killer in their midst?As the country tunes in, the bodies mount up. Under the intense glare of the media spotlight, Patrik faces his toughest investigation yet…

Althea Graham's hypochondriac mother seldom visitsthe gazebo- yet she is found dead in it one morning.The Graham estate had once enjoyed a rural view, butnow the grounds are part of suburban London and thegazebo is an anachronistic summerhouse. Scotland Yardbecomes suspisious of Althea and her fiance, thedashing foreign correspondent Nicholas Carey, becausethe death of her mother frees them to be married atlast. Miss Silver is fortunately a friend of Althea'sand comes to the rescue, complete with knittingneedles, a gentle smile, and the preception of a mindreader.

The local Film Noir festival takes a dark turn when a legendary femme fatale is nearly killed. Now, bookstore owner Penelope Thornton-McClure enlists the help of Jack Shepard, P.I. – even though he and his license expired more than fifty years ago.

My Hop-Çiki-Yaya (pronounced Hope Cheeky Ya Ya) thriller series now consists of seven books in Turkish, including the latest book, Chasing Destiny, and three translated into English – The Prophet Murders, The Kiss Murder and The Gigolo Murder. I have questioned whether or not I should continue with the series, but my dearest and closest friend (and agent) Mr. Barbaros Altug managed to persuade me with his witty and authoritarian arguments, and so I shall continue!Over the course of the series I've tried to reverse traditional perceptions of negatives and positives. The criminals in my stories come from mainstream society, and you'll find that the transgender people who are often marginalised in everyday life are mostly positive characters. My transgender characters and their supporters represent joy, fun and solidarity. I transpose the supposed negatives of society into the positives, and vice versa. I believe that transgender people are often misrepresented, and I want to alter the media's presentation of transgender people as freaks, slapstick characters or unethical people with the potential to commit any kind of crime. What I defend in this series is that being a transgender person is a choice.At the start of The Gigolo Murder we find my Audrey Hepburn alter-egoed protagonist in a deep depression, skinnier than usual, unshaved for days, miserable, because of a recently ended love affair. His/her best buddy Ponpon comes to the rescue with her motherly force, and takes him/her to the club where Ponpon is the ultimate show diva. At the club a murder falls into the lap of my transvestite amateur sleuth and because he/she starts to fancy the perfect-male-specimen lawyer who is the brother-in-law of the suspect, he starts to investigate the murder of the famed gigolo. This adventure in the series is also where my protagonist develops closer relations with female characters… and not just real fag-hags!The ending of The Gigolo Murder is my ode to the grand-dame of crime Agatha Christie's finales. Everybody gathers in a hall and our sleuth answers all of our questions.

The incomparable Travis McGee is back in a brand-new adventure! Poking around where he’s not wanted — as usual — McGee delves into the mystery of a rich and beautiful wanton who happens to be losing her mind, a little piece at a time. As he probes, he uncovers some of the strange corruptions that simmer behind the respectable facade of a quiet Florida town...

Donna Leon's "Commissario Guido Brunetti" mysteries have won legions of fans for their evocative portraits of Venetian life. In her novels, food, family, art, history, and local politics play as central a role as an unsolved crime. In "The Girl of His Dreams" when a friend of Brunetti's brother, a priest recently returned from years of missionary work, calls with a request, Brunetti suspects the man's motives. A new, American-style Protestant sect has begun to meet in the city, and it's possible the priest is merely apprehensive of the competition. But the preacher could also be fleecing his growing flock, so Brunetti and Paola, along with Inspector Vianello and his wife, go undercover. But the investigation has to be put aside when, one cold and rainy morning, a body is found floating in a canal. It is a child, a gypsy girl. Brunetti suspects she fell off a nearby roof while fleeing an apartment she had robbed. He has to inform the distrustful parents, encamped on the mainland, and soon finds himself haunted by the crime-and the girl. Thought-provoking, eye-opening, and profoundly moving, "The Girl of His Dreams" is classic Donna Leon, a spectacular, heart-wrenching addition to the series.

Matthew moved to look out of the helicopter window. They were near the edge of the glacier. Beneath them the sea was dense with pack ice. In front of them the endless whiteness stretched out as far as the light and the eye could reach. It hurt his eyes. Millions of white crystals. Except in one place. One spot. Right where the Norseman mummy had been found and Aqqalu had kept watch. There the ice was glossy red.

JOURNALIST MATTHEW CAVE is sent out to the edge of an ice sheet to write about the discovery of a mummified Viking corpse. But the next day the mummy has disappeared, and the body of the policeman who was keeping watch is found naked and flayed at the discovery site.

Matthew soon realises that the body is connected to a series of unsolved murders from the 1970s. As he delves deeper into his investigation, he finds shocking connections to the present. When he meets Tupaarnaq, a young Greenlandic woman, he knows there is no way back—but nothing has prepared him for what he will discover.

‘Macabre but engrossing.’ Jyllands-Posten

‘Gruesome, believable and incredibly tense.’ Bogfidusen

‘Everything the heart of a crime fan could desire.’ Krimifan

DI Vera Stanhope is not one to make friends easily, but her hippy neighbours keep her well-supplied in homebrew and conversation so she has more tolerance for them than most. When one of them goes missing she feels duty-bound to find out what happened. But her path leads her to more than a missing friend… It's an easy job to track the young woman down to the Writer's House, a country retreat where aspiring authors gather to workshop and work through their novels. It gets complicated when a body is discovered and Vera's neighbour is found with a knife in her hand. Calling in the team, Vera knows that she should hand the case over to someone else. She's too close to the main suspect. But the investigation is too tempting and she's never been one to follow the rules. There seems to be no motive. No meaning to the crime. Then another body is found, and Vera suspects that someone is playing games with her. Somewhere there is a killer who has taken murder off the page and is making it real…

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of his first book, Ellery Queen takes a long step forward. He has written a novel expressed only incidentally in terms of mystery, a novel whose theme is uppermost in the minds of all thoughtful Americans today.For thirty years old Judge Shinn has delivered the Fourth of July oration on the little village green. He has said again and again: “There is no liberty without justice,” and “Let one man be deprived of his liberty, or his property, or his life without due process of law, and the liberty and property and lives of all of us are in danger.” When mere accusation takes the place of evidence, freedom is in peril.To Shinn Corners, the “outside” has always been suspect. Only a few years back, a “furriner” killed a Shinn Corners man and “got away with it,” thanks to a jury over in Cudbury who, with fancy talk about Justice and A Fair Trial, let him off on a plea of self-defense. Shinn Corners has never gotten over that; resentment lies in the streets like dynamite, ready to explode at a touch. And now murder strikes, claiming as its victim the best-loved citizen of the village.For Johnny Shinn, late of Army Intelligence, veteran of two wars, the grim events that follow are profoundly disturbing. Johnny, “all scattered to hell and gone,” has been through too much to worry about “ideals of justice.” Like so many young Americans today, Johnny is hung up between the recent past and the dark future. He can only say in response to Judge Shinn’s attempts to revitalize him, “Oh, I believe, I believe it all — but what can I do about it?”What happens after the murder is the story of what Johnny, in spite of himself, does about it. The tense lynch trial that is the focus of the action is really the trial of Johnny Shinn as an American. Against an atmosphere of frightening contemporary reality, THE GLASS VILLAGE raises pointed problems that all the Johnny Shinns of the free democracies, and their uncles and their aunts, must wrestle with and solve if our way of life is to survive.

In Laurie R. King's latest Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes mystery, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author delivers a thriller of ingenious surprises and unrelenting suspense – as the famous husband and wife sleuths are pursued by a killer immune from the sting of justice.It began as a problem in one of Holmes' beloved beehives, led to a murderous cult, and ended – or so they'd hoped – with a daring escape from a sacrificial altar. Instead, Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, have stirred the wrath and the limitless resources of those they've thwarted. Now they are separated and on the run, wanted by the police, and pursued across the Continent by a ruthless enemy with powerful connections.Unstoppable together, Russell and Holmes will have to survive this time apart, maintaining tenuous contact only by means of coded messages and cryptic notes. With Holmes' young granddaughter in her safekeeping, Russell will have to call on instincts she didn't know she had. But has the couple already made a fatal mistake by separating, making themselves easier targets for the shadowy government agents sent to silence them?From hidden rooms in London shops and rustic forest cabins to rickety planes over Scotland and boats on the frozen North Sea, Russell and Holmes work their way back to each other while uncovering answers to a mystery that will take both of them to solve. A hermit with a mysterious past and a beautiful young female doctor with a secret, a cruelly scarred flyer and an obsessed man of the cloth, Holmes' brother, Mycroft, and an Intelligence agent who knows too much: Everyone Russell and Holmes meet could either speed their safe reunion or betray them to their enemies – in the most complex, shocking, and deeply personal case of their career.

It’s been more than a year since LAPD detective Jacob Lev learned the remarkable truth about his family, and he’s not coping well. He’s back to drinking, the LAPD Special Projects Department continues to shadow him, and the memory of a woman named Mai haunts him. And while Jacob has tried to build a bridge to his mother, she remains imprisoned inside her own tattered mind.

Then he comes across the file for a gruesome unsolved murder that brings the two halves of his life into startling collision. Finding the killer will take him halfway around the world, to Paris.

It’s a dangerous search for truth that plunges him into the past. And for Jacob Lev, there is no place more frightening.

The Good Old Stuff is a selection of thirteen of John D. MacDonald’s best mystery stories written between 1947 and 1952, at the beginning of his career. While many readers know about MacDonald’s success from recent books such as Cinnamon Skin, Free Fall in Crimson and The Empty Copper Sea, few but the hardcore mystery addicts remember when MacDonald wrote for magazines.The Good Old Stuff has been chosen carefully to give readers a taste of his early best and to show the range of his abilities in the mystery genre. “The Simplest Poison” is a straight detective story, “Miranda” psychological suspense, “Noose for a Tigress” a real thriller. “Murder for Money” gives us an early glance at the Travis McGee prototype. In “Breathe No More” and “From Some Hidden Grave” you will see an even more recognizable Travis McGee hero in Park Falkner.Contemporary MacDonald readers and Travis McGee fans will delight in recognizing these precursors to Travis McGee; and mystery readers who remember them when they first appeared will remark on that extraordinary talent for storytelling, which is as apparent in his early stories as it is in his recent novels.

In this twisty thriller from the New York Times bestselling master of suspense, reward-seeker Colter Shaw infiltrates a sinister cult after learning that the only way to get somebody out... is to go in.

In the wilderness of Washington State, expert tracker Colter Shaw has located two young men accused of a terrible hate crime. But when his pursuit takes a shocking and tragic turn, Shaw becomes desperate to discover what went so horribly wrong and if he is to blame. Shaw’s search for answers leads him to a shadowy organization that bills itself as a grief support group. But is it truly it a community that consoles the bereaved? Or a dangerous cult with a growing body count? Undercover, Shaw joins the mysterious group, risking everything despite the fact that no reward is on offer. He soon finds that some people will stop at nothing to keep their secrets hidden... and to make sure that he or those close to him say “goodbye” forever.

The Barnes Noble ReviewThe 18th novel in Martha Grimes's popular Richard Jury series finds the author extending her range, echoing the work of two other masters of mystery – osephine Tey and Dick Francis – while skewering British society with a droll, rapier wit.The fun starts with Jury lying in a hospital bed, recuperating from the bullet wound he received at the end of The Blue Last. In a scene reminiscent of Tey's classic hospital bed mystery, The Daughter of Time, a bored, frustrated Jury is overjoyed when his assistant, Melrose Plant, arrives with a proffered mystery. While in the local pub, called the Grave Maurice, Plant overhears a conversation concerning the disappearance of teenager Nell Ryder, the daughter of Jury's surgeon. Nell vanished two years earlier from the family horse farm, but there are rumors she's been seen riding at midnight on her favorite mare. On Jury's orders, Plant enters the occasionally bizarre world of horse racing. There he meets Nell's cousin, Maurice, a grave lad plagued by an adolescent growth spurt that's left him too tall to be a jockey, his only dream since he was a boy. The eccentric suspects start piling up, as do the murders, as Jury is eventually released from the hospital and enters the fray. Grimes, perhaps overcompensating for entering the equestrian universe dominated by Dick Francis, spends a bit too much time giving us the minute details of horse breeding. However, the offbeat characters – especially a demanding nurse who infuriates Jury – are so likable they soon smooth over any bumps in the narrative road. The Grave Maurice is a strange and unique amalgam of satire and mystery that works on most levels, thanks to the author's sure and talented hand. Tom Piccirilli