Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Mystery

London, 1758. Beatrice Scarlet has returned to London and found work at St Mary Magdalene's Refuge for fallen women. Beatrice enjoys the work and her apothecary skills are much needed. But when 12 girls sent to a factory in Clerkenwell disappear, Beatrice is uneasy. Their would-be benefactor claims they were witches, sacrificed by Satan for his demonic misdeeds. But Beatrice is sure something much darker than witchcraft is at play....

When notorious gangster "Fat Sam" Mahood is murdered, the chief suspect is arrested nearby. But he seems to have suffered a breakdown. Incarcerated in a mental institution, he's known only as the Man in the White Suit. The suspect remains an enigma until Nurse Brenda calls on Mystery Man, Belfast's finest mystery bookshop owner, to bring his powers of investigation to bear....

Charles Krogh thought he had left the intelligence world for good, but before long finds himself immersed back in the vast invisible game without rules, the game of deception and bluff...the game without which the world can never be safe...or at peace. Nicholas Reed, brutally murdered by a stone-cold KGB killer - what did he know? Marshal T. K. Golovanov, hero of the Soviet Union and one of the most powerful men in the world - why is he jeopardising the future of his country with a female agent?

If you found the person who brutally murdered a loved one, what would you do? Forgive and forget? Or take the law into your own hands? Detective Martin Murphy is the law and he's back with a vengeance.... Someone has started killing the killers - who just happen to have been under the surveillance of 'Confront', a support group for relatives of murder victims who believe that therapy conies through empowerment. Suspecting the group of revenge killings, Murphy goes undercover and joins them.

Detective Nic Costa finds himself a stranger in a strange land when he's sent to infiltrate the mob in a remote part of southern Italy. Roman police detective Nic Costa has been sent undercover to Italy's beautiful, remote Calabrian coast to bring in the head of the feared mob, the 'Ndrangheta, who has offered to turn state witness for reasons of his own. Hoping to reel in the biggest prize the state police have seen in years, the infamous Butcher of Palermo, Costa and his team are aware the stakes are high. But the constant deception is taking its toll....

When Arnold Clover is recruited by Lizzie Hawker to help her look into her family inheritance, he cannot begin to guess the journey he is about to embark on. Lizzie's mother, an Italian countess, disappeared thirty years ago, presumed dead. Her father, a famous, some say infamous, music promoter, has just died and now the family home Ca' Scacchi, a leaning palazzo in Dorsoduro, has fallen to her. When her mother vanished so too did a priceless painting, supposedly an erotic portrait of Lucrezia Borgia, which has captivated men for generations.

Glasgow's citizens are in a celebratory mood for the annual West End Festival parade. But beneath the jovial surface lurks something darker. A confused young woman is found wandering among the stilt walkers and jostling crowds, claiming to have been abducted by aliens. Before DCI Anderson and DI Costello can investigate further, a body is discovered, and it becomes horrifyingly clear that a depraved killer has taken advantage of the busiest day of the year to carry out a gruesomely macabre plan.

Abby enters the Maybridge Flower Show, never dreaming for one moment that she'll win the gold. Or an invitation to appear on telly, alongside gardening legend Daisy Dashwood! Some people say Daisy's a tiresome diva. But starry-eyed Abby can't wait for the cameras to start rolling. Until . . . Daisy staggers out on stage. Only to collapse at Abby's feet. Her demise might seem like a tragic accident—resulting from a cocktail of booze and hay-fever medicine. But Abby's not so sure.

When a mint copy of the final album by Valerian - England's great lost rock band of the 1960s - surfaces, all hell breaks loose. Finding this record triggers a chain of events culminating in our hero learning the true fate of the singer of Valerian, who died under equivocal circumstances just after...or was it just before the abduction of her two-year-old son? Along the way the Vinyl Detective finds out what happened to the missing child, and it wasn't what anyone expected - or wanted - to hear.

Meet Happy Doll. Hap to his friends. He's a LA private detective living a quiet life along with his beloved half-Chihuahua, half-terrier, George. He's getting by just fine When he's not walking George or sipping tequila, Hap works nights at the Thai Miracle Spa, protecting the women who work there from clients who won't take 'no' for an answer. Until he kills a man. Usually Doll avoids trouble by following his two basic rules: bark loudly and act first. But after a deadly fight with a customer, even he finds himself wildly out of his depth.

In a nursing home on the outskirts of Cork, an elderly nun lies dead. She has been suffocated. It looks like a mercy killing - until another sister from the same convent is found viciously murdered, floating in the Glashaboy river. Why would anyone want to kill them? As she investigates, DS Katie Maguire discovers a 50-year-old secret that just might lead her to the killer...if the killer doesn't find her first.

The Thames is London's most important yet neglected artery. When a young woman is found chained to a post in the tide, no one can understand how she came to be drowned there. That's only part of the problem. Bryant's deteriorating condition prevents him from handling the case. To make matters worse, May makes a fatal error of judgment that knocks him out of action.

In an adventure that's as twisting as the river, will there be anything left of the Peculiar Crimes Unit when it's over?

The life of secret agent James Bond has begun to fall into a pattern that threatens complacency…until the sunny afternoon when M is kidnapped. The action ricochets across the globe to a volcanic Greek island, where Colonel Sun Liang-tan of the People's Liberation Army of China collaborates with an ex-Nazi atrocity expert in a world-menacing conspiracy. Stripped of all professional aids, Bond faces, unarmed, the monstrous devices of Colonel Sun....

A dazzling mixture of crime, romance, magic and myth from the acclaimed author of The Psychology of Time Travel. The Kendrick family have been making world-famous dolls since the early 1800s. But their dolls aren't coveted for the craftmanship alone. Each one has a specific emotion laid on it by its creator. A magic that can make you feel bucolic bliss or consuming paranoia at a single touch. Though founded by sisters, now only men may know the secrets of the workshop.

Fear haunts the streets of London after the assassination of a protestant Prince, and the recurrence of the plague. Giordano Bruno suspects someone is following him, but on confronting his stalker, he realizes it is the woman he once loved – she is on the run, accused of murder. Bruno travels to Canterbury to help clear her name, instructed by Sir Francis Walsingham to also search for the assassin in the shadow of England’s holiest shrine…

September 1941. While on a delivery, young Freddie Hackett, a message runner for a government office, witnesses an argument that ends in murder. Crouching in the doorway of a bombed-out house, Freddie waits until the coast is clear. But when he arrives at the delivery address, he's shocked to come face to face with the killer. Dismissed by the police when he attempts to report the crime, Freddie goes in search of a woman he once met when delivering a message: Maisie Dobbs.

Dreaded more than the Devil himself, cholera - the 'blue death' - spares no one. As fear grows across the city, Jem Flockhart and Will Quartermain are called to the bedside of a dead man, murdered, and with his throat torn out, in the back room of a brothel. When an innocent man is taken to Newgate, Jem and Will have until execution day to save him. The search for the identity of the corpse, and the killer, takes them to the gates of Blackwater Hall, home to the secretive, and corrupt Mortmain family.

It's Saturday evening, 9th March 1566, and Mary, Queen of Scots, is six months pregnant. She's hosting a supper party. Outside, Edinburgh is bustling. It’s full of the great and the good and the idiot sons of the rich, here for a Parliament that will take Scotland by the shoulders and turn it from England to face Europe. Mary doesn't know that her palace is surrounded - that, right now, an army of men is creeping upstairs to her chamber. They're coming to murder David Rizzio, her friend and secretary, the handsome Italian man who is smiling across the table at her.

You see the people you work with every day, but what can't you see? Amira, Sarah, Paula, Ewan and Charlie have worked together for years - they know how each other likes their coffee, whose love life is a mess, whose children keep them up at night. But their comfortable routine life is suddenly shattered when an aggressive new boss walks in.... Now there's something chilling in the air. Who secretly hates everyone? Who is tortured by their past? Who is capable of murder?

AD 264 - The Roman Empire is torn in two. The latest blazing novel in the Warrior of Rome series. The western provinces - Gaul, Spain and Britain - have been seized; to the east, on the plains of northern Italy, armies muster. War is coming. Everyone must choose a side. Ballista must journey the Amber Road to the far north to Hyperborea, back to his original home and the people of his birth. Yet not all welcome Ballista’s return. Does treachery pose the greatest danger?