Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Crime Fiction

When writer Rob Fallon gets drunk one night and ends up joining his friend's girlfriend, Jenny, back at her apartment in London's West End, he's feeling guilty before anything's even happened. But guilt quickly turns to shock when a sequence of events put him in the centre of a mystery and a deadly race against time.

Twelve-year-old Carl Hunter has been snatched at gunpoint from his home on Jersey. He and his kidnapper have vanished without a trace. Enter Ben Hope, now working freelance to rescue kidnapped children. But as Ben begins his search for Carl, he soon discovers that nothing about this case is as it seems. Behind the mystery of the boy's disappearance lies a sinister secret that threatens to destroy anyone who comes into contact with it...

It's evening, you're back late from work - and the house is in darkness. You step inside, and the phone rings. You answer it - and your world turns upside down. Your 14-year-old daughter's been taken, and her kidnappers demand half a million pounds in cash. They give you 48 hours to raise the money, and warn you that if you call the police, she'll die. Trying desperately to remain calm, you realise that your husband - the man you married only two years previously - is also missing.

London, 1930. A headless corpse; an apparent suicide in a locked room; a man burned alive during an illusionist's show in front of thousands of people. Scotland Yard is baffled by the sequence of ghastly murders unfolding across the city, and at the centre of it all is mysterious heiress Rachel Savernake. Daughter of a grand judge, Rachel is as glamorous as she is elusive. Jacob Flint, a tenacious young journalist eager to cover the gruesome crimes, is drawn into Rachel's glittering world of wealth and power....

In the small Minnesota town of Deephaven, an entire family has been killed. There's something about the scene that pokes at Lucas's cop instincts - it looks a lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he's seen in drug killings sometimes. But this is an up-market town, and the husband was an executive at a big bank. It just doesn't seem to fit. Until it does. And where it leads Lucas will take him into the darkest nightmare of his life.

Cass is having a hard time since the night she saw the car in the woods and the woman who was killed. Since then she's been forgetting everything: where she left the car, if she took her pills, the alarm code, why she ordered a pram when she doesn't have a baby.... What she can't forget is the woman she might have saved, the terrible nagging guilt, the silent calls she's receiving and the feeling that someone's watching her.

Trouble is rising in Montana's Bitterroot Valley and only one man is willing to stop it.... Frank Riordan is waging a one-man campaign to shut down the local pulp mill that is polluting the air and devastating the environment; tensions are growing, and the only man who can help already has troubles of his own. Having served time for accidentally killing a man Iry Paret is making a fresh start on Frank's ranch, where he meets a dynamic and beautiful woman who will test the limits of Iry's loyalty to his friends.

When a brilliant young English doctor vanishes into the impenetrable forests of the northern Congo, intelligence chief Jack Milton sends a message to his godson, Luca Matthews, in the Himalayas, asking him to go to Africa and find Joshua. Reluctantly, Luca obeys; but he is no longer the man he once was. Meanwhile in Africa, brilliant pilot Beatrice (Bear) Makuru, also wants to brave the northern wilderness.

When Dave Robicheaux gets the call saying his ex-partner Clete Purcel is in jail for felony assault and resisting arrest, bailing him out is instinctive. After all, Clete is the man who saved Dave's life. But Clete's latest escapade isn't just worrying because it shows his demons are gaining the upper hand; it also brings some of those demons into Dave's life, in the most personal way possible...

Cracow, 1893. Thirty-eight-year-old Zofia Turbotyńska has assured her husband’s rise through the ranks to university professor and is now looking for something to fill her long days at home. To stave off the boredom and improve her social standing, she decides to organise a charity raffle. To recruit the requisite patronage of elderly aristocratic ladies, she visits Helcel House, a retirement home run by nuns.

In 1970, Harold Stamp, a retarded 20-year-old, was convicted on disputed evidence and a retracted confession of brutally murdering his grandmother. Less than three years later he is dead, driven to suicide by isolation and despair. Thirty years on, Jonathan Hughes, an anthropologist specialising in social stereotyping, comes across the case by accident. He finds alarming disparities in the evidence and has little doubt that Stamp's conviction was a terrible miscarriage of justice. But how far is Hughes prepared to go in the search for justice?

London, 1930s: Rachel Savernake has been invited to a private view of an art exhibition at a fashionable gallery. The artist, Damaris Gethin, known as 'the Queen of Surrealism', is debuting a show featuring live models pretending to be waxworks of famous killers. Before her welcoming speech, Damaris asks a haunting favour of the amateur sleuth: she wants Rachel to solve her murder. As Damaris takes to a stage set with a guillotine, the lights go out. There is a cry and the blade falls. Damaris has executed herself.

It's February, and Carnival time in Venice. Bright blue skies and freezing temperatures welcome forensic pathologist Teresa Lupo to the city. Teresa has taken time out from her job to find her beloved bohemian aunt Sofia who has mysteriously disappeared. There seem to be no clues as to her whereabouts, but a visit to Sofia's very strange apartment in the Dorsoduro confirms Teresa’s suspicions that all is not well....

The Sounds of Crime is an exclusive collection of five brand new short stories by some of the best crimewriters around. Using the theme of 'audio', this unique collection features brand new stories by Lawrence Block, Peter James, Val McDermid, Mark Billingham and Christopher Fowler.

Meet Detective Chief Inspector John Luther. He's a murder detective. He's brilliant; he's intense; he's instinctive. And yet there are rumours that DCI Luther is bad - not corrupt, but tormented. The first in a new series of novels featuring DCI John Luther takes us into Luther's past and into his mind. It is the story of the case that tore his personal and professional relationships apart, and propelled him over the precipice....

In the heart of the Cotswolds, a body is found, that of a teenage girl, probably local - somebody's daughter who went out one evening and didn't come back. It's not long before she is identified: 15-year-old Lynne Wills, a habitual, underage drinker at The Silver Bells pub who, on the night of her death, was seen leaving with an unknown man.

Reality TV star Buck Nance incites a riot in a bar and vanishes in the melee. His agent, Lane Coolman, has been accidentally taken hostage by two petty criminals who now think they can turn a quick profit by ransoming an LA talent agent.

The mystery of Buck’s disappearance draws in a range of characters from across the island, including a redheaded con artist named Merry who, using a razor blade and a high-speed car, has developed a signature way of luring in her victims.

As they blunder towards doom, Warlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson find themselves inconvenienced by a variety of eldritch beings. Christmas brings a goose that doesn't let being cooked slow it down; they meet an electricity demon and discover why being a redhead is even trickier than one might imagine; and Holmes attempts an Irish accent. And, naturally, Moriarty is hanging around...in some form or other.

When a University of Wyoming professor goes missing, authorities are stumped. That is, until Game Warden Joe Pickett makes two surprising discoveries in his district. First, Joe finds the professor's vehicle parked on a remote mountainside. Then he finds the professor's frozen and mutilated body. When he attempts to learn more, Joe's investigation is obstructed by Federal agents, extreme environmentalists, and Governor Colter Allen. Meanwhile, Joe's associate, falconer Nate Romanowski, is approached by a shadowy group of local militant activists who are gaining in power and influence.

Amsterdam is bursting at the seams and the police are out in force, struggling to manage the crowds. Brigadier Pieter Vos is on duty with his young assistant, Laura Bakker, when the first grenade hits. In the chaos a young girl wearing a pink jacket is kidnapped. But she isn't the daughter of an Amsterdam aristocrat as the terrorists first thought. What is the life of one immigrant child worth in the greater political game emerging?