Showing results by publisher "HarperCollins Publishers Limited" in Dark Humour

Rhiannon is your average girl next door, settled with her boyfriend and little dog...but she's got a killer secret. Although her childhood was haunted by a famous crime, Rhinannon's life is normal now that her celebrity has dwindled. By day her job as an editorial assistant is demeaning and unsatisfying. By evening she dutifully listens to her friend's plans for marriage and babies whilst secretly making a list. A kill list.

Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything. One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted – while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life.

Mark Franklin came from the American West to Edwardian England with two long-barrelled .44s in his baggage and a fortune in silver in the bank. Where he had got it and what he was looking for no one could guess, although they wondered - at Scotland Yard, in city offices, in the glittering theatreland of the West End, in the highest circles of society (even King Edward was puzzled) and in the humble pub at Castle Lancing.

The sequel to Jonas Jonasson’s international best seller The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. It all begins with a hot air balloon trip and three bottles of champagne. Allan and Julius are ready for some spectacular views, but they’re not expecting to land in the sea and be rescued by a North Korean ship, and they could never have imagined that the captain of the ship would be harbouring a suitcase full of contraband uranium on a nuclear weapons mission for Kim Jong-un....

All the horrors of hell stand between Snorri Ver Snagason and the rescue of his family, if indeed the dead can be rescued. For Jalan Kendeth, getting back out alive and with Loki's Key is all that matters. Loki's creation can open any lock, any door, and it may also be the key to Jal's fortune back in the living world. Jal plans to return to the three Ws that have been the core of his idle and debauched life: wine, women, and wagering.

Meet the daughters of Iris Parker. Dee, sensitive and big-hearted; Rose, uptight and controlled; and Fleur, the reckless free spirit. At the reading of their mother's will, the three estranged women are aghast to discover that their inheritance comes with very tricky strings attached. If they are to inherit her wealth, they must spend a series of weekends together over the course of a year and carry out their mother's bucket list.

All Georgie Turner wants is to keep her family together. But with her daughter growing up fast, her sister married to a man Georgie hates, and their aging aunt getting more and more outrageous, nothing’s simple. So when her brother-in-law makes his biggest mistake yet, Georgie sees the chance to reunite the ladies in her life. And after a little persuasion, three generations of Turner women head off on a very unusual road trip. Georgie’s confident that some sun, sea and a bottle or two of prosecco will make this an adventure they’ll never forget. What could possibly go wrong?

A funny and heartwarming debut for fans of Celia Imrie and Dawn French. Evie Gallagher is regretting her hasty move into a care home. She may be 75 and recently widowed, but she’s absolutely not dead yet. And so, one morning, Evie walks out of Sheldon Lodge and sets off on a Great Adventure across Europe. But not everyone thinks Great Adventures are appropriate for women of Evie’s age, least of all her son, Brendan, and his wife, Maura, who follow a trail of puzzling text messages to bring her home.

As inventive as Agatha Christie, as hilarious as P. G. Wodehouse - discover the delightful detective stories of Edmund Crispin. Crime fiction at its quirkiest and best. Holy Disorders takes Oxford don and part-time detective Gervase Fen to the town of Tolnbridge, where he is happily bounding around with a butterfly net until the cathedral organist is murdered, giving Fen the chance to play sleuth.

Written in reaction to what Bentley perceived as the sterility and artificiality of the detective fiction of his day, Trent's Last Case features Philip Trent, an all-too-human detective who not only falls in love with the chief suspect but reaches a brilliant conclusion that is totally wrong. Trent's Last Case begins when millionaire American financier Sigsbee Manderson is murdered while on holiday in England. A London newspaper sends Trent to investigate, and he is soon matching wits with Scotland Yard's Inspector Murth.

Mid-December, and Cambridgeshire is blanketed with snow. Detective Sergeant Manon Bradshaw tries to sleep after yet another soul-destroying Internet date – the low murmuring of her police radio her only solace. Over the airwaves come reports of a missing woman – door ajar, keys and phone left behind, a spatter of blood on the kitchen floor. Manon knows the first 72 hours are critical: you find her, or you look for a body.

A pretty but spiteful young actress with a talent for destroying men's lives is found dead in a college room just yards from the office of the unconventional Oxford don Gervase Fen. Anyone who knew the girl would gladly have shot her, but can Fen discover who did shoot her and why?

When their mother died, she had only one request: that her daughters take a pilgrimage across India to carry out her final rites. Suddenly, the three are packing their bags and heading to the airport, together for the first time in years. The sisters seem to have nothing in common, but they need each other now more than ever. And as the miles rack up on their family road-trip, each of them will make unexpected discoveries about themselves and each other. After all, there are no secrets between sisters....

As dusk falls, a young man staggers through a park, far from home, bleeding from a stab wound. He dies where he falls, cradled by a stranger, a woman's name on his lips in his last seconds of life. DI Manon Bradshaw can't help taking an interest - these days she handles only cold cases, but the man died just yards from the police station where she works. She's horrified to discover that both victim and prime suspect are more closely linked to her than she could have imagined.

It's always awkward when 5,000 kronor goes missing. When it happens at a certain grotty hotel in South Stockholm, it's particularly awkward because the money belongs to the hitman currently staying in room seven. Per Persson, the hotel receptionist, just wants to mind his own business and, preferably, not get murdered. Johanna Kjellander, temporarily resident in room eight, is a priest without a vocation and, as of last week, without a parish. But right now she has two things at her disposal: an envelope containing 5,000 kronor and an excellent idea....

Amber Patterson is tired of being a nobody: an invisible woman who melts into the background. She deserves more. She deserves a life of wealth, luxury and leisure. Daphne Parrish is the golden girl of Bishops Harbor, Connecticut. With her model looks, her picture-perfect mansion and her millionaire husband, Jackson, she has everything Amber wants.

Every summer, a once-sort-of famous cartoonist named Rich Fischer leaves his wife and two kids behind to teach a class at a week-long arts conference in a charming New England beachside town. It’s a place where drum circles happen on the beach at midnight, clothing optional. Rich finds himself worrying about his family’s nights without him, his back taxes, his stuttering career and his own very real desire for love and human contact.

Daisy Wickens has returned to Ottercombe Bay, the picturesque Devon town where her mother died when she was a girl. She plans to leave as soon as her great uncle’s funeral is over, but Great Uncle Reg had other ideas. He’s left Daisy a significant inheritance - an old building in a state of disrepair, which could offer exciting possibilities, but to get it she must stay in Ottercombe Bay for 12 whole months.

Dismissed for misconduct from the Met’s Homicide Command after refusing to follow orders, unable to pay her bills (or hold down a relationship), Detective Inspector Robin Lyons has no choice but to take her teenage daughter Lennie and move back in with her parents in the city she thought she’d escaped forever at 18. In Birmingham, sharing a bunkbed with Lennie and navigating the stormy relationship with her mother, Robin works as a benefit-fraud investigator - to the delight of those wanting to see her cut down to size.

First story in a collection of interlinked tales of crime and retribution laced with dark humour, set around the festive season. Billy Partridge wasn’t really cut out to be a cat burglar, but it was ‘do the job, or come up with thirteen grand by Thursday, or have both legs shattered’.‘Do the job’ seemed the least worst option. But he’s about to find out just how bad the least worst option can be….