Showing results for "Running" in Crime Fiction

The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organisation that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths. In order to try to rescue Will, Strike's business partner Robin Ellacott decides to infiltrate the cult and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito amongst them. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her.

Debauched, divorced, and courting death, Billy Ray Schafer is a comedian who has forgotten how to laugh. Over the course of seven spun-out days across the American Southwest, he travels from from hell gig to hell gig in search of a reason to keep living in this bleak and violent glimpse into the psyche of a thoroughly ruined man. Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father - comedian is the only title Schafer has left. Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: What happens when the opportunity doesn't come - or worse - it comes and goes?

Twenty years ago, in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas, Annie Randall took her dog for a walk. The dog returned. Annie did not. When her body was found, cruelly broken and posed like a runner, there was only ever one suspect: Annie’s husband, Frank. Now he’s served his time and come home–but the locals won’t let him forget. Especially when there’s a new ‘running girl’ murder…

Fresh out of Police College, 18-year-old WPC Helen Grace is the first to arrive on the scene of a fatal collision. Her colleagues see nothing amiss, convinced that the young man's death was a tragic accident. But Helen is not so sure. Who is their mystery victim? Why would he risk life and limb running across a busy highway?

The trial of notorious gangland boss, Elrit Selmani, is about to start but the star witness has gone missing. Without Derrick Morris' testimony, the killer will walk free. Detective Inspector Simon Wise and his Murder Investigation Team must race against the clock to find Morris before Selmani's gang do — except not everyone on Wise's team wants to find the man alive. Can Wise find Morris in time or will a deadly killer go free?

When Alexis ‘Lexi’ James falls out with her best mate Nicole over ‘bad boy’ Ryan King, it’s just the beginning of a chain of events that go from bad to worse to deadly. Returning home one night to her high-rise flat, she is faced by a terrifying scene that changes her life forever, and matters are made worse when she is put into care in another town. Years later, Lexi has left school and is back in Manchester. A chance meeting with Nicole and her so-called ‘other half’ Ryan ends in disaster, and she vows never to see them again.

When Tony Caruso is hired to go undercover for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, he has no idea that his life will change forever in the remote mountains of Oregon. He is tasked to track down an Asian ring of smugglers who are killing black bears for gallbladders and shooting elk and deer in velvet for their antlers. He narrowly escapes with his life, but follows the smugglers to Portland. Eventually, he ends up in the southern Cascades in the mushroom fields, where he must fight not only the Asian game smugglers, but Asian gangs from San Francisco and Seattle.

After battling through the early years of his comeback as a jump jockey, Eddie Malloy seems, at last, to be back on the road to the top. Multi-millionaire businessma, Broga Cates has hired Eddie to ride his string of horses, and Eddie is full of hope. But fate has other plans.

Coming from scandalous Florida treasure hunters and drug smugglers, Sloan McPherson is forging her own path, for herself and for her daughter, out from under her family’s shadow. An auxiliary officer for Lauderdale Shores PD, she’s the go-to diver for evidence recovery. Then Sloan finds a fresh kill floating in a canal - a woman whose murky history collides with Sloan’s. Their troubling ties are making Sloan less a potential witness than a suspect. And her colleagues aren’t the only ones following every move she makes. So is the killer.

Scarlett is dancing in the school talent show tomorrow. Nana, who Scarlett lives with since Mum died, reckons Scarlett will be on Strictly at this rate. Except Scarlett doesn't make it home from school. She's abducted by a man she never imagined she'd see again. A man on the police's most wanted list. Her dad.

Nash is okay with things staying simple and small-town, until the person of interest shows up in a city of seven million, with old friends and older scores to settle. And then the war begins.

When a hot shot crew, practicing high altitude/low opening parachute jumps in the desert, lands on two chest freezers, it's just an interesting surprise. Until one of the crew discovers the Air Force accidentally dropped them in the boom-boom section of an active bombing range. As the jump master calls in a high-wire dust-off, one of the crew opens the freezers. Seconds later, they are calling it in as an active crime scene. And to contact the FBI…

Elenore struggles to heal emotionally from an accident years before that killed her boyfriend and uses substances to get through. When she becomes pregnant and her current boyfriend beats her, she flees to a man who has just been biding his time, waiting to make her life a living nightmare of which she sees no way to escape.

Private detective Sam Jones’s six-year search for an 8-year-old boy ends with gunshots in a basement and cold bodies that would eventually lead the police straight to him. Jones had never promised Ruth Verne that he would find her son alive, but he knew deep down that she believed he would - worse, he had believed it too. Jones wasn’t ready to look Ruth in the eye and tell her he had failed. He wasn’t ready to admit that he lost everything and had nothing to show for it. But an unsigned note scrawled on a bathroom door gives Jones a second chance - a chance for redemption.

After selling his company for millions, Colby Walker takes his family - and his son's friend Jess - on vacation, wanting nothing more than to unwind in the sun and surf. But he spots the alarming signs in short order: Jess' downcast eyes, a familiar passivity, and angry red welts marching across the boy's bare back. Walker understands what they mean because he'd been that boy, many years ago. He'd suffered in silence, too.

All he wanted to do that day was drive into town to look for a job. But when Pete Larkey turns the ignition key, his car won't start. He decides to walk to town. He'll have a morning beer at the Lemon Tree Lounge and buy a new battery for his car. He refuses to feel victimized. At least, he tries.
But inside the bar is the last man on earth that Pete Larkey wants to see. A guy named Morton will ask a few questions that will change the course of Pete Larkey's life in a deep, dark way.

An opportunist act throws a disturbed teenager into conflict with local drug dealers, and headlong into a covert drugs operation. Something happened to trigger her self-destructive descent, but what? Was she abused? Is she amoral? Why would the child of politician choose to live on the streets rather than have a Maserati for her 18th birthday? DI Redwall is determined to find out, and save this lost child, but Jessie's chances of survival seem slim.

Money manager J. R. Johnson coasts through life in his adopted home of Austin, Texas. Seen as an underachiever by his family, J.R. has a complicated relationship with a client, movie goddess Lola Madison. When Lola asks J.R. to accompany her to a New York gala event, Johnson has reason to suspect that she may be moving her account to a Wall Street hotshot. J. R. investigates and suspects that the New Yorker is running an audacious Ponzi scheme.