Showing results by publisher "Isis Publishing Ltd" in All Categories

September 1940. The height of the Blitz. When the Savoy advertises its series of underground shelters, a crowd of people from East London arrive at the hotel and demand entry. There they find a shelter worthy of the Savoy's clientele, but the next morning, after the air raid and when the Stepney protestors have left, it is discovered that one of the hotel's guests is dead, stabbed through the heart.

London, 1921. Lord Johnny Fairfax has been found dead in his study, along with a second victim, a mysterious American who arrived unannounced the previous evening. For DCI Paul Stark, the case is personal: he's in a relationship with Lord Fairfax's former wife, Lady Amelia. The dead man had no shortage of enemies. Winston Churchill, his former colleague at the War Office, is convinced the murder is revenge for the disaster at Gallipoli. Lady Amelia herself is accused of the crime.

In the far south of New Zealand, in the remote Fiordland village of Manapouri, Ruth Shaw runs two tiny bookshops. In this memoir, she weaves together stories of the characters who visit her shops, musings about favourite reads, and bittersweet stories from her full and varied life, which has been crammed with incredible escapades. After becoming the first New Zealand Wren to go AWOL, Ruth has sailed the Pacific for years, been boarded by pirates, and worked the yacht Breaksea Girl with her husband Lance.

DI Adams fled London to escape bridge-dwelling monsters and magical toasties - a one-time experience she's in no hurry to repeat. She's police, not some cryptid hunter. Leeds has other plans, though. Tasked with the seemingly mundane case of a missing necklace, Adams soon realises she's stumbled into something inexplicable. The trinket is dangerous, and she's the only one who recognises it for what it is - a weapon that could tear the North apart.

Iceland 1940. Britain invades Iceland. Lieutenant Tom Marks is a British officer tasked with defending Whale Fjord. He meets Kristín, a young widow from a nearby farm, who has a small son. Tom is smitten. Iceland 2023. Inspector Magnus Ragnarsson is called to the shores of Whale Fjord where the skeletons of a man and a woman have been discovered, both shot with British wartime bullets. Magnus uncovers a web of anger and revenge that stretches back 80 years and forward to a shocking murder in Reykjavík.

Henri Koskinen firmly believes in the power of common sense and order. That is until he moves in with Laura Helanto and her daughter. As Henri realises he has inadvertently become part of a group of local dads, a competing adventure park is seeking to expand their operations, not always sticking to the law in the process. Is it possible to combine the increasingly dangerous world of the adventure-park business with the unpredictability of life in a blended family? At first glance, the two appear to have only one thing in common: neither deals particularly well with a mounting body count.

When a man from Callum's past turns up at our door claiming to have lost both the last herd of unicorns in England and his sister, I knew it should be a hard pass. The past has teeth. But old debts plus a damsel in distress means Callum just can't say no. G&C London, Private Investigators, are plunging deep into the magical underbelly of Leeds, and we're going to have our work cut out for us. Never mind the criminal dynasties, cross-dressing trolls, trained attack lizards, and philosophical donkeys - we need to find the sister and get out before the Watch get involved.

Iceland, 1934. Two boys playing see something they shouldn't have. The consequences will haunt them and their families for generations. Iceland, 2009. The credit crunch bites. The currency has been devalued, savings annihilated, lives ruined. Grassroots revolution is in the air, as is the feeling that someone ought to pay.... And in a country where everyone knows everybody, it isn't hard to draw up a list of exactly who is responsible. And then, one by one, to cross them off.

Icelandic sisters Áróra and Ísafold live in different countries and aren‘t on speaking terms, but when their mother loses contact with Ísafold, Áróra reluctantly returns to Iceland to find her sister. But she soon realises that her sister isn’t avoiding her...she has disappeared. As she confronts Ísafold’s abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend Björn, and begins to probe her sister’s reclusive neighbours, Áróra is led into an ever-darker web of intrigue and manipulation.

As the thick, autumnal fog chokes the capital, within the fire-lit lounge of London's notorious Brimstone Club a bizarre tale is being spun for Inspector Bencolin and his friend Jeff Marle. A member of the club has been sent a model of a tiny gallows, and the word is that the folkloric hangman Jack Ketch has been stalking the streets for victims by night. The threat of this supposed bogeyman becomes thrillingly real when that same night Bencolin and Marle are almost run down by a limousine with a corpse behind the wheel.

Mr. Richard Dodsley, owner of a fine second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road, has been found murdered in the cold hours of the morning. Shot in his own office, few clues remain besides three cigarette ends, two spent matches and a few books on the shelves which have been rearranged. In an investigation spanning the second-hand bookshops of London and the Houses of Parliament - since an MP's new crime novel Death at the Desk appears to have some bearing on the case - John Ferguson's series sleuth MacNab is at hand to assist Scotland Yard in an atmospheric fair-play bibliomystery.

We hadn't planned a return to Leeds. But our friend Gerry is missing, and we've got to find him. Never mind the fact that anyone who can take out a troll is operating way above our pay grade. It doesn't take long to discover a missing troll is the least of our worries. Leeds has blown straight past dicey and into end times. The necromancers are back, and this time it's not just a few cats they want dead. It's everyone. So if we want any chance of life as we know it to continue, we need to stop them as well as save Gerry. Easy, right?

Shetland Detective Jimmy Perez knows it will be a difficult homecoming when he returns to Fair Isle. It’s a community where strangers, while welcomed, are still viewed with a degree of mistrust. With the autumn storms raging, the island feels cut off from the rest of the world. Tempers among the trapped islanders become frayed. Enough to drive someone to murder? When a body is discovered, the islanders react with fear. With no support from the mainland, Jimmy has to investigate the old-fashioned way.

Carrie's best friend has an accident and can no longer make the round-the-world trip they'd planned together, so Carrie decides to go it alone. Violet is also travelling alone, after splitting up with her boyfriend in Thailand. She is desperate for a ticket on the Trans-Siberian Express, but there is nothing available. When the two women meet in a Beijing Hotel, Carrie makes the impulsive decision to invite Violet to take her best friend's place. Thrown together in a strange country, and the cramped cabin of the train, the women soon form a bond

The discovery of Sir Robert Boniface's body on the floor of his limousine was made quite accidentally on a sultry Friday evening towards the end of June. The industrial and financial tycoon, and former stalwart of the British Cabinet, was shot in the head and left in the quiet Vale of Health. Nearby, a rejected portrait of Sir Robert is found riddled with bullets in the studio of the now missing artist Matt Caldwell.

Rebellious Christmas wreaths. Mysterious welly-dwelling eggs. A plague of irate water fowl. And ten ladies of a certain age who are by no means the least troublesome of Toot Hansell's residents, as far as Detective Inspector Adams is concerned. She's entirely certain her training never covered dealing with the Women's Institute, dragons, or festive magic spills. Not to mention invisible dogs with caffeine dependencies. But Christmas is almost here. Things can't go too wrong. . . can they? Well. It is Toot Hansell.

One thousand years ago: an Icelandic warrior returns from battle, bearing a ring cut from the right hand of his foe. Seventy years ago: an Oxford professor, working from a secret source, creates the 20th century’s most pervasive legend. The professor’s name? John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Six hours ago: an expert on Old Icelandic literature, Agnar Haraldsson, is murdered. Everything is connected, but to discover how, Detective Magnus Jonson must venture where the shadows lie....

When DI 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. Then Vera spots ligature marks around the victim’s throat...Vera revels being back in charge of an investigation again, working with Sergeant Joe Ashworth to find a motive. While Joe struggles to reconcile his home life with the demands of the case, death has never made Vera feel so alive. The duo investigates the victim’s past and discovers a shocking case, involving a young child.

Michelle Williams, an attractive young woman with close family ties and an active social life, describes her first extraordinary year in her unusual new job as a mortuary technician. It’s a year in which, with innate good humour, she encounters death at its most tragic, bizarre, and hilarious. Her tale, neither gruesome nor sad, is enlivened by a range of colourful and eccentric characters, from pathologists and coroners to hospital porters and undertakers, giving us a glimpse of life - and death - that few of us will ever experience.

1948. After serving with the French Resistance during the Second World War, codenamed La Chatte Noire, Phryne Fisher escaped to Australia in search of sunshine, butter and peace. So she’s furious when tragedy intrudes upon her newfound tranquillity and she discovers a dead man on Somerton Beach - well-dressed, good-looking and with a secret smile on his lips. The police are baffled as to his identity and cause of death - not to mention the scrap of paper bearing the words TAMAM SHUD found upon him, and the coded message in the book from which it was torn.