Whiteout


Ragnar Jónasson - 2013
    Did she jump, or did something more sinister take place beneath the lighthouse and the abandoned old house on the remote rocky outcrop? With winter closing in and the snow falling relentlessly, Ari Thór Arason discovers that the victim's mother and young sister also lost their lives in this same spot, twenty-five years earlier. As the dark history and its secrets of the village are unveiled, and the death toll begins to rise, the Siglufjordur detectives must race against the clock to find the killer, before another tragedy takes place.Dark, chilling and complex, Whiteout is a haunting, atmospheric and stunningly plotted thriller from one of Iceland's bestselling crime writers.

And Justice for One: A novel of revenge


John Clarkson - 1992
    After the burial – on a whiskey-soaked night on the town – Jack’s brother disappears. When his brother is found comatose on the edge of death, Devlin resolves to avenge the wrong – no matter what it takes, no matter where the trail leads, even if he has to descend into the lawless underworld of New York City after-hours clubs where violence reigns, sex and drugs rule the night, and corruption kills. AND JUSTICE FOR ONE tells a dark, violent story set in 1980’s New York during a time when lawlessness and corruption pulsed intently under the city’s civilized veneer. Those times and places are gone now, but today’s readers can experience them in this intense, thoroughly-researched novel. This is the second edition of the acclaimed debut novel in the Jack Devlin “One” series, re-edited by the author, John Clarkson. The New York Times said AND JUSTICE FOR ONE "Packs a savage punch". Kirkus Reviews called it, "Dark, sexy, tough, and fast." Amazon reviewers called it: “The best action novel I have ever read!”, “Well-written, hot, furious, fun.”, “A helluva a good read, loaded with action.”If you missed AND JUSTICE FOR ONE the first time around, don’t miss it this time!Author's Note This novel was first published in 1992. I don't remember exactly when I began writing it. I do remember the two events that inspired the story. The first event occurred in 1976 when I visited an after-hours club in downtown Manhattan. The second event came in 1979. A six-year-old boy named Etan Patz disappeared on a spring morning in New York's SoHo district, igniting the worst fears of parents around the country. It happened during a two-block walk to his school bus stop. Somewhere in the back of my mind those two events brewed for years. What if someone you loved vanished? What would you do to find them? And what if it turned out that the mysterious, hidden world of after-hours clubs had something to do with the disappearance? At some point in the late eighties, those two events became the inspiration for my first novel. I hardly remember writing it. My sense is that it came out in a sudden rush. And selling it to a publisher happened quite fast. I landed an agent, George Wieser, very quickly. And it seems like George sold it to Crown with in a few weeks. Thank you, George! I do remember spending a very long time editing the book under the guidance of Peter St. John Ginna. He was patient with me. He made it a much better book. I still appreciate his efforts. In the original author's note, I also thanked my wife Ellen for her patience. A good deal of the research for And Justice for One started at four in the morning. All these years later Ellen is still patient with me, but more importantly,she still loves me, and I her. The others I thanked in the first edition were "the people who made it possible for me to enter the world of after-hours clubs, particularly a friend named Tommy Burns. When I asked how I should acknowledge him in the first edition, he said use T.B., 'Bartender to the Stars.'" Tommy rarely took anything very seriously. Obviously, all the after-hours clubs described in this book no longer exist. But all of them except for one which is a composite of three clubs, existed very much as described. It was a wild time in NYC. A time before cell phones and the internet and Uber. A time long gone. So, what prompted me to re-publish And Justice for One? Since its publication in 1992, I have persisted in writing crime thrillers, despite about a ten-year break after the first five. All five of those novels are out of print, but readers often ask me how they can get them. This is an attempt to make that easier. It has also provided me with the opportunity to polish the book. Nothing substantive, but lots of nips and tucks. This new edition is still what I consider a raw, rather impetuous novel from an unformed writer just starting out. Maybe that's the best kind. Hope you enjoy it.

The Hiding Game


Louise Phillips - 2019
    Within hours, he dies, and Abby is charged with his murder.Heather Baxter, her defense attorney, knows the case is not as clear cut as the Assistant District Attorney claims, and with enormous media attention on the trial, the stakes couldn't be higher.When Heather digs deeper, the shadows of her own past, and her mother's unsolved murder 25 years earlier, in the same small town, begin to unravel with deadly consequences, placing both Heather, and her young client in danger.Will Heather find the link between Abby and what happened to her mother all those years before? And will Abby walk free?

Ice Moon


Jan Costin Wagner - 2003
    It is the case of a woman smothered in her sleep—a curiously tranquil death, it seems, and one with no motive—and Kimmo becomes obsessed. The only clues are a half-empty bottle of red wine, two glasses, and a missing painting, a blurred landscape of no value. When a young man is found murdered in bed the next day in a hostel room with seven people asleep around him, Kimmo realizes a serial killer must be at work. As he struggles with the memory of his wife’s early death, Kimmo investigates the murders and tries to understand the mind of the perpetrator, who appears to be quiet, self-effacing, and affable—why then the urge to destroy? Set in Finland during the unnervingly long days of late summer near the top of the world, Ice Moon is an unsettling, poignant mystery.

The Gingerbread House


Carin Gerhardsen - 2008
    When criminal investigator Conny Sjöberg and the Hammarby police begin to suspect that there’s a link between the murders, Sjöberg goes completely cold. There is a killer out there whose motives are very personal, and who will not be deterred.The Gingerbread House by Carin Gerhardsen is the first in the Hammarby series, thrillers with taut, suspenseful plots and unexpected twists and turns. This haunting novel explores schoolyard bullying among young children and the effect it has on them when people look the other way. Many of the scenes in this book are self-experienced and based on Gerhardsen’s own childhood. Urban settings and strong portraits of authentic characters are crafted in depth and detail, insuring the books will linger in the reader’s mind long after the finish.The Gingerbread House is written in the same tradition as the Sjöwall / Wahlöö crime novels, and has been described as a book version of the tv series The Wire. It is not only published by the same publisher as Stieg Larsson’s The Millennium Trilogy, but by the same editorial team.

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End: The Story of a Crime


Leif G.W. Persson - 2002
    It seems to be a mundane suicide—at least that’s what the police choose to think. But the young man is American, not Swedish, and there are a couple of odd things about his room when they search it. . . . From these tiny beginnings, Leif GW Persson slowly begins to unravel a puzzle that gets larger and larger as it becomes more and more complex, until it sweeps us into a web of international espionage, backroom politics, greed, sheer incompetence, and the shoddy work of Sweden’s intelligence force that leads to the murder of the prime minister. The first novel in a dark and dazzling trilogy that has become the defining fictional account of the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme—an event that triggered the biggest criminal investigation in recorded history—Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End is a riveting insider’s combination of black satire, thriller, psychological drama, and police procedural by a writer universally acknowledged as Sweden’s leading criminologist.

The Crow Girl


Erik Axl Sund - 2016
    When two more bodies are found, it becomes clear that she is hunting a serial killer.With her career on the line, she turns to psychotherapist Sofia Zetterlund. Together, they uncover a chain of shocking events that began decades ago – but will it lead them to the murderer before someone else dies?

Faceless Killers


Henning Mankell - 1991
    And as if this didn’t present enough problems for the Ystad police Inspector Kurt Wallander, the dying woman’s last word is foreign, leaving the police the one tangible clue they have–and in the process, the match that could inflame Sweden’s already smoldering anti-immigrant sentiments. Unlike the situation with his ex-wife, his estranged daughter, or the beautiful but married young prosecuter who has piqued his interest, in this case, Wallander finds a problem he can handle. He quickly becomes obsessed with solving the crime before the already tense situation explodes, but soon comes to realize that it will require all his reserves of energy and dedication to solve.--back cover

Snow Angels


James Thompson - 2010
    Kaamos: Just before Christmas, the darkest time of the year in Lapland, above the Arctic Circle. The unrelenting darkness and extreme cold cause everyone to go just a little bit insane, whether or not they’ve just killed someone… A beautiful Somalian refugee-turned-actress is found murdered on a reindeer farm, gruesomely mutilated, a racial slur carved into her chest. Inspector Kari Vaara, head of the rural police force, is under great pressure not only to solve this crime himself, without the help of the big-city cops from Helsinki, but also to keep the potentially explosive case out of the news. Sufia Elmi had become a tabloid fixture, and her death—not to mention the awful way she met it—is sure to send shock waves across this insular, secretly racist country. Was this murder a hate crime, a sex crime—or both?Kari is dealing with culture shock at home, too. His wife, Kate, is a young American woman, newly pregnant with their first child. She doesn’t understand much about Finnish customs or the Finns themselves and is struggling to come to terms with her new home. Kari himself is haunted by his rough childhood and his past, and even as he tries to shape a new life with Kate, the past keeps biting at his heels: the rich man his ex-wife left him for years ago may be Sufia’s killer.

An Imperfect Killing


Luke Delaney - 2016
    Perfect for fans of Mark Billingham, Peter James and Stuart MacBride.A STAR HAS BEEN MURDEREDSue Evans is a beautiful and successful TV presenter – that is until she’s shot dead in the car park of her Southbank studios.IT’S CLEAR WHO THE KILLER ISDS Sean Corrigan and the Southwark Police Department are under pressure to solve the crime fast. Luckily they don’t have far to look – turns out Sue Evans had a stalker and all the evidence points to him.BUT THINGS AREN’T ALWAYS WHAT THEY SEEMCorrigan is not so sure – some things just aren’t adding up. With everyone convinced it’s case closed, he must take a risk to get to the truth. But can he be sure it’ll pay off?

In a Deep Dark Wood


Tina Pritchard - 2021
    She tells the police exactly what she saw, but their investigation doesn’t seem to make much headway.Fran tries to settle back into a normal life, but is tormented by guilt – was there something she could have done to save the boy? Fran can’t let it go and finds herself drawn to Tyler’s grieving mother, Mel, both finding some strange connection through this shared trauma.Then someone launches a terrifying campaign of intimidation against Fran and her husband, Laurie. Could it be the killers? Are they letting her know she had better be careful what she says? Who she sees? And why is Mel acting so strangely? Does she know more about her son’s death than she is saying?Fran can’t help herself – she needs to know the truth. But when she begins to dig, she uncovers the terrible secret of the deep, dark wood – a secret that will change her life forever.

Michael Robotham Omnibus : The Drowning Man; Bombproof


Michael Robotham - 2010
    Two fast-paced London-based thrillers in one volume.The Drowning Man 390 pagesBombproof 393 pages

Molls Like It Hot


Darren Dash - 2019
    Now he drives one of London's iconic black cabs. On a dark, wet night, he gives a lift to a wounded gangster, and everything changes from that point on. When the gangster gets in touch some time later, offering Eyrie a small fortune if he will take care of a mysterious young woman for a few nights, Eyrie is suspicious and hesitant. He can see trouble ahead, but the money will change his life for the better, so he reluctantly agrees to become a temporary guardian. But some deals should never be struck, and his charge turns out to be far more of a handful than he had ever anticipated. As twist follows twist and the bodies start to mount, Eyrie gets backed into a blood-soaked corner and must resort to desperate, inventive measures if he is to stand any chance of seeing his mission through and making it out of the weekend alive.Fast-paced, action-packed, gritty London-based noir, inspired by the likes of Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, with a large tip of the hat to the Billy Wilder movie Some Like It Hot.

I Can See in the Dark


Karin Fossum - 2010
         Riktor doesn't like the way the policeman comes straight into the house without knocking. He doesn't like the arrogant way he observes his home.The policeman doesn't tell him why he's there, and Riktor doesn't ask. Because he knows he's guilty. But it turns out that the policeman isn't looking for a missing person. He is accusing Riktor of something totally unexpected. Riktor doesn't have a clear conscience, but this is a crime he certainly didn't commit.

Danger Close


Cameron Curtis - 2021
    His name is Breed. Ex-Delta Force sniper Breed has spent most of his life at war and now he’s trying to make some time for peace. But when a veteran from his old unit is murdered in El Paso, Breed feels duty-bound to bring the killer to justice. A feeling that only grows stronger when his friend’s widow and son are also murdered. As he uses all his specialist skills to uncover the truth, Breed finds himself working with some unlikely allies - a devious CIA operative, and a determined Latina reporter. Together, they uncover a conspiracy to launch a massive attack on US soil.The terrorists are confident – they have powerful friends in the Mexican cartels and US law enforcement. But they have reckoned without one thing—Breed. Danger Close – the first in the stunning Breed action thriller series. Perfect for fans of Lee Child, Jason Kasper & David Archer.