Dick Francis’s second thriller again has steeplechasing as its setting. Despair, suicide and obsessive hatred — mixed well with humour, love, and horses — brew up into a story of a battle between one man’s nerve and another man’s cunning. Robert Finn, steeplechase jockey, finds himself the focus of a malicious campaign which is also afflicting his friends, and sets out to uncover its source, and remove it.

Jack Dwyer is an ex-cop turned part-time actor (and, sometimes, part-time security guard in a discount supermarket — but he doesn’t particularly like talking about that) who, since giving up police work, really tries to mind his own business. But when Jane Branigan — his ex-live-in-lover — is found in a state of shock, holding a recently fired gun, he knows that his quiet days are about to become very complicated.

Stephen Elliot — Jane’s present lover and one of the hottest young advertising executives in town — is found dead, and all evidence points to Jane. As far as the police are concerned, the case is closed; but not according to Dwyer.

Who was Stephen Elliot — and who would have wanted him dead? Dwyer’s investigation takes him deep into the workings of the advertising industry, and into the sometimes luxurious, sometimes seedy, sometimes volatile lives of the people who work there. Could the murderer be Carla Travers — the blowsy, alcoholic media rep whom Elliot publicly humiliated weeks before; or David Baxter — the man who seemingly encouraged his wife’s affair with Elliot; or Bryce Hammond — the ineffectual owner of the Hammond agency — whose company falls into jeopardy with Elliot’s demise; or Phil Davies — the Hammond client who seemed to have a strange attraction toward Elliot’s women?

New, Improved Murder is a gritty page-turner of a whodunit, whose solution lies in the secrets of the cutthroat world of advertising. In order to help Jane, Dwyer’s going to have to discover the truth behind the most brilliant — and deadly — hype campaign ever devised.

A business trip that brings Mallory from his Iowa home to New York City has been stretched to include his playing a “suspect” in a mystery weekend at Mohonk Mountain House, the rambling upstate New York resort that almost seems to have been designed as backdrop to a murder — real or fictional. In its winding halls and unexpected nooks and crannies, avid fans to try to solve a “crime” acted out by a gaggle of mystery writers, their spouses and companions. Mallory, along with his lover, Jill Forrest, is looking forward to a weekend of fun and relaxation.Curt Clark, the crime writer who is stage-managing this annual outing, has trickily chosen the intended “victim” — mystery critic Kirk Rath, whose magazine has become influential enough to make or break a writer’s career and whose word processor is a thinly disguised dagger kept sharp on authors’ reputations.Author Mallory’s fictional crimes have a way of being topped by real ones, and this is no exception. Or is it? On their first night there, while Jill is incommunicado in the shower, Mallory sees what he believes to be a real murder from his bedroom window. But when he and Jill brave the snow to investigate, there is no body, no blood, no evidence of foul play. Either Mallory is the victim of a prank or this is a part of the crime enactment that Curt Clark was sneakily keeping to himself.Mallory is not convinced, however. And then he and Jill come across evidence that the murder is no joke, and that the snowstorm rapidly cutting off the mountain house from the rest of the world is quite possibly shutting in the game-players and staff with a real killer.

He was a big strapping fellow around thirty, broad and well-built, but far from muscular; soft, just this side of fat.“Hello, Baby,” he said. “You one of her boy friends?”“Go jump in a lake,” I said. “Jump into two if one won’t hold you,” and I turned back to Netta’s door.He giggled. “There’s no one there,” he said, added in an undertone. “She’s dead: died by her own hand.”I felt a little cold breath against my cheek. There was something wrong here. I knew Netta well. She wasn’t the suicide type.And that’s how it began. From then on Steve Harmas, American newspaper correspondent, was never out of trouble. Netta’s body was kidnapped, then her mysterious sister Anne also committed suicide. Harmas, working on his own to try to solve the mystery of these two girls’ deaths, became so involved in the murders that followed that he was in danger of being arrested himself.No Business of Mine, written with tremendous speed and punch, has an ending that comes like the crack of a whip.

A disturbing missing-person case reunites ex-Navy SEAL Jon Lancaster and FBI Agent Beth Daniels. Skye is just one of a dozen young women who have disappeared from Florida without a trace. Beth can do more than just imagine their fear. She was a victim herself — a trauma that’s strengthened her fight for justice.Then Lancaster uncovers a scrap of evidence, and the mystery begins to unravel. But the lead comes with a personal sting: the involvement of his estranged brother, Logan, an ex-con recruited into the shepherding of human trade. The only way for Logan to shed his demons is to come clean. For Lancaster and Daniels, that means being drawn, secret by secret, into a dangerous underground world.With time running out, three damaged pasts will collide; more secrets will spill; and Lancaster, Daniels, and Logan will have to fight to save themselves first if they ever hope to find the girls alive.