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

Jack Parker knows all too well how treacherous life can be. His parents did not survive a smallpox epidemic. His grandfather was murdered. Now his sister Lula has been kidnapped by a bank robber. Alongside bounty hunter Shorty, an eloquent dwarf with a chip on his shoulder, and Eustace, the grave-digging son of an ex-slave, Jack sets off to rescue Lula. In turn-of-the-century Texas, that quest is likely to turn dangerous.

Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn't remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Sometimes her home is unrecognizable - or her daughter Helen seems a total stranger. But there's one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her so. And no matter who tells her to stop going on about it, to leave it alone, to shut up, Maud will get to the bottom of it. Because somewhere in Maud's damaged mind lies the answer to an unsolved seventy-year-old mystery....

At first the rules were simple: quarantine the city and let the plague die. So men and women closed their doors and lived in lockdown, fighting for survival against a disease as contagious and destructive as the Black Death. A disease for which there was no known cure. But the plague did not die. And so, at lunchtime on a Friday afternoon, the president announces the new rules. Every American should take up arms to protect the disease-free zones. Anyone attempting to leave the plague-zone must be shot.

Two weeks in a boathouse on the edge of peaceful Lake Orta, Italy is exactly what Ginny and Adam Trustlove need. But twenty-four hours later, the silence is broken when the Sale family arrives. It doesn't take long for Ginny and Adam to be drawn in, especially when the teenage Pippi introduces her beguiling new friend Zach. Not one of them suspects that his arrival in their lives might be anything other than accidental...

It started with the judge. He was about to sentence five of Cork's most notorious criminals. But his body has just turned up, beaten and broken, on an isolated road in his burned-out car. Now four members of a rival gang have been shot, and in retaliation three civilians have been blown up. To Katie's horror, Cork is becoming a gang battleground like Dublin. Can Katie save the city? Can she save herself?

FBI Agent Peter Sutherland waits in the White House Situation Room. He monitors an emergency line for calls that might never come. Then the phone rings. A terrified young woman says two people have been murdered and the killer might still be in the house with her. One of the victims gave her this phone number with urgent instructions: "Tell them OSPREY was right. It's happening." The call thrusts Peter into the heart of a conspiracy years in the making. There's a Russian mole in the U.S. government and Peter must uncover who it is.

Harper Connelly has a strange job: she finds dead people. She can sense the final location of a person who's passed, and share their very last moment. Traveling with her step-brother Tolliver as manager and sometime-bodyguard, she's become an expert at getting in, getting paid, and getting out fast. Because for the living it's always urgent—even if the dead can wait forever.

London, October 1968. As Beatles fans encamp outside Abbey Road Studios up the road, the Marylebone CID is as much an old boys' club as it ever was: comfortably sexist, racially prejudiced and crawling with corruption. Detective Sergeant Cathal Breen is the pariah of the office, having just run out on a fellow officer held at knifepoint, when it's shaken up by the arrival of WPC Helen Tozer: awkward chatterbox, farmgirl, and the first woman to enter the murder unit - apart from the secretary.

Dublin's notorious Canal Killer is 10 years into his life sentence when a body is fished out of the Grand Canal. Detectives suspect a copycat is emulating the crimes, and they must turn to Ireland's most prolific serial killer for help. Will admits he has the information the cops need but will give it to only one person.... When Alison Smith gets the request from Dublin, she is pulled back to face the man she's worked so hard to forget.

In the middle of Cork, in the middle of the day, a fire crackles in a local dance studio. Thirteen women, all promising stars of Irish folk, die in the blaze, their young lives cut short by a tragic accident. But where others see tragedy, DCI Katie Maguire sees murder. This is not the first fire to sweep through Cork. And in one previous case, the victims were dead before the fire was started. As Katie Maguire investigates the strange, obsessive world of competitive Irish folk dancing, she must face her most chilling killer yet.

A few years back, Virgil investigated the corrupt - and, as it turned out, homicidal - local school board in Trippton, Minnesota. Now the town's back in view with more alarming news: a woman's been found frozen in ice. There's a possibility that it might be connected to a high school class of 20 years ago, and so Virgil begins to dig into 20 years' worth of bad blood.

When one of his cats accidentally discovers a rare Victory Disc, the Vinyl Detective and his girlfriend, Nevada, are whisked into the world of big band swing music and a mystery that began during the Second World War. Hired to track down the rest of the highly sought-after recordings of the Flare Path Orchestra, our hero will discover that the battles of the last world war aren’t over yet. And if all this sounds simple, it’s only because we haven’t mentioned drive-by shootings, murderous neo-Nazis, or that slight case of being buried alive....

When Max I Versson, codirector of a small firm of freelance bodyguards, is introduced to North London nightclub owner Roy Fowler, he immediately senses that the man is trouble. Fowler wants security for a meeting with a group of businessmen who want to buy his nightclub. Five grand for a couple of hours' work is too tempting to turn down, so Iversson - against his better judgment - takes the work....

Clete Purcel—private investigator, ex-member of the New Orleans Police Department, and war veteran with a hard shell and just a few soft spots—is Dave Robicheaux's longtime friend and partner in detective work. But he has a troubled past. When Clete leaves his car at the local car wash, only to return to find it ransacked by a group of thugs tied to the drug trade from Mexican cartels to Louisiana, it feels personal—his grandniece died of a fentanyl overdose, and his fists curl when he thinks of the dealers who sold it.

When Van Shaw receives a distress call from his fellow Afghan War veteran, Leo Pak, he has to leave the urban hazards of Seattle to head far south to a town called Broken Ridge, deep in the wild heart of rural Oregon. Leo faces charges of murdering a local gun dealer, and while Van doesn't doubt his friend's innocence, he knows he faces conviction. As Van starts his own covert investigations, the small town is suddenly awash with Army Ranger veterans, converging for a raucous annual rally.

Wyatt Gillette, a cyber genius who's never used his phenomenal talent for evil, is sitting in a California jail doing time for a few harmless computer capers when he gets a temporary reprieve - a chance to help the Computer Crimes Unit of the state police catch a super hacker called Phate who's using his ingenious program, Trapdoor, to lure innocent victims to their death by infiltrating their computers.

A trusted colleague and friend. A mother. A wife. Neve Connolly is all these things. She has also made mistakes: some small, some unconsciously done, some large, some deliberate. She is only human, after all. But now one mistake is spiralling out of control, and Neve is bringing those around her into immense danger. She can’t tell the truth. So how far is she prepared to go to protect those she loves? And who does she really know? And who can she trust? A liar. A cheat. A threat. Neve Connolly is all these things. Could she be a murderer?

Fall, 1947. New York City. Private Investigator Ida Davis has been called to New York by her old partner, Michael Talbot, to investigate a brutal killing spree in a Harlem flophouse that has left four people dead. But as they delve deeper into the case, Ida and Michael realize the murders are part of a larger conspiracy that stretches further than they ever could have imagined. Meanwhile, Ida’s childhood friend, Louis Armstrong, is at his lowest ebb.

January 1829: Cuts in the army mean that Matthew Hervey’s Dragoons are to be reduced to a single squadron. With his long-term plans in disarray, Hervey undertakes a six-month assignment as an observer with the Russian army. Soon Hervey and his faithful groom, Private Johnson, are sailing north to St Petersburg, and on to the Eastern Balkans, seat of the ferocious war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. For Hervey, the stakes have never been higher - or more personal.

Cullrothes, in the Scottish Highlands, where Innes hides a terrible secret from his girlfriend, Alice, a gorgeous, cheating, lying schoolteacher. In the same village, Donald is the aggressive distillery owner, who floods the country with narcotics alongside his single malt; when his son goes missing, he becomes haunted by an anonymous American investor intent on purchasing the Cullrothes Distillery by any means necessary. Schoolgirl Jessie is trying to get the grades to escape to the mainland, while Grandpa counts the days left in his life.