Showing results by publisher "Isis Publishing Ltd" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mataura is a small town in rural New Zealand where, apart from the odd tractor theft, nothing very interesting happens. But when the body of a young mother is found washed up on the banks of the Mataura River, the small rural community is rocked by her tragic suicide. All is not what it seems, however. Sam Shephard, sole-charge police constable in the town, soon discovers the death was no suicide and has to face the realisation that there is a killer in town. To complicate the situation, the murdered woman was the wife of Sam's former lover.

When a homeless man is found strangled to death, Detective Sergeant Geraldine Steel is caught off guard by the cold-blooded nature of the crime. A second murder suggests the existence of a killer whose motive is as elusive as he is dangerous. In an investigation plagued by police scepticism, only Geraldine is relentless in her pursuit of the truth. As she is forced down unexpected avenues into the lives of three people caught in a toxic triangle of love and deceit, she discovers there is more to this case than any of them could have imagined.

Burned out and traumatised by her horrifying experiences around the world, aid worker Úrsula has returned to Iceland. Unable to settle, she accepts a high-profile government role. But on her first day in the post, Úrsula promises to help a mother seeking justice for her daughter, who had been raped by a policeman. A homeless man is stalking her – but is he hounding her, or warning her of some danger? And why has the death of her father in police custody so many years earlier reared its head again?

A fork of lightning and a crash of thunder herald the completion of a heinous crime. In woodland belonging to the eccentric Lord Wychbold, a body has been crucified on a tree. On Easter Day, the Reverend Tobias Campion returns from morning service at St Luke's and discovers the corpse, already beginning to putrefy. A crown of thorns frames his face, bludgeoned beyond recognition, and a loincloth preserves what is left of his modesty.

Carmilla, Queen of the Night, is a shape-shifting raven whose fictional exploits thrill girls all over the world. When tweens in Chicago's Carmilla Club hold an initiation ritual in an abandoned cemetery, they stumble on an actual corpse, a man stabbed through the heart in a vampire-style slaying. The girls include daughters of some of Chicago's most powerful families. For V.I. Warshawski, the questions multiply faster than the answers. Is the killing linked to a hostile media campaign against Sophy Durango?

DI Geraldine Steel is called to investigate the murder of a man who has been battered to death. His widow, Caroline, is terrorised into concealing the identity of the killer who then claims a second victim. This leaves Geraldine with a dark secret. The truth might help to solve the case, but it also threatens to cost Geraldine her career. When Caroline's 10-year-old son disappears, his distraught mother turns to the police, with fatal consequences.

Crimes are rare in Singapore, but when there's one that has the police baffled, it is Inspector Zhang that they turn to. From locked-room mysteries to murders disguised as suicide, Inspector Zhang is able to draw on his experience as a detective along with tricks he has learned from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. See if you can solve the crimes before the Inspector - the clues are there!

After Arthur Penfold’s wife reveals she is leaving him to care for her ailing aunt, he sets upon a path of murder and deceit to avoid the social embarrassment of a second marital breakdown. But the purchase of a poetry book triggers a sequence of events that begins to unravel both Arthur and a seemingly open-and-shut murder case.

When a sex worker dies in suspicious circumstances in York, Detective Inspector Geraldine Steel struggles to remain focused on the murder investigation: she is distracted by her worries about her colleague and life partner, Ian Peterson, who has disappeared. As Geraldine becomes close to her new DS, Matthew, she is unaware that Ian is working undercover in London, trying to identify a criminal gang who have been targeting her. As a second victim is discovered in York, and Ian's life is threatened by a psychopath the tension mounts.

An inoffensive man is murdered in a seemingly motiveless attack. Detective Inspector Geraldine Steel and her team are baffled, until DNA from an apparent stranger is discovered on the victim's body. Geraldine is not convinced the suspect is guilty. When a witness comes forward to offer the suspect an alibi, Geraldine lets him go. That night, a second murder is committed. The evidence points to the suspect who has just been released. As Geraldine attempts to make sense of the suspect's complex history, he goes on the run. Even his wife appears to condemn him.

With his near-fatal stabbing almost a memory, DI Bob Valentine is settling back onto the force - until one of Ayrshire's darkest secrets is unearthed. The skeletal remains of a boy, his hands and feet cable-tied, turns up in a semifoetal position during routine drainage works. The boy is soon identified as a missing child from the 1980s, reopening a cold case that was previously thought unsolvable. When the remains of more children are unearthed, Valentine soon finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy linking the past and present through some of the most shocking crimes of his police career.

In 1944, in the outer-Melbourne suburb of Nunawading, the brutal deaths of a family herald the return of a long-forgotten cult. A man named Anthony Prescott has declared himself the Messiah, and has promised his followers immortality. There are those who believe him—and who are ready to kill in his name. Inspector Titus Lambert of the Melbourne Homicide unit, whose detectives are over-stretched, requests the discreet assistance of Helen Lord and Joe Sable, once members of his unit, now private inquiry agents.

Nothing in Stan Andino's regular and uneventful existence has prepared him for the moment he discovers his wife naked, except for a black apron, bleaching the lounge carpet with a sponge. A CT scan one week later explains it: Carmen has a brain tumour. As Stan and his teenage sons grapple with the diagnosis and frightening personality changes in their wife and mother, family friends Austin and Tibbie Lamb do everything possible to assist the Andinos. Then Tibbie's body is discovered at the bottom of Browns Bay cliffs. DS Ramesh Bandara and his partner are assigned to the case.

In 1946 Regina Robichard is a rarity. A young New York civil rights lawyer working for Thurgood Marshall, Reggie stumbles across a letter asking her boss to investigate the case of a young black soldier whose body has been found floating in the river in Mississippi. For Reggie, justice is not the only draw to this case. The letter is signed by the reclusive M. P. Calhoun, author of one of the most banned books in the country, a book Reggie loved as a child.

For Sophie Rivers, tackling newly imposed profit margins and a disruptive Fundamentalist movement means that teaching comes low on the agenda. And when a young teacher dies, victim of a series of arson attacks at William Murdock College of Further Education, another teacher is attacked, and a women's safe hostel is razed to the ground, Sophie has more than school politics on her mind. Could these events be connected to the group of muggers she witnessed in action?

Civilisation is collapsing. Frustrated and angry after years of denial and inaction, a government of youth has taken power in North America, and a policy of institutionalised ageism introduced. All those older than the prescribed age are deemed responsible for the current state of the world, and are to be 'relocated', their property and assets confiscated. David Ashworth and his wife May find themselves among the thousands being moved to the southern deserts.

DI Owen Sheen vowed to his father never to return to Ireland. But years have passed, and Sheen needs answers to the questions he has surrounding his brother’s death. He is on loan from the Met under the belief he will be helping set up a new Historical Offences Team. On arrival to Ireland, plans change, and he finds himself partnered with newly promoted DC Aoife McCusker to work on her first appointed murder investigation.

It’s our world, but decades into the future...an ordinary world, where cars drive themselves, drones glide across the sky, and robots work in burger shops. All conflicts are safely oceans away. People get up, work, and have dinner. Everything is as it should be. Except for 17-year-old John, a tech prodigy from a damaged family, who hides a deeply personal secret. But everything starts to change when he enters a tiny café on a cold Tokyo night. A café run by a disgraced sumo wrestler, where a peculiar dog with a spherical head lives, alongside its owner, enigmatic waitress Neotnia.

London, 1841. Mr Jeremiah Blake and Captain William Avery, recently returned from India, are invited by Viscount Allington to examine the particulars of a grisly pair of murders. Two printers from the seditious gutter presses have been brutally dispatched in distinct but similar circumstances. Fearing the deaths will stoke the fires of Chartism sweeping the capital, Allington hopes Blake and Avery's determination to uncover the truth will solve these crimes and help restore civic order.

In 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family's summer house on a remote Minnesota lake. Her mother and two sisters spend the rest of their lives at the lake house, keeping a decades-long vigil for the lost child. Sixty years later, Lucy, the middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before her death, she leaves the house to her grandniece, Justine. For Justine, the lake house offers freedom and stability - a way to give her daughters the home she never had. But the long Minnesota winter is just beginning....