Tap Into Your Inner Sleuth With These Dazzling Detective Novels

From mesmerizing mysteries to chilling crime fiction, discover your next detective story with this dazzling collection.

 

East Long Beach. The LAPD is barely keeping up with the neighborhood’s high crime rate. Murders go unsolved, lost children unrecovered. But someone from the neighborhood has taken it upon himself to help solve the cases the police can’t or won’t touch.

They call him IQ. He’s a loner and a high school dropout, his unassuming nature disguising a relentless determination and a fierce intelligence. He charges his clients whatever they can afford, which might be a set of tires or a homemade casserole. To get by, he’s forced to take on clients that can pay.

This time, it’s a rap mogul whose life is in danger. As Isaiah investigates, he encounters a vengeful ex-wife, a crew of notorious cutthroats, a monstrous attack dog, and a hit man who even other hit men say is a lunatic. The deeper Isaiah digs, the more far reaching and dangerous the case becomes.

Young Brawly Brown has traded in his family for The Clan of the First Men, a group rejecting white leadership and laws. Brown’s mom asks Easy to make sure her baby’s okay, and Easy promises to find him. His first day on the case, Easy comes face-to-face with a corpse, and before he knows it he is a murder suspect and in the middle of a police raid. Brawly Brown is clearly the kind of trouble most folks try to avoid. It takes everything Easy has just to stay alive as he explores a world filled with betrayals and predators like he never imagined.

Socrates Fortlow, an ex-convict forced to define his own morality in a lawless world, confronts wrongs that most people would rather ignore and comes face-to-face with the most dangerous emotion: hope. It has been nine years since his release from prison, and he still makes his home in a two-room shack in a Watts alley. But he has a girlfriend now, a steady job, and he is even caring for a pet, the two-legged dog he calls Killer. These responsibilities make finding the right path even harder – especially when the police make Socrates their first suspect in every crime within six blocks.–Book Jacket. “In each chapter of Walkin’ the Dog, Socrates challenges a different conundrum of modern life. In “Blue Lightning, ” he is offered a better-paying job but has to consider whether the extra pay is worth the freedom he would have to give up. In “Promise, ” he keeps a vow made long ago to a dying friend, and learns that a promise to one person can mean damage to another.

When LAPD cops Hollywood Nate and Bix Rumstead find themselves caught up with bombshell Margot Aziz, they think they’re just having some fun. But in Hollywood, nothing is ever what it seems. To them, Margot is a harmless socialite, stuck in the middle of an ugly divorce from the nefarious nightclub-owner Ali Aziz. What Nate and Bix don’t know is that Margot’s no helpless victim: the femme fatale is setting them both up. But Ms. Aziz isn’t the only one with a deadly plan.

Eighteen-year-old auto mechanic Sawyer Taft did not expect her estranged grandmother to show up at her apartment door and offer her a six-figure contract to participate in debutante season. And she definitely never imagined she would accept. But when she realizes that immersing herself in her grandmother’s “society” might mean discovering the answer to the biggest mystery of her life-her father’s identity-she signs on the dotted line and braces herself for a year of makeovers, big dresses, bigger egos, and a whole lot of bless your heart. The one thing she doesn’t expect to find is friendship, but as she’s drawn into a group of debutantes with scandalous, dangerous secrets of their own, Sawyer quickly discovers that her family isn’t the only mainstay of high society with skeletons in their closet. There are people in her grandmother’s glittering world who are not what they appear, and no one wants Sawyer poking her nose into the past. As she navigates the twisted relationships between her new friends and their powerful parents, Sawyer’s search for the truth about her own origins is just the beginning.

Believing that someone is trying to murder her, gorgeous Jane Wetherby asks Hamish Macbeth to spend Christmas with her and an exclusive group of friends at her Scottish island health farm. With a cold in his head and no place to go for the holidays, Hamish accepts her invitation. He thinks the lady is a bit daft, but, arriving on the lonely isle of Eileencraig, he feels a prickle of foreboding. The locals are openly threatening; the other guests, especially a terrible snob named Heather Todd, are barely civil. So when Heather meets an untimely end, Hamish knows he doesn’t have far to look for the culprit. The only snag in his investigation is that all the guests were in the house when Heather vanished. Now, as mysterious events abound on Eileencraig, Hamish must work through the holiday sniffles to find the killer-or else it will be a very miserable Christmas indeed . . .

Lustmord–the joy of murder. The terrifying concept seems apt for the brutal slaying of a beautiful young society wife dumped in the vast English Garden. Homicide inspector Axel Berg is horrified by the crime . . . and disturbed by the artful arrangement of the victim’s clothes and hair–a madman’s portrait of death.

Berg’s superiors demand quick answers and a quick arrest: a vagrant, the woman’s husband, anyone who can be demonized will do. When a second body is discovered, the city erupts into panic, the unrest fomented by the wild-eyed, hate-mongering Austrian Adolf Hitler and his Brownshirt party of young thugs.

Berg can trust no one as he relentlessly hunts a ruthless killer, dodging faceless enemies and back-alley intrigue, struggling to bring a fiend to justice before the country–and his life–veer straight into darkness.

It’s a long way from the island of Manhattan to the island resort where Preston Fareweather has his hedonistic hideout-avoiding the legal prosecutions of five embittered ex-wives and enjoying the attentions of the prettiest gold diggers who happen to come his way. A terrible human being, Preston makes the terrible mistake of getting friendly with an equally dyspeptic personality: a New York fence named Arnie Albright.

Arnie went to the island paradise to become a happier man. It worked. After a week with Preston, Arnie comes home to New York with a whole new attitude and a proposition for his associate John Dortmunder: a can’t miss, million-dollar robbery-of Preston’s nearly unguarded, art-filled Fifth Avenue penthouse.

But when Dortmunder and his clean-up crew get together to plan the heist, they quickly get distracted and suddenly a billionaire from Fifth Avenue and a would-be Tony Soprano from New Jersey have one thing in common: John Dortmunder is after them both at the same time . . . and disaster can’t be far behind.

No one can separate defense attorney Andy Carpenter from his golden retriever, Tara, who stands loyally beside him through every investigation, no matter how dangerous or puzzling-and he is about to be confronted with one of his most difficult cases yet.

When a cop’s body is found burned and decapitated, the last thing Andy expects is for a stranger to waltz into his office and confess to the crime. For the wisecracking millionaire attorney suffering from “lawyer’s block,” the case looks like a no-brainer, that is until the cops pick up another suspect: Andy’s lead P.I., Laurie Collins, who happens to be the love of his life. Soon Laurie’s case is looking bleak and Andy is becoming increasingly desperate. All he had wanted was a case to sink his teeth into. Now he gets one that’s a kick in the head . . . and the heart.

On a quiet August morning, Judge Deborah Knott’s father Kezzie makes a shocking discovery on a remote corner of his farm: the body of a man bludgeoned to death. Investigating this crime, Deborah’s husband, Sheriff’s Deputy Dwight Bryant, soon uncovers a long-simmering hostility between Kezzie and the slain man over a land dispute. The local newspaper implies that Deborah’s family may have had something to do with the murder-and that Dwight is dragging his feet on the case.

Meanwhile, Deborah is given a cigarette lighter that once belonged to her mother. The cryptic inscription inside rekindles Deborah’s curiosity about her parents’ past, and how they met. For years she has wondered how the daughter of a wealthy attorney could have married a widowed, semi-illiterate bootlegger, and this time she’s determined to find the answer.

But why are Deborah’s brothers so reluctant to talk about the dead man? Is the murder linked to Kezzie’s illegal whiskey business? And could his courtship of Deborah’s mother have something to do with the bad blood between the two families? Despite Deborah’s promise not to interfere in Dwight’s work, she cannot stop herself from doing everything she can to help clear her brothers and her father from suspicion . . .

Ostracized by his family after a botched case that led to the death of his baby cousin, Jeffrey, Frank was on a collision course with catastrophe. Now clean and clinging hard to sobriety, he’s barely eking out a living as a private investigator for a defense attorney—who also happens to be his ex-girlfriend. Frank passes the time—and tests himself—by robbing the houses of local dealers, taking their cash and flushing their drugs down the toilet. But when an old friend from his police days needs Frank’s help to prove he didn’t shoot an unarmed civilian, Frank is drawn back into the world of dirty cops and suspicious drug busts, running in the same circles that enabled his addiction those years ago.

Never one to play by the rules, Frank recruits a young man he nearly executed years before. Together—a good man trying not to go bad and a bad man trying to do good—detective and criminal charge headfirst into the D.C. drug wars. Neither may make it out.

Two kinds of cops find their way to Portland’s North Precinct: those who are sent there for punishment, and those who come for the action. Officer Hanson is the second kind, a veteran who survived the war in Vietnam only to decide he wanted to keep fighting at home. Hanson knows war, and in this battle for the Portland streets, he fights not for the law but for his own code of justice.

Yet Hanson can’t outrun his memories of another, warmer battleground. A past he thought he’d left behind, that now threatens to overshadow his future. An enemy, this time close to home, is prying into his war record. Pulling down the shields that protect the darkest moments of that fevered time. Until another piece of his past surfaces, and Hanson risks his career, his sanity–even his life–for honor.

A twenty-nine-year-old man lives alone in his Glasgow flat. The telephone rings; a casual conversation, but behind this a job offer. The clues are there if you know to look for them. He is an expert. A loner. Freelance. Another job is another job, but what if this organization wants more?

A meeting at a club. An offer. A target: Lewis Winter, a necessary sacrifice that will be only the first step in an all-out war between crime syndicates the likes of which hasn’t been seen for decades. It’s easy to kill a man. It’s hard to kill a man well. People who do it well know this. People who do it badly find out the hard way. The hard way has consequences.