Alison is as close to anonymous as she can get; hers is a life lived under the radar. But once Alison was Esme Grace, a teenager who lived in a dilapidated house on the edge of a bleak estuary. Then one night a terrible thing happened in the crooked house, a nightmare of violence from which only Alison emerged and from which she has been running ev...

Jack Reacher - six foot five and dangerous. Adrift in the hellish heat of Texas. Moving like a shark in the water. Looking for a lift through the vast empty landscape. A Cadillac stops. A ride, but with a hitch. A pretty young woman, alone. Her husband's in jail. When he comes out, he's going to kill her. Her family's hostile, she can't trust the c...

Two small towns in Colorado: Hope and Despair. Between them, nothing but twelve miles of empty road. Jack Reacher can't find a ride, so he walks. All he wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets are four redneck deputies who want to run him out of town. Mistake. They're picking on the wrong guy. Jack Reacher is a big man, and he's in shape. No job, no...

It is summer, it is the Edinburgh Festival. People queuing for a lunchtime show witness a road-rage incident - an incident which changes the lives of everyone involved. Jackson Brodie, ex-army, ex-police, ex-private detective, is also an innocent bystander - until he becomes a suspect. With Case Histories, Kate Atkinson showed how brilliantly she c...

One frozen January morning at 5am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he believes is a routine call out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath. An old man has been tortured and beaten to death, his wife lies barely alive beside his shattered body, both victims of a violence beyond reason. The woman supplies Wallander wit...

When forensic anthropologist Dr Tempe Brennan is approached by amateur detective Hazel `Lucky' Strike, at first she is inclined to dismiss the woman's claims that she's matched a previously unidentified set of remains with a name. But as the words of a terrified young woman echo round her office from an audio recorder found near where the bones wer...

Detective Lindsay Boxer has finally married her long-time boyfriend Joe. But she doesn't even have time for a honeymoon before returning to work and a traumatic case. A fifteen-year-old girl is found lying unconscious in the street, naked but for a cheap plastic raincoat, and haemorrhaging badly after having given birth within the last 36 hours. Bu...

A brutal madman sprays bullets into a crowd of children leaving a San Francisco church. Miraculously-or was it intentionally?-only one person dies. Then an elderly black woman is hung. Police homicide inspector Lindsay Boxer senses a connection and, together with medical examiner Claire, assistant D.A. Jill, and Chronicle reporter Cindy, finds a li...

A young mother and her infant child are ruthlessly gunned down while returning to their car in the garage of a shopping mall. There are no witnesses, and Detective Lindsay Boxer is left with only one shred of evidence: a cryptic message scrawled across the windshield in blood-red lipstick. The same night, the wife of A-list actor Marcus Dowling wal...

Almost bigamy and absolute murder - Agatha's life is never dull . . . The morning of Agatha's longed-for marriage to James Lacey dawns bright and clear. But her luck runs out in the church when Jimmy, the husband she had believed long dead, turns up large as life and twice as ugly. Agatha has a go at strangling him. It's all too much for James, who...

A dazzling novel of murder and monsoons, of poison and seduction, of long-buried secrets and lethal betrayals. Rosalind Benegal is a BBC correspondent who has spent years distancing herself from surreal memories of a childhood spent in India. But lately her long-lost sister, Miranda, has taken to sending her cryptic postcards all the way from Bomba...

The truth will set you free - if it doesn't kill you first. New York attorney Trevor Mann's world shatters when he receives a phone call telling him his girlfriend has been shot dead in a mugging. But the circumstances point to something more calculated than a random attack. Claire was a New York Times journalist and Trevor is convinced she had une...

#1 bestselling author Patricia Cornwell returns to the chilling world of gutsy medical examiner Kay Scarpetta in this suspense classic.

Little Emily Steiner left a church meeting late one afternoon and strolled toward home along a lakeside path; a week later, her nude body was discovered, bound in blaze-orange duct tape. Called by the North Carolina authorities, forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta recognizes similarities to the gruesome work of a serial killer who has long eluded th...

"I want you all out-gone-dead-exterminated!" high strung Alex Household cried out, when, after a lifetime of struggle, he lost the starring role in a new play called The Hooded Owl-to an actor who couldn't remember his lines. But did that mean that it was Alex who had shot the leading man dead during his climactic speech? charles Paris, for one, co...

A day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a purchase she hadn't bargained for. One moment of madness is all it takes for Tracy's humdrum world to be turned upside down, the tedium of everyday life replaced by fear and danger at every turn. Witnesses to Tracy's Faustian exchange in the Merrion Centre in Leeds are Till...

In the fishing community of Fjallbacka, life is remote, peaceful - and for some, tragically short. Foul play was always suspected in the disappearance twenty years ago of two young holidaymakers in the area. Now a young boy out playing has confirmed this grim truth. Their remains, discovered with those of a fresh victim, send the town into shock. L...

A vicious hit, a vengeful enemy, a drug addled Colombian club owner and a sex crazed Italian family... the ever powerful Lucky Santangelo has to deal with them all. Meanwhile Max - her teenage daughter - is becoming the 'it' girl in Europe's modeling world. And her Kennedyesque son, Bobby, is being set up for a murder he didn't commit. But Lucky ca...

STUNNING NEW CRIME SET IN THE CAPITAL'S LEAST LOVED QUARTER Reporter Rex Tracey has just recovered from his affair with Lithuanian artist Milda Majauskas when she disappears. He's got other concerns, not least an anti-immigration group spreading hate across his beloved Tottenham, and a string of attacks on young women at the local beauty spot, Alex...

It's 1957 and James Bond (agent 007) has only just survived his showdown with Auric Goldfinger at Fort Knox. By his side is Pussy Galore, who was with him at the end. Unknown to either of them, the USSR and the West are in a deadly struggle for technological superiority. And SMERSH is back. The Soviet counter-intelligence agency plans to sabotage a...

London, 1940. Winston Churchill has just been sworn in, war rages across the Channel, and the threat of a Blitz looms larger by the day. But none of this deters Maggie Hope. She graduated at the top of her college class and possesses all the skills of the finest minds in British intelligence, but her gender qualifies her only to be the newest typis...