During intermission at the famed La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy, a notoriously difficult and widely disliked German conductor is poisoned—and suspects abound. Guido Brunetti, a native Venetian, sets out to unravel the mystery behind the high-profile murder. To do so, he calls on his knowledge of Venice, its culture, and its dirty politics. Along the way, he finds the crime may have roots going back decades—and that revenge, corruption, and even Italian cuisine may play a role.

Miss Busby helped Major Heathcliff Lennox solve a series of murders at Bloxford in the Cotswolds. Now, she finds herself drawn into a new murder, but this time, it's just her, and she must rely on her sharp mind and sharper wits to catch a Cotswolds killer, along with a handsome police inspector and a reporter who's keen to make her mark.

Bruno is a former soldier who has embraced the pleasures and slow rhythms of country life - living in his restored shepherd's cottage; patronizing the weekly market; sparring with, and basically ignoring, the European Union bureaucrats from Brussels. He has a gun but never wears it; he has the power to arrest but never uses it. But then the murder of an elderly North African who fought in the French army changes everything and galvanizes Bruno's attention.

A reluctant ex-spy with demons of her own, Elinor finds herself facing down one of the most dangerous organized crime gangs in London, ultimately exposing corruption from Scotland Yard to the highest levels of government. The private, quiet “Miss White" as Elinor is known, lives in a village in rural Kent, England, and to her fellow villagers seems something of an enigma. Well she might, as Elinor occupies a "grace and favor" property, a rare privilege offered to faithful servants of the Crown for services to the nation.

The story opens with the apparently accidental drowning of a sixth form student in the Norfolk countryside. As a matter of routine, or so it seems, the case passes across the desk of Detective Sergeant Smith, recently returned to work after an internal investigation into another case that has led to tensions between officers at Kings Lake police headquarters. As an ex-DCI, Smith could have retired by now, and it is clear that some of his superiors wish that he would do so.

In North Devon, where two rivers converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his estranged father’s funeral takes place. On the day Matthew left the strict evangelical community he grew up in, he lost his family, too. Now, as he turns and walks away again, he receives a call from one of his team. A body has been found on the beach nearby: a man with a tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to death. The case calls Matthew back to the people and places of his past, as deadly secrets hidden at their hearts are revealed.

Maisie Dobbs got her start as a maid in an aristocratic London household when she was thirteen. Her employer, suffragette Lady Rowan Compton, soon became her patron, taking the remarkably bright youngster under her wing. Lady Rowan’s friend, Maurice Blanche, often retained as an investigator by the European elite, recognized Maisie’s intuitive gifts. The outbreak of war changed everything. Ten years after the Armistice, in the spring of 1929, Maisie sets out on her own as a private investigator, one who has learned that coincidences are meaningful, and truth elusive.

For most of the last hundred years, Biloxi was known for its beaches, resorts, and seafood industry. But it had a darker side. It was also notorious for corruption and vice, everything from gambling, prostitution, bootleg liquor, and drugs to contract killings. The vice was controlled by small cabal of mobsters, many of them rumored to be members of the Dixie Mafia.

Edinburgh, 1911: When Maud McIntyre and her lady’s maid, Daisy, form a detective agency, they never dream their first case will take place at a glamorous house in the Scottish Highlands. But when the duchess of Duddingston, concerned that a notorious jewelry thief will target her lavish weekend party, employs Maud to go undercover as a guest to find the culprit, the agency has its first case to solve....

Detective Sergeant Chris Waters got the call at 05.29 that July morning. This is it, said DCI Reeve, you'll be first there, it's all yours, you're the crime scene manager. Suddenly, after months of waiting and wondering, Waters finds himself in at the deep end, and alone at the scene of a puzzling murder. As the investigation proceeds, the detectives at Kings Lake Central find themselves visiting familiar places and talking to some familiar faces, while old enmities reappear in the incident room. Before this is over, Chris Waters will need to make a career-changing decision.

Ian Rutledge returns to his career at Scotland Yard after years fighting in the First World War. Unknown to his colleagues he is still suffering from shell shock, and is burdened with the guilt of having had executed a young soldier on the battlefield for refusing to fight. A jealous colleague has learned of his secret and has managed to have Rutledge assigned to a difficult case which could spell disaster for Rutledge whatever the outcome. A retired officer has been murdered, and Rutledge goes to investigate.

A week's holiday in a luxurious hotel is just what Scotland Yard's Superintendent Duncan Kincaid needs. But his vacation ends dramatically with the discovery of a dead body in the whirlpool bath. Despite a suspicious lack of cooperation from the local constabulary, Kincaid's keen sense of duty won't allow him to ignore the heinous crime, impelling him to send for his enthusiastic young assistant, Sergeant Gemma James. But the stakes are raised significantly when a second murder occurs....

Summertime—as the temperature rises, so does the potential for evil. From Cornwall to the French Riviera, whether against a background of Delphic temples or English country houses, Agatha Christie’s most famous characters solve complicated puzzles as the stakes heat up. Pull up a deckchair and enjoy plot twists and red herrings galore from the bestselling fiction writer of all time.

The daughter of a distinguished soldier, Bess Crawford follows in his patriotic footsteps, volunteering to serve her country as a nurse during the Great War. In 1916 she promises Lieutenant Arthur Graham that she will carry his dying request to a brother. When Bess arrives at the Graham house in Kent, Jonathan Graham listens to his brother's last wishes with surprising indifference.

In this prequel to the international best seller The Ruin, set 10 years prior, bright-eyed Carrie Ryan is at the very start of her career. When she has a hunch about an ongoing murder investigation, she knows it could be her only chance to prove herself and truly break into the “boys' club” of Dublin’s police force.

During intermission at the famed La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy, a notoriously difficult and widely disliked German conductor is poisoned—and suspects abound. Guido Brunetti, a native Venetian, sets out to unravel the mystery behind the high-profile murder. To do so, he calls on his knowledge of Venice, its culture, and its dirty politics. Along the way, he finds the crime may have roots going back decades—and that revenge, corruption, and even Italian cuisine may play a role.

Aleksander Granovsky has dedicated his life to exposing the brutality of the Russian penal system. In two days, he will be tried for the crime of smuggling essays to the West. It is a show trial, and there is no doubt he will be convicted and executed, yet before he dies, he intends to tell the truth one more time. But this is Moscow, where death is never heroic. While writing his final speech in his government flat, Granovsky is surprised by an assassin, who pierces his heart with the point of a rusty scythe.

Berlin, 1929. Detective Inspector Rath was a successful career officer in the Cologne Homicide Division before a shooting incident in which he inadvertently killed a man. He has been transferred to the vice squad in Berlin, a job he detests even though he finds a new friend in his boss, Chief Inspector Wolter. There is seething unrest in the city, and the Commissioner of Police has ordered the vice squad to ruthlessly enforce the ban on May Day demonstrations.

Smashed skull, snapped ribs, and a cloying smell of carrion. Leave the body for the hyenas to devour - no body, no case. But when Kalahari game rangers stumble on a human corpse midmeal, it turns out the murder wasn't perfect after all. Enough evidence is left to suggest foul play. Detective David "Kubu" Bengu of the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department is assigned to the case.

Pools of blood, scenes of carnage, signs of agonising death - who deals with the aftermath of violence once the bodies have been taken away? Judith Kepler has seen it all. She is a crime-scene specialist. She turns crime scenes back into habitable spaces. She is a cleaner. It is at the home of a woman who has been brutally murdered that she is suddenly confronted with her own past. The murder victim knew Judith's secret: as a child Judith was sent to an orphanage under mysterious circumstances - parentage unknown.

An unbearably tense novel of revenge, murder, bereavement and the destructive force of passion. The single-mother families of the isolated community under the shadow of the Pyderhorn, Bergen's greatest mountain, are being terrorised by a teenage gang. But teenage violence is nothing compared to what awaits detective Varg Veum when he gets to know the blue-eyed Wenche Andersen.

Berlin, between the two world wars. When an executive at the renowned Ufa film studios is found dead floating in his office bathtub, it falls to Nikolai Hoffner, a chief inspector in the Kriminalpolizei, to investigate. With the help of Fritz Lang (the German director) and Alby Pimm (leader of the most powerful crime syndicate in Berlin), Hoffner finds his case taking him beyond the world of film and into the far more treacherous landscape of Berlin's sex and drug trade.

Jan Reyna is a murder squad detective, British by adoption and choice, Faroese by birth and history. Called back to the remote Danish Faroe Islands when his father suffers a paralysing stroke, Reyna is forced to reexamine his decades-long rejection of the past and of his father in particular. But in this now-foreign country, whose language and customs he no longer understands, Reyna is also drawn into a rare Faroese murder case.

The first audiobook which appeared in Georges Simenon's famous Maigret series, in a gripping new translation by David Bellos.Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel's atmosphere could not assimilate. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn't have a moustache and he didn't wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted. He shaved every day and looked after his hands. But his frame was proletarian. He was a big, bony man.

Frieda Klein is a solitary, incisive psychotherapist who spends her sleepless nights walking along the ancient rivers that have been forced underground in modern London. She believes that the world is a messy, uncontrollable place. The abduction of five-year-old Matthew Farraday provokes a national outcry and a desperate police hunt. And when his face is splashed over the newspapers, Frieda cannot ignore the coincidence: one of her patients has been having dreams in which he has a hunger for just such a child.

Corporate auditor Sam Keller, careful to a fault, has decided to live it up for a change. And what better spot for business-class hedonism than the boomtown of Dubai, where resort islands materialize from open ocean, fortunes are made overnight, and skiers crisscross the snowy slopes of a shopping mall. But when a colleague is murdered during a night on the town, Sam soon finds himself waist-deep in a bewildering, lethal mix of mobsters, prostitutes, and crooked cops.

Twenty-six years ago, just before a series of brutal murders rocked the idyllic town of Bowers Inlet, Cassie Burke lost her family and nearly her own life to a transient befriended by her father. Back then, Cassie was a scared kid; now, she's a homicide cop. Back then, the suspect was caught and convicted; he died in prison. But now the killing has started again. And all signs indicate that the Bayside Strangler has come back for more.

Who exactly is Danziger? He's a writer of letters for illiterate immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side - "a steadfast practitioner of concealing and forgetting" for his clients, and perhaps for himself: He hints at a much worldlier past. What and whoever he really is or has been, he has a seemingly boundless knowledge of the city and its denizens. And he knows much more than the mere identity of the floating corpse.

One May evening in London, Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, is feeling good about the future as he sits down for a meal at a little Italian bistro. He strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterward. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents, through which Adam loses everything—home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, cell phone—never to get them back.

A small-time drug dealer is found battered to death on the outskirts of the Norwegian capital, Oslo. A young Dutchman, walking aimlessly in central Oslo covered in blood, is taken into custody but refuses to talk. When he is informed that the woman who discovered the body, Karen Borg, is a lawyer, he demands her as his defender, although her specialty is civil, not criminal, law. The young man is adamant: he will speak to Karen Borg, and to her alone.

During intermission at the famed La Fenice opera house in Venice, Italy, a notoriously difficult and widely disliked German conductor is poisoned—and suspects abound. Guido Brunetti, a native Venetian, sets out to unravel the mystery behind the high-profile murder. To do so, he calls on his knowledge of Venice, its culture, and its dirty politics. Along the way, he finds the crime may have roots going back decades—and that revenge, corruption, and even Italian cuisine may play a role.

Michael Sebastian thought that Curacao would be the perfect place to have a little fun in the sun - and between the sheets. So far no one has struck his interest - until Sam Anderson walks into the bar. With one look at his tense body and expensive suit, Michael knows that this is a man in need of release. And Michael is more than willing to lend a hand.

When John Rechy's explosive first novel appeared in 1963, it marked a radical departure in fiction, and gave voice to a subculture that had never before been revealed with such acuity. It earned comparisons to Genet and Kerouac, even as Rechy was personally attacked by scandalized reviewers. Nevertheless, the book became an international best seller, and 50 years later, it has become a classic. Bold and inventive in style, Rechy is unflinching in his portrayal of one hustling "youngman" and his search for self-knowledge.

Caterina Pellegrini is a native Venetian, and like so many of them, she’s had to leave home to pursue her career elsewhere, mostly abroad. With a doctorate in baroque opera from Vienna, she lands in Birmingham, England, as a research fellow and assistant professor. Birmingham, however, is no Venice, so when she gets word of a position back home, Caterina jumps at the opportunity. The job is an unusual one.

It is 1969 and Glasgow is in the grip of the worst winter in decades, yet it is something else that has Glaswegians on edge: a serial killer whose name alone is enough to make them tremble with fear. The Quaker has killed another victim, snatching a young woman from a nightclub and dumping her body like trash in the back of a cold-water tenement. He leaves no clues, and the investigation has led police down one blind alley after another.

This exclusive box set collection contains the first three books in the best-selling gay romance series, Spruce Texas!

Aimee Nicole Walker presents books 1-3 in the Zero Hour series. Contains mature themes.

Noah Bradford knows secrets that could get him killed, and staying in WITSEC seems like a good plan. What he didn't plan on is losing his heart to a man who is sworn to protect him. Battle scarred US Marshal Robert "Mac" Mackenzie has a job to do, and guaranteeing the safety of Noah Bradford is at the top of that list. Mac will do whatever it takes to keep Noah safe, even if it means walking away. Mac and Noah, brought together during extreme circumstances, have been separated by evil.

Vaughn O'Keefe has been part owner of the Hog's Den for years. Privy to plenty of Disciples of the Road business, he's never been more ruffled as when a new recruit named "Smoke" walks through the door. Something about the man gets his blood pumping, but he knows to keep his preferences under wraps around the club. "Smoke" Callahan has done a couple of rehab stints and is finally clean, thanks to help from the Disciples. He's on the right path and isn't about to get sidetracked, no matter how much the guy who manages the bar gets beneath his skin.

Smashed skull, snapped ribs, and a cloying smell of carrion. Leave the body for the hyenas to devour - no body, no case. But when Kalahari game rangers stumble on a human corpse midmeal, it turns out the murder wasn't perfect after all. Enough evidence is left to suggest foul play. Detective David "Kubu" Bengu of the Botswana Criminal Investigation Department is assigned to the case.