Showing titles in International Mystery & Crime

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….

Anneliese Vos, 16-year-old daughter of detective Pieter Vos, disappeared three years ago. Her father's desperate search revealed nothing. One day, Laura Bakker, a trainee detective, visits to tell him that the daughter of local politician, Katja Prins, has gone missing in circumstances similar to Anneliese. Vos is drawn back into the life of a detective, hoping that somewhere will be a clue to his daughter’s fate….

He began swimming in slow, broad strokes. The sea smelled harsh, stinging his nostrils like champagne, and he nearly got drunk on it.... In a fraction of a second, Montalbano realized he'd struck a human foot. Somebody else was floating right beside him, and he hadn't noticed. 'Excuse me,' he said hastily, flipping back onto his belly and looking over at the other. The person beside him didn't answer, because he wasn't doing the dead man's float. He was actually dead.

Retired army Sergeant Boonzie McCulloch travels to the wintry Highlands of Scotland to help a relative in danger but is soon deeper in it himself than he’d bargained for. Ruthless, controlling thugs are running amok across the region and will kill anybody to get their hands on a historic hoard of lost gold treasure....

Bruno, Chief of Police in the charming French town of St Denis, is already busy with a case when the body of an undercover French Muslim cop is found in the woods, a man who called Bruno for help only hours earlier. But Bruno's sometime boss and rival, the Brigadier, doesn't see this investigation as a priority - there are bigger issues at stake. Bruno has other ideas. Meanwhile, a Muslim youth named Sami turns up at a French army base in Afghanistan hoping to get home to St Denis. One of Bruno's old army comrades helps to smuggle Sami back to France, but the FBI aren't far behind.

April 1941, Romsey, England. Josephine 'Josy' Fox hasn't set foot in Romsey in over 20 years. As an illegitimate child, her family - headed by her controlling grandfather - found her an embarrassment. Now, she wants to return to what was once her home and uncover the secret of her parentage. Who was her father, and why would her mother never talk about him? Josy arrives the day after the Luftwaffe have bombed the town.

Millennium publisher Mikael Blomkvist has launched an explosive investigation into the sex-trafficking industry in Sweden and its international links. When two journalists are found dead in a Stockholm apartment, police are baffled by what appears to be a professional killing. Ex-security analyst and former child delinquent Lisbeth Salander is wanted for murder, but the trail has gone cold.

Mma Ramotswe knows she is very lucky indeed. She has a loving family, good friends and a thriving business doing what she enjoys most - helping people. But the latest mystery she is called upon to solve is distinctly trickier than it initially appears, and, of course, there's plenty to handle in her personal life between Charlie and his new bride and Mma Makutsi and her talking shoes. In the end, Mma Ramotswe's patience and common sense will win out, and, without a doubt, all will be the better for it.

The Terracotta Dog, the second audiobook in Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano series, opens with a mysterious tête-à-tête with a mafioso, some inexplicably abandoned loot from a supermarket heist and some dying words that lead Inspector Montalbano to a secret grotto in a mountain cave where two young lovers, dead 50 years and still embracing, are watched over by a life-size terracotta dog.

Sir Robert Skinner's stock is rising - after retiring from the police service he's been promoted to head an international media organisation. Yet a series of unexplained deaths on his home turf in Scotland threaten to bring him crashing back down to earth. As Skinner helps the elderly in his local community, several residents seem to die of natural causes. But when a gruesome discovery is made in a Glasgow flat and one of Skinner's long-time friends - an aspiring politician - emerges as the prime suspect, things become very murky indeed.

This is a collection of three complete novels in the thrilling Sam Reilly series featuring Sam Reilly and his unique team of troubleshooters. The set includes The Ironclad Covenant, The Heisenberg Legacy, and Omega Deep.

Naples, 1931. A bitter wind stalks the city streets, and murder lies at its chilled heart. When Maestro Vezzi, one of the world's greatest tenors, is found brutally murdered in his dressing room at Naples' famous San Carlo theater, the enigmatic and aloof Commissario Ricciardi is called to investigate. Arrogant and bad-tempered, Vezzi was hated by many. But with the livelihoods of the opera at stake, who would have committed such a callous act?

DCI Kett is back, heading Norfolk Constabulary’s brand-new Extreme Crime Task Force. And it’s just in time. The body of a woman bound in thorns has been discovered in Norwich’s historic Cow Tower. In her mouth is a severed finger wrapped in a scrap of red cloth, and the first few lines of a fairy tale. “Once upon a time, a young maiden waited to be saved from a hideous monster.” The finger belongs to another missing woman, and if Kett, Porter and Savage want to find her alive they must follow a chain of blood-drenched riddles, each victim leading to the next.

When a man dies in a gas explosion, the police suspect arson, and the Murder Investigation Team is called in to investigate. But the case takes on a new and terrible twist when a local villain is viciously attacked. As the police enquiries lead from the expensive Harchester Hill estate to the local brothel, a witness dies in a hit-and-run. Was it coincidence - or cold-blooded murder? The Murder Investigation Team has problems of its own – and so does Geraldine Steel. A shocking revelation threatens her peace of mind as the investigation races towards its dramatic climax.

With marriage, there are things you can and can't live with. Harry, my abusive husband, made that clear enough when he beat me like a dog, forced a miscarriage on me, and tried posing me as a hostage to my father's notorious biker gang, The Reapers. I was lucky enough to get out of my marriage in one piece but it's only a matter of time before he picks up my trail and hunts me down. Blackjack swears he'll kill him the second he steps foot in town. I know he means well but there's something about his stare when he tells me I deserve better.

Miss Caroline has doubts when she receives an urgent invitation from a London law firm to discuss her late father's estate. After all, the dishonored Earl of Morton died without a pound sterling to pass on to his two daughters. But while immersing herself in helping Mrs. Frogerton's capricious daughter navigate the high social season, Caroline meets with a cagey lawyer, Mr. Smith, who shares life-altering news—the earl composed a second will, leaving behind an undisclosed fortune. Mrs. Frogerton, however, is thoroughly unimpressed with the firm's conduct and suspicious of their true motives.

While secretly researching the bizarre discoveries of Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla many years earlier, physicist Claudine Pommier becomes the victim of a remorseless and cruel murderer who breaks into her Parisian apartment. Is he just a serial killer? Or is there more to her death than the Paris cops believe?

Everyone has a breaking point. Carl Logan might have just found his. The JIA sends intelligence agent Carl Logan on a routine mission to Russia. It should have been simple. But when Logan's cover is blown, he's transported into a world of hell he thought he would never see again. Something is different this time, though, and before long doubts begin to surface in Logan's mind as to why the assignment went so wrong. Logan has never been short of enemies.

Inspector Maigret is meant to be taking a holiday, but he can't resist following the development of his colleague Janvier's case in the papers - and playing a few tricks on the way. Standing at the window in the middle of the morning, vaguely observing the comings and goings in the street, he had a feeling that reminded him of certain days in his childhood, when his mother was still alive and he was off school because he had the flu or it was the end of term. It was the feeling of finding out what went on when he wasn't there.

It was the smell that Mrs. Powell noticed first. Slightly sweet. Slightly unpleasant...It shocked her badly to find a dead man in the corner, his head slumped on his knees. Who was Billy Blake, other than a homeless alcoholic who wandered the streets? Why was he found dead from starvation in one of the richest areas of one of the richest capitals in the world?