Amateur Sleuth Suspense

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved killings. But when a local property developer shows up dead, 'The Thursday Murder Club' finds themselves in the middle of their first live case. The four friends, Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron, might be octogenarians, but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves. Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer, before it's too late?

Tough and demanding LAPD Detective Kate Delafield is the leader of the investigation into a high-rise office building murder. The case is intriguing but routine - until Kate interviews the only witness, Ellen O'Neil. When Ellen O'Neil took her new job over the objections of her lover, she wasn't expecting to become embroiled in murder. The curiosity that Kate Delafield rouses is equally unexpected. But it is never far from Ellen's mind that she is merely a name on an interview sheet to the tight-lipped detective.

When Holly White's fiancé cancels their Christmas Eve wedding with less than two weeks to go, Holly heads home with a broken heart. Lucky for her, home in historic Mistletoe, Maine is magical during Christmastime - exactly what the doctor prescribed. Except her plan to drown her troubles in peppermints and snickerdoodles is upended when local grouch and president of the Mistletoe Historical Society, Margaret Fenwick, is bludgeoned and left in the sleigh display at Reindeer Games, Holly's family tree farm.

Cordelia knows books. An addict-turned-dealer of classic paperbacks, when she's not spending her days combing the charity shops and jumble sales of suburban London for valuable collector's items, she's pining for the woman of her dreams and nimbly avoiding her landlord's demands for rent. The most elusive prize of all, her white whale, has surfaced—a set of magnificent, vintage Sleuth Hound crime novels. Gorgeous, and as rare as they come. Just one problem. They're not for sale. Still, that won't stop a resourceful woman like Cordelia…

When a well-known British TV historian, Marmaduke Godolphin, is found murdered in the canals of Venice during carnival, stabbed by a stiletto blade, the Venetian police are eager to have the case solved and cleared up within a day—murder is bad for tourism! The police recruit the help of retired archivist, Arnold Clover. Godolphin had hired his services on arriving in Venice to help sort through some historical papers of note. These dusty documents may contain previously unknown information about the assassination of the murderer, Lorenzino de' Medici, 500 years previously.

Fourteen-year-old Mona isn't like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can't control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter, and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt's bakery making gingerbread men dance. But Mona's life is turned upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona's city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target. And in an embattled city suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona's worries.

It is an ordinary Thursday, and things should finally be returning to normal. Except trouble is never far away where the Thursday Murder Club are concerned. A local news legend is on the hunt for a sensational headline, and soon the gang are hot on the trail of two murders, ten years apart. To make matters worse, a new nemesis pays Elizabeth a visit, presenting her with a deadly mission: kill or be killed.

It's the following Thursday. Elizabeth has received a letter from an old colleague, a man with whom she has a long history. He's made a big mistake, and he needs her help. His story involves stolen diamonds, a violent mobster and a very real threat to his life. As bodies start piling up, Elizabeth enlists Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron in the hunt for a ruthless murderer. And if they find the diamonds, too? Well, wouldn't that be a bonus? But this time, they are up against an enemy who wouldn't bat an eyelid at knocking off four septuagenarians.

When editor Susan Ryeland is given the tattered manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has little idea it will change her life. She's worked with the revered crime writer for years, and his detective, Atticus Pund, is renowned for solving crimes in the sleepy English villages of the 1950s. As Susan knows only too well, vintage crime sells handsomely. It's just a shame that it means dealing with an author like Alan Conway.... But Conway's latest tale of murder at Pye Hall is not quite what it seems.

She is freelancing for Causton Books, where she is asked to work on a ‘continuation’ novel , Pund’s Last Case, by a young author, Eliot Crace. Susan is surprised: Eliot Crace is the grandson of one of the most well known children’s authors ever, Marian Crace. Rather doubtfully, Susan starts to read the opening chapters, finding to her relief that Pund’s Last Case is actually pretty good. Set in the South of France, it revolves around the mysterious death of Lady Margaret Chalfont who, though mortally ill, is poisoned – perhaps by a member of her own family. But why? And who did it?

An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing. As the gang springs into action they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home. With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die?

College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same. Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran-and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.

An anonymous letter arrives at the offices of the Clarendon English Dictionary containing a challenge for the team of lexicographers working there. It's clear that's it's not the usual run-of-the-mill, eccentric enquiry. The letter hints at secrets, lies and a year. 2010. For Martha Thornhill, the new senior editor, that year can mean only one thing: the summer her brilliant, beautiful older sister Charlie went missing.

Twenty years ago at summer camp, Paul Copeland's sister died in the woods, the alleged victim of a serial killer. Her body was never found. Now, Paul is the prosecutor for Essex County, New Jersey, immersed in one of the biggest cases of his career - a case that will change everything he believes about the past...and the truth.

Rampton Farm, Northumberland, has always been a gloomy, godforsaken place. Now it’s earmarked for demolition—to make way for just another tawdry amusement park. It will be progress, and nothing can stand in the way—except perhaps Arnold Landon, the Planning Officer who must glean the lie of the land.

Recently engaged and deeply ensconced in her third year of surgical residency in Chicago, Emily Hartford gets a shock when she is called home to Freeport, Michigan, the small town she fled a decade ago after the death of her mother. Her estranged father, the local medical examiner, has had a massive heart attack. At the hospital, she finds her father in near total denial of the seriousness of his condition. He insists that the best thing Emily can do to help him is to take on the autopsy of a senator's teen daughter whose sudden, unexplained death has just rocked the sleepy town.

When Lily returns home to her aunt's manor house, she discovers that in order to inherit, she and her estranged cousins must stay together over the Christmas week and take part in a family tradition: the annual treasure hunt. But as they are drawn deeper into the game, the clues seem to point not to the deeds to the manor house, but to the key to a 20-year-old mystery: what really happened to Lily's mother? As a snowstorm cuts them off from the village, it becomes apparent that the game has turned deadly and that Lily is fighting for more than just an inheritance.

Katherine Hamilton's goal in high school was to escape from her dead-end hometown of Asheboro, Maryland. Fifteen years later she's got a degree in hospitality management and a great job at a high-end boutique hotel in Baltimore. Until, that is, the hotel is acquired by a chain, and she's laid off. When Kate's high school best friend calls with a mysterious invitation to come talk with the town leaders of Asheboro, she agrees to make the trip, curious about where this new opportunity might lead.

I was dreading the Cunningham family reunion even before the first murder. Before the storm stranded us at the mountain resort. The thing is, us Cunninghams don't really get along. We've only got one thing in common: we've all killed someone. My brother, my step-sister, my wife, my father, my mother, my sister-in-law, my uncle, my step-father, my aunt. Even me. When they find the first body in the snow, it's clear that only a Cunningham could have committed the crime—and it's up to me to prove it. There are plenty of killers in my family. But only one murderer.

When acclaimed mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers first began compiling anthologies of the best crime stories in the 1920s and ’30s, the genre was in the flush of its first golden age. While it is hard to imagine today - after every possible mystery plot has been told, retold, subverted, and played straight again by hundreds of writers over nearly a century - in Sayers’s day there were still twists that had never been seen, and machinations of crime that would shock even jaded Jazz Age fans.