Mystery Crimes Police Procedural

When Detective Kim Stone is woken before dawn because local journalist Tracy Frost wants to show her a message, she’s not impressed. But her blood turns cold when she reads the note. She has 36 hours to follow a trail set by an anonymous challenger. If she fails, people will die. Kim’s gut tells her this is no hoax. She summons her team, desperate to prevent what lies ahead. With minutes to spare, they solve the first cryptic clue. It leads to a box hidden deep in the woods, containing a second clue and a tape.

Homicide Detective Max Rupert never fully accepted his wife's death, even when he believed that a reckless hit and run driver was the cause. But when he learns that in fact she was murdered, he devotes himself to hunting down her killers. Most of his life he had thought of himself as a decent man. But now he's so consumed with thoughts of retribution that he questions whether he will take that last step and enact the vengeance he longs for.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been "exiled" to a low-key post policing rustic Catalina Island, after department politics drove him off a homicide desk on the mainland. But while following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Detective Stilwell gets a report of a body found wrapped in plastic and weighed down at the bottom of the harbor. Crossing all lines of protocol and jurisdiction, he starts doggedly working the case.

A former Medal of Valor winner, Minnesota detective Alexander Rupert is now under subpoena by a grand jury on suspicion of corruption. So when he's asked to look into the false identity of a car-accident victim named James Putnam, a man who in fact died 15 years earlier, Rupert sees a potentially big case and an opportunity to regain his respectability. But the investigation puts him in the path of "the Beast", the nom de guerre of Drago Basta, a cunning veteran of the Balkan wars.

In a secluded farm house in the Pacific Northwest, a family has been slaughtered - and a teenage son has disappeared. Single mother and cop Emily Kenyon spearheads a dark hunt for a killer. But Emily's teenage daughter, Jenna, is one step ahead of her. Then another family is butchered, and another. As Emily fits the puzzle pieces together, she makes a chilling discovery: The killer is coming after her and her daughter....

The “Prey” novels by Pulitzer prize-winning journalist John Sandford consistently make the best-seller lists, but they are not for the faint of heart. Featuring Minneapolis Lieutenant Lucas Davenport, these thrillers are raw, graphic, and impossible to put down. In Eyes of Prey, a depressed and unfocused Davenport takes on a macabre case, tracking down a serial killer who maims the eyes of his victims after he has murdered them.

A young woman is dumped, injured and unconscious, in a private hospital's parking lot. She is an amnesiac with no memory prior to her discovery by hospital personnel. Detective Inspector Peter Diamond of the Bath homicide squad is unwilling to become involved. He has other, more important cases to solve: a woman has plunged to her death from the roof of a local landmark while half the young people of Bath partied below, and an elderly farmer has shot himself.

All around Albuquerque, New Mexico, young women are going missing, seemingly vanished into thin air. With no link between the victims, Detective Alyssa Wyatt is quickly plunged into a horrifying case with no obvious clues. And when Jersey Andrews, the best friend of Alyssa's teenage daughter, Holly, joins the list of vanished girls, the case becomes personal. But this investigation will lead Alyssa and partner Cord into the most sinister depths of humanity; an evil place where life is expendable and where the depraved can fulfill their darkest desires - if they have the money.

Few writers have explored the human dark side with as much insight and power - and in Winter Prey, his shattering New York Times best-seller, Sandford tells his most ice-blooded tale of all. Minneapolis Lieutenant Lucas Davenport has tracked killers in cities across America. But even he may be unprepared to face the savage murderer hunting human prey in the Wisconsin woods this winter.

After 17-year-old Charlotte Kane, the beautiful, brilliant, and brooding daughter of a rich widower, disappears on a drunken New Years' Eve snowmobile ride, a raging blizzard soon snuffs out all search efforts. When her body is found during the spring thaw four months later, preliminary evidence implicates her ex-boyfriend: Ojibwe bad-boy Solemn Winter Moon. But then a second Charlotte Kane turns up dead, and Cork isn't sure of anything any more.

When another resident of the Rosemary House care home is found dead in her chair one Saturday evening in December, no one is very surprised - not until the results of a routine post-mortem reveal something extraordinary. Sergeant DC Smith and his team have to tread carefully as they investigate what took place, and Smith himself has to confront some difficult memories. Others, meanwhile, seem intent on getting him to leave the force altogether.

Jonathan Hale is terrified. The wealthy property lawyer and money launderer is back home in Surrey after a nightmare experience in a U.S. jail. The police have him under secret surveillance. But Hales's fears lie elsewhere. His plea bargain has earned him the enmity of The Reptile, a notoriously cold-hearted gangster, now confined for life in a maximum-security jail in Arizona thanks to Hale. He's taken precautions, moved house, hidden his identity and installed security for his wife and family. But still… what if The Reptile escapes?

On the tree-lined banks of Surrey’s River Wey, a decaying corpse is dug up by workmen in the middle of an Anglo-Saxon burial site. His modern dental fillings show that this is no Dark Age corpse. DCI Craig Gillard is called in, but the body’s condition makes identification difficult. One man, however, seems to fit the bill: Ozzy Blanchard, a contractor employed by the same water firm doing the digging who disappeared six months ago. But then an X-ray of the corpse throws the investigation into turmoil. The deeper Gillard digs, the more shocking truths he will uncover.

A tangled Trask Brothers thriller you will want to read in one sitting. He knew. There was only a scrap of red material, but he knew. Don Trask, Lead Agent for the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, had no doubt what it was. For five years he had locked away the haunting memories associated with his most difficult case, the unsolved disappearance of a small girl. But now those memories had burst from their vault, and the nightmares that came with them were back. And then there was another, a young boy, and Trask knew who had done it. The same man who had taken the girl. The same man...

When legendary crime novelist William MacRae is found dead in suspicious circumstances at his Glasgow home, Police Scotland's premier investigator DCI John Lomond is put on the case. After discovering a list of seven bestselling authors–all old friends of MacRae's–Lomond and his team head north to the Ullapool Book Festival, where the seven are gathering to remember their fallen friend. But a vicious storm is closing in. And not everyone, it seems, has fond memories of MacRae. Or each other.

In Shadow Prey, the crackling sequel to Rules of Prey, Twin Cities sleuth Lucas Davenport teams up with NYPD Lieutenant Lily Rothenberg to track down an elusive killer known only as Shadow Love. Among the victims are a Minneapolis slumlord, a judge from Oklahoma City, and a Manhattan politician. The murder weapon is a Native American ceremonial knife.

Gabriel Kensington and his wife, Lydia, have been brutally slain in their luxurious home in New Mexico. A frantic, whispered phone call from their teenage daughter, Addis, and her best friend, Emerson, quickly alerts the authorities to the killings. But when detective Alyssa Wyatt and the squad appear at the house, the unthinkable has happened. The girls are nowhere to be found...and neither is the killer. In a race against time, it's up to Alyssa Wyatt and her partner, Cord, to find the missing girls - and discover just why the Kensingtons have been targeted.

Recent Afghan refugee Sabera Ahmadi was last seen exiting her place of work three weeks ago. The local police have yet to open a case, while her older, domineering husband seems unconcerned. Sabera's closest friend, however, is convinced Sabera would never willingly leave her three‑year old daughter. At her insistence, missing persons expert Frankie Elkin agrees to take up the search through the broiling streets of Tucson. Just in time for a video of the young mother to surface—showing her walking away from the scene of a brutal double murder.

When Dr. Emma Sweeney stumbles across the victim of a hit-and-run outside Galway University early one morning, she calls her boyfriend, Detective Cormac Reilly, bringing him first to the scene of a murder that would otherwise never have been assigned to him. The dead girl is carrying an ID that will put this crime at the center of a scandal—her card identifies her as Carline Darcy, heir apparent to Darcy Therapeutics, Ireland's most successful pharmaceutical company. Darcy Therapeutics has a finger in every pie....

Detective Sergeant Chris Waters got the call at 05.29 that July morning. This is it, said DCI Reeve, you'll be first there, it's all yours, you're the crime scene manager. Suddenly, after months of waiting and wondering, Waters finds himself in at the deep end, and alone at the scene of a puzzling murder. As the investigation proceeds, the detectives at Kings Lake Central find themselves visiting familiar places and talking to some familiar faces, while old enmities reappear in the incident room. Before this is over, Chris Waters will need to make a career-changing decision.