When a thirteen-year-old boy is found floating in the river Thames with his throat slit, William Monk, superintendent of the Thames River Police, pursues a child pornographer who runs a sex ring using small boys. Monk's wife Hester and several memorable characters from Dark Assassin return in this richly complex story.

Local businessman Harry Exeter doesn't want the aid of the Thames River Police in tracking down the men who kidnapped his wife, Kate. He only asks them to help him navigate Jacob's Island, a creepy mass of decrepit buildings where he will hand off a large sum of money in exchange for her life. But when they arrive at the meeting place, Commander Monk and five of his best men are attacked from all sides, and Monk is left wondering who could have given...

As the story begins, a lonely woman vanishes while out on her morning run. Then a 22-year-old girl never returns from a walk. An old man disappears too. When fresh-faced policewoman Freya Graffham is assigned to the case, she runs the risk of getting too invested--too involved--in the action. Alongside the enigmatic detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrallier, she must unravel the mystery before events turn too gruesome. Written with intelligence,...

A particularly unpleasant murder, that of a very old woman in a housing project, rocks the town of Lafferton. The murderer has left a distinctive "sign" on the body and at the scene of crime. A couple of weeks later, a similar murder occurs, and a month or so later, so does another. Initial investigations discover that the mysterious "sign" left on the body was the calling card of a suspect who was charged with several murders in the northwest of...

Killing becomes a twisted team sport in this "smart, fast-paced procedural" from the award-winning author of Sleepyhead (Booklist). It was a vicious, calculated murder. The killer selected his victim at London's Euston station, followed her home on the tube, strangled her to death in front of her child. At the same time, killed in the same way, a second body is discovered at the back of King's Cross station. It is a grisly coincidence that eerily...

Angela Jackson, a young girl abducted from Whitebridge Corporation Park, has been missing for over twenty-four hours and, in the opinion of Dr Stevenson, the psychiatrist who Woodend turns to for advice, her kidnapper will first torture and then kill her. Woodend is aware of the damaging strains operating within his own team. Inspector Bob Rutter seems unable to control his infatuation with the unscrupulous journalist, Elizabeth Driver, while Sergeant...

Two Cases. One location. The first case, a girl gone missing, seems a decidedly local affair. The second, the return of a violent criminal who had fled the country, instantly attracts the interest of Scotland Yard and Detective Inspector David Brock. When he learns that his longtime nemesis, the amphetamine-juiced killer and thief known as "Upper" North, may have surfaced, Brock assembles his team and summons Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla. Their...

The Hard Detective is called upon to root out corruption in an elite London crime squad in this British mystery novel by the author of A Detective in Love. Detective Superintendent Harriet Martens earned her reputation by having more grit, brains, and dogged determination than any man on the Greater Birchester police force. But when she's called down to London to investigate accusations of bribery among the elite Maximum Crimes Squad, Harriet finds...

Detective Tom Thorne is forced to re-consider an old case when a grieving father takes one of Thorne's colleagues hostage and demands to know the truth about how his son died in prison from the man who put him away.