I have been binge-reading J.D. Robb's In Death series, Concealed in Death is book #38, and it's the best plot yet. She is an excellent writer, her character development is exceptional, and it's fun to watch the characters grow and to learn new things about them with each book. And the manner in which she weaves her characters in and out of unique murder mystery after murder mystery is ingenious.
There is nothing unusual about billionaire Roarke supervising work on his new property - but when he takes a ceremonial swing at the first wall to be knocked down, he uncovers the body of a girl. And then another - in fact, twelve dead girls concealed behind a false wall.
Luckily for Roarke, he is married to the best police lieutenant in town. Eve Dallas is determined to find the killer - especially when she discovers that the building used to be a sanctuary for deliquent teenagers and the parallel with her past as a young runaway hits hard.
I’ve been reading mysteries since I “borrowed” my Grandpa’s Miss Marple’s as an elementary schooler. (And yes, my maiden name really IS Marple) And I’ve always been drawn to smart, competent women characters–even better if they’re funny. Women who do their own fighting and their own detecting and then hand the killer off to the cops with a smile and a great line. These women inspired me–and now I get to write a lady who at least belongs in the room with them!
I love a quirky small-town mystery with screwball comedy, and this one absolutely delivers–with a wonderful twist: the detective is Sheriff Arly Hanks, a woman forced to go home and start over after a meltdown in the big city.
I love Arly’s intelligence and spirit…and the fact that while she has a gun (and even a bullet or two), she doesn’t need more than her wits and the help of the crazy locals–including her own mother–to catch the killer. She’s my favorite funny, badass woman sleuth.
After a crossbow killing at a cheap roadside motel, Ozarks police chief Arly Hanks finds herself investigating her first murder case.
Her marriage over and career gone bust, Arly Hanks flees Manhattan for her hometown: Maggody, Arkansas. In a town this size, nothing much ever happens, so Arly figures she's safe as the town's first female chief of police-until the husband of one of the local barmaids escapes from state prison and heads for town. And that's not all. An EPA official with ties to polluting the local fishing hole has suddenly vanished off the face of the earth.
My wife suggested we try scuba diving while on holiday in Grand Cayman. We were already falling in love with the island, and the incredible experience underwater opened a whole new world to us. From that moment on, our yearly travels changed completely. Our destination choices were now based upon diving opportunities. That was twenty years ago. Today, I’m a certified divemaster with dives all over the US (including Hawaii), the Caribbean (including Cuba), Australia, and even Iceland. Throw in my sense of adventure as a former race car driver, motorcycle rider, and outdoor adventurer, and I had plenty of personal experiences to create the AJ Bailey series.
I’d already written several books in my AJ Bailey series when Girl beneath the Sea came out. With the might of a large publisher behind the book it hit best-seller lists and proved to me that I was writing books with a subject matter appealing to a broad audience.
Mayne’s protagonist, Sloan McPherson, is a police diver in Florida, who takes cases much farther than her role suggests. She’s an imperfect person with baggage and problems, but her gutsy determination drives the stories forward.
I dive into each new book in the series on the day they’re released.
For a Florida police diver, danger rises to the surface in an adventurous thriller by the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of The Naturalist.
Coming from scandalous Florida treasure hunters and drug smugglers, Sloan McPherson is forging her own path, for herself and for her daughter, out from under her family’s shadow. An auxiliary officer for Lauderdale Shores PD, she’s the go-to diver for evidence recovery. Then Sloan finds a fresh kill floating in a canal―a woman whose murky history collides with Sloan’s. Their troubling ties are making Sloan less a potential witness than a suspect.…
For almost thirty years, I worked as a cop in the back alleys, poorly lit laneways, and forgotten neighbourhoods in Toronto, the city where I grew up. Murder, mayhem, and sexual violations intended to demean, shame, and haunt the victims were all in a day’s work. Whether as a beat cop or a plainclothes detective, I dealt with good people who did bad things and bad people who followed their instincts. And now that I’m retired, I can take some of those experiences and turn them into crime fiction novels.
I really enjoyed the entire 87th Precinct series, wherein Ed McBain creates the American police procedural genre.
Cop Hater, the first in the series, is hard-hitting, fast-paced, filled with complex characters, and captures the essence of a cop’s soul while giving the reader a wonderful glimpse into the world of criminal investigations.
The murder of three detectives in quick succession in the 87th Precinct leads Detective Steve Carella on a search through the city's underside and ultimately into the murderer's sights
Growing up, most books seemed to feature strong and adventurous boys but rarely were the female characters cast in the same roles. Remember Anne in the Famous Five? Bless her. Even non-gendered animal characters in books were almost always called ‘he.’ And, as I look for books to empower my daughter, I’m so happy to see that things are moving in the right direction. Nowadays, I actively seek out books that feature strong female leads, which, thankfully, are many in the crime fiction world. These are just five of my favorites, but there are so many to choose from!
I was already a fan of Clare Mackintosh’s standalone thrillers, but when I found out she was launching a police procedural series, I was so excited! Set in Wales, this compelling book stars the complex, courageous character of DC Ffion Morgan as she tries to get to the bottom of who killed Rhys Lloyd during his New Year’s Eve party and dumped his body in the freezing lake.
I won't reveal much about the plot itself because I want you to experience the twists and turns for yourself. I want your heart to pound like it wants to escape your chest. I want you to lose hours of sleep because 'one more chapter' turned into twenty. You'll order the next book faster than I can say 'no comment.'
THE INSTANT SUNDAY TIMES TOP 5 BESTSELLER AND START OF A THRILLING NEW SERIES: AT MIDNIGHT, ONE OF THEM IS DEAD. BY MORNING, ALL OF THEM ARE SUSPECTS . . . 'Superb, with echoes of Agatha Christie' PATRICIA CORNWELL 'A dark delight of a murder mystery' JANICE HALLETT 'Mackintosh is just getting better and better' PETER JAMES 'A wickedly enjoyable reprise of the traditional crime novel' THE TIMES
On New Year's Eve, Rhys Lloyd has a house full of guests. His lakeside holiday homes are a success, and he's generously invited the village to drink champagne with their wealthy new…
I'm the author of two police procedural mysteries, a series that features a father/daughter detective team. I write in the traditional mystery genre for the simple reason that I'm a passionate reader of this genre, and always have been. I enjoy the structure of a whodunnit—the pacing, red herrings, clues, plot twists, reveals—and love constructing a multi-layered mystery that is both engaging and suspenseful. I’m a big fan of the masters of this genre: Agatha Christie, PD James, Dick Francis, and Val McDermid. I’m also an avid watcher of police procedural television series, and I’m especially drawn to the darker investigative stories you find in programs like The Killing, Mare of Easttown, and The Wire.
Former NYPD detective and single mom PI Laney Bird is flawed and imperfect, yet resourceful and determined—a nuanced protagonist that makes this book as much a character study as a mystery thriller. Far from the grisly crime cases she investigated in NYC, Laney settles into a small town in upstate New York hoping to raise her teenage son in a safe environment. When Laney’s neighbor Holly disappears, the plot takes off in unexpected directions as Laney scratches the surface of her friend’s seemingly normal life. Although this is a crime novel, at its heart, it’s about the lengths women will go to to protect their families.
NYPD detective turned small town PI Laney Bird is in a fight to save lives—including her own—when an explosion of deadly violence at a block party exposes the crimes simmering underneath her neighborhood’s peaceful façade.
A transplant to the upstate New York hamlet of Sylvan, all Laney wants is a quiet life for herself and her son. But things rarely remain calm in Laney’s life. When one neighbor, a Russian immigrant, is shot, and his Ukrainian wife disappears—along with Laney’s best friend—at her neighborhood summer block party, Laney will need all her skills as a PI to solve a mystery…
I cut my teeth loving the intrigue of the spy world. Days of old TV shows like Man from U.N.C.L.E. (the original not the remake). All the James Bond movies—old and new. As a child, I had a Man from U.N.C.L.E. spy kit, equipped with a miniature camera and all. It seemed only fitting that when I started writing, I stayed with what I loved. The espionage thriller genre has evolved over time to a more sophisticated, action-packed storyline…which is right up my alley.
I met Lee Child within a few weeks of this book being released. I had never read anything by Child and honestly, hadn't even heard of him prior to that meeting. I bought his book, got it autographed, and read it. His style was different from any other author I had read to that point. I liked his rogue character, Jack Reacher, and the way Child put that character into more and more peril as the story progressed. Having said all that, I had a character in my writing that, in many ways, resembled Reacher. Lee child's writing had a major influence in the crafting of my Gregg Kaplan character and series.
He watches a man cross a New York street and drive away in a Mercedes. The car contains $1 million of ransom money. Reacher's job is to make sure it all turns out right - money paid, family safely returned.
But Reacher is in the middle of a nasty little war where nothing is simple.
What started on a busy New York street explodes three thousand miles away, in the sleepy English countryside.
Reacher's going to have to do this one the hard way.
I’m a Canadian writer born in Northern Ireland. My first book, A Nice Place to Die, introduced Northern Ireland detective DS Ryan McBride. In 2019, A Nice Place to Die won the RWA Daphne du Maurier Award for Mainstream Mystery and Suspense, was shortlisted in the Crime Writers of Canada Awards in 2021, and was a 2023 Silver Falchion Award finalist. As for my choices, each of these fabulous, atmospheric mysteries has richly drawn settings inhabited by characters the reader comes to care deeply about. This brings a book alive for me — each has a wonderful, compelling cast of characters and a clever, complex plot.
Sarah Stewart Taylor is an American writer who has lived and studied in Ireland.
Her books offer complex, intelligent plots filled with flawed yet compelling characters. Maggie D'arcy, a detective in the North Shore of Long Island and divorced mother of a teenage girl, offers to go to Ireland to follow up on a phone call her uncle Danny received.
His daughter, and Maggie’s cousin, Erin, has been missing for twenty-three years, since disappearing on a hike in the Wicklow mountains. Back then, Erin went to Dublin to try and find her, and became involved in the initial enquiry. Now the Irish police have found something, a buried scarf they believe belonged to Erin. And another girl has gone missing.
The settings are finely-drawn––you can feel the rain and smell the peat fires. A beautifully written novel, not to be missed. That rarest of treats, a literary mystery.
Twenty-three years ago, Maggie D'arcy's family received a call from the Dublin police. Her cousin Erin has been missing for several days. Maggie herself spent weeks in Ireland, trying to track Erin's movements, working beside the police. But it was to no avail: no trace of her was ever found.
The experience inspired Maggie to become a cop. Now, back on Long Island, more than 20 years have passed. Maggie is a detective and a divorced mother of a teenager. When the Gardai call to say that Erin's scarf has been found and another young woman has gone missing, Maggie…
I love to read about strong, independent, imperfect women who are capable of getting themselves out of their own messes. That's why my female protagonists are strong, independent, imperfect women who don't need a man to save them.
Detective Renée Ballard is a woman I hate to love. She sleeps during the day in a tent on the beach–who needs a solid roof over your head when you’re working graveyard for the L.A.P.D.–and occasionally shags the lifeguard. She is a loner, super smart, super tough, touchy, relentlessly driven, bitchy. What’s not to like?
This book got pretty scary. I like to be scared, and there are three more in the series.
In this first installment of the Renée Ballard series, #1 bestselling author Michael Connelly introduces a "complicated and driven" young detective fighting to prove herself on the LAPD's toughest beat (The New York Times). Renée Ballard works the midnight shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing few, as each morning she turns everything over to the daytime units. It's a frustrating job for a once up-and-coming detective, but it's no accident. She's been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor. But one night Ballard catches two assignments she doesn't want to part…
Born and raised in New York City, my plans to become an artist got sidetracked by an interest in psychology. While in school, I graduated college, majoring in Fine Arts and Psychology, combining my two interests. I continued my education as a Graphic Designer at The School of Visual Arts. I worked as a freelance graphic artist for a while before starting a career in the creative arts therapies. While I enjoy a dark, brooding, suspenseful mystery, sometimes I need a little humor to round out those dark edges. Despite some bad things happening in the world, most people do silly, goofy, and often stupid things and you have to laugh.
Though David Handler’s The Cold Blue Blood plays out much like a traditional whodunit, it has a dash of East Coast humor. The Berger and Mitry Mysteries have been one of my favorites for years. Handler’s strong descriptive style, unique characters, and colorful book titles always had me searching for the next installment. Handler’s main character, Mitch Berger, a New York City film critic, plays the perfect fish out of water, now living on a wealthy private island called Big Sister. A dead body in his garden introduces him to his other partner in crime, Lieutenant Desiree Mitry. This odd couple is both charming and disarming as they sleuth through the snobs of Big Sister.
Mitch Berger, a top film critic with a major New York newspaper at a surprisingly young age, has become almost a recluse since his wife died one year ago. He spends his time secluded in his apartment or in the dark recesses of a screening room. Although he continues to dazzle moviegoers and the film elite with his criticisms, his editor and good friend is alarmed about him. As a scheme to pull him out of the doldrums of his grief, she gives him a non-film assignment - to do a color story on the wealthy and social homeowners on…
