Showing results by publisher "Quercus" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Kids can be so cruel. They'll call you names. Hurt your feelings. Push you to your death. In the garden of an abandoned house, Luke Connolly lies broken, dead. The night before, he and his friends partied inside. Nobody fought, everybody else went home safely. And yet, Luke was raped and pushed to his death. His alleged attacker is now in custody. DCI Tom Reynolds is receiving the biggest promotion of his career when a colleague asks him to look at the Connolly case, believing it's not as cut and dried as local investigators have made out.

Five German schoolgirls are missing. Four have been found dead. But unlike the undesirables who make up the majority of dead and missing people in Hitler's Berlin, these girls were blonde and blue-eyed - the Aryan flower of German maidenhood - and their gruesome deaths recall ritual killings.

Being held hostage at gunpoint by her childhood friend is not Dr Heather Gilmore's idea of a good day at work. It only gets worse when she hears that her 19-year-old daughter, Leah, has been kidnapped. Sergeant Claire Boyle wasn't expecting to get caught up in a hostage situation during a doctor's appointment. When it becomes apparent that the kidnapping is somehow linked to the hostage taker, a woman called Eileen Delaney, she is put in charge of finding the missing girl.

When Nina's father dies, she inherits a gleaming dream vacation home in a balmy tropical paradise - one she had no idea existed. The house is extraordinary: state-of-the-art, all glass and marble. How did her sensible father ever have enough money for this? And why not tell her about it? Desperate to uncover why he hid such a big secret, she decides to visit.

In the small town of St Denis, Bruno, can't get a moment's rest. Some rare bank notes have come to light that may have links to the legendary Neuvic train robbery in 1944. The investigation is fraught with issues. Bruno is also dealing with a wave of local burglaries, which have brought his old flame, Isabelle - and their complicated history - back to the town.

St Denis may be picturesque and sleepy, but it has more than its fair share of murder and mystery, as Bruno knows all too well. When Bruno is invited to the 90th birthday of a powerful local patriarch - a war hero with high-level political connections in France, Russia and Israel - he encounters a family with more secrets than even he had imagined.

Five years ago, Erin Kennedy moved to New York following a family tragedy. She now lives happily with her detective husband in the scenic seaside town of Newport, Long Island. When Erin answers the door to Danny's police colleagues one morning, it's the start of an ordinary day. But behind her, Danny walks to the window of their 4th-floor apartment and jumps to his death.

Claire Wright likes to play other people. A struggling British actress, in New York without a green card, Claire needs work. She takes the only part she's offered: as a decoy for a firm of divorce lawyers, hired to entrap straying husbands, catching them on tape with their seductive propositions. The rules? Never hit on them directly. Make it clear you're available, but they have to proposition you, not the other way around. The firm is after evidence, not entrapment.

The inspector frowned and examined the earth under the trees. As he scanned the glade, his stomach lurched. One, two, three, four. Five, counting the mound of earth disturbed under the tent. Somebody had cleared the earth of its natural layer and sown their own flowers. In five places. Five graves. A young woman, Fiona Holland, has gone missing from a small Irish village. A search is mounted, but there are whispers. Fiona had a wild reputation. Was she abducted, or has she run away?

From his father, Jack Parker has inherited the mutant gene that guarantees he will get dementia. It's early days for Jack, and his symptoms so far can be put down to ageing while he's taking steps to manage the problem and keep the job he loves. When Jack begins to investigate a murder case in which a serial killer is clearly haunted by childhood memories, he begins to realize that his own memories are built on increasingly shifting sands - making him almost envy the killer's obvious clarity.

In the middle of a hard-won morning nap in the basement of police headquarters, Carl Mørck, head of Department Q, receives a call from a colleague working on the Danish island of Bornholm. Carl is dismissive at first, but then he receives some shocking news. Carl then has no choice but to lead Department Q into the tragic cold case of a vivacious seventeen-year-old girl who vanished from school, only to be found dead hanging high up in a tree.

Everything has changed for Dr Ruth Galloway. She has a new job, home and partner and is no longer North Norfolk police's resident forensic archaeologist. That is, until convicted murderer Amyas March offers to make DCI Nelson a deal. Nelson was always sure that March killed more women than he was charged with. Now March confirms this and offers to show Nelson where the other bodies are buried - but only if Ruth will do the digging.

Christmas day, and DCI Tom Reynolds receives an alarming call. A mass grave has been discovered on Oileán na Caillte, the island which housed the controversial psychiatric institution St. Christina's. The hospital has been closed for decades, and onsite graves were tragically common. Reynolds thinks his adversarial boss is handing him a cold case to sideline him. But then it transpires another body has been discovered amongst the dead - one of the doctors who went missing from the hospital in mysterious circumstances 40 years ago.

Jane stumbles on the rental opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to live in a beautiful ultraminimalist house designed by an enigmatic architect, on condition she abides by a long list of exacting rules. After moving in she discovers that a previous tenant, Emma, met a mysterious death there - and starts to wonder if her own story will be a rerun of the girl before. As twist after twist catches the listener off guard, Emma's past and Jane's present become inexorably entwined in this tense portrayal of psychological obsession.

France, 1956. Bernie Gunther is on the run. If there's one thing he's learned, it's never to refuse a job from a high-ranking secret policeman. But this is exactly what he's just done. Now he's a marked man, with the East German Stasi on his tail. Fleeing across Europe, he remembers the last time he worked with his pursuer: in 1939, to solve a murder at the Berghof, Hitler's summer hideaway in the Bavarian Alps. Hitler is long dead, the Berghof now a ruined shell and the bizarre time Bernie spent there should be no more than a distant memory.

Nordland. A region in the Norwegian Arctic; a remote valley that stretches from the sea up to the mountains and the glacier of the Blue Man. It is May. In Nordland it's a time of spring and school-leavers' celebrations - until Daniel, a popular teenage boy, goes missing. Conflicting stories circulate among his friends, of parties and wild behaviour. As the search for Daniel widens, the police open a disused mine in the mountains. They find human remains, but this body has been there for decades, its identity a mystery.

One Way Street sees the welcome return of Jimmy Mullen, the homeless, PTSD-suffering veteran, as he attempts to rebuild his life following the events in The Man on the Street. As his probation officer constantly reminds him, all he needs to do is keep out of trouble. But then one of Jimmy's friends asks for help. Someone this friend was close to but has lost touch with is found dead in a dumpster, yet another victim of Newcastle's drug culture. Jimmy knows he shouldn't get involved, but loyalty compels him to try to find out what's really going on.

As war looms over Britain and there is talk of gas masks and blackout, people are understandably jumpy and anxious. Stella Fry, who's been working in Vienna for a Jewish family, returns home with no job and a broken heart. She answers an advertisement from a famous mystery writer, Hubert Newman, who needs a manuscript typed. She takes on the job and is shocked the next day to learn of the writer's sudden, unexplained death.

Dr Ruth Galloway is called in by a team of archaeologists investigating coastal erosion on the north Norfolk coast, when they unearth six bodies buried at the foot of a cliff. They seem to have been there a very long time. Ruth must help discover how long, and how on earth they got there. Ruth and DCI Nelson are drawn together once more to unravel the past. Tests reveal that the bodies have lain, preserved in the sand, for sixty years. The mystery of their deaths stretches back to the Second World War, a time when Great Britain was threatened by invasion.

The strange and sinister world of cults is a source of endless fascination. Their secrets, rituals and shadowy hierarchies make for some of the most disturbing and shocking revelations in history. Most chilling of all is the fact that many of their followers forfeit all independence in order to carry out the often sadistic bidding of a mysterious master manipulator - and continue to defend their leader to this day.