Book picks similar to
A Perfect Match by Jill McGown


mystery
mysteries
police-procedural
mystery-thriller

Never Look Back


Clare Donoghue - 2014
    He's waiting. He knows.Three women have been found brutally murdered in south London, the victims only feet away from help during each sadistic attack. And the killer is getting braver . . .Sarah Grainger is rapidly becoming too afraid to leave her house. Once an outgoing photographer, she knows that someone is watching her. A cryptic note brings everything into terrifying focus, but it’s the chilling phone calls that take the case to another level.DI Mike Lockyer heads up the regional murder squad. With three bodies on his watch, and a killer growing in confidence, he frantically tries to find the link between these seemingly isolated incidents. What he discovers will not only test him professionally but will throw his personal life into turmoil too.

The Merchant's House


Kate Ellis - 1998
    Then Wesley's old friend from university, archaeologist Neil Watson, unearths the bodies of a strangled young woman and a new-born baby on the site of a seventeenth century merchant's house: though luckily for the overstretched police force the skeletons are centuries old. But as the search for the missing child intensifies and the true identity of the body on the cliff path is established, Wesley begins to suspect a tragic link, spanning the centuries, between his investigations and Neil's: for motives of jealousy, sexual obsession and desperate longing are as old as time. And when the dark secret of the merchant's house is finally revealed, Wesley must act swiftly to avert a further tragedy.

Ice Blue


Emma Jameson - 2011
    With the exception of his chosen career, too sordid for his blue-blooded family to condone, his life has been safe and predictable. But then he meets Detective Sergeant Kate Wakefield — beautiful, willful, and nearly half his age. When Hetheridge saves the outspoken, impetuous young detective from getting the sack, siding with her against Scotland Yard's powerful male hierarchy, his cold, elegantly balanced world spins out of control. Summoned to London's fashionable Belgravia to investigate the brutal murder of a financier, Hetheridge must catch the killer while coping with his growing attraction to Kate, the reappearance of an old flame, and the secret that emerges from his own past.

The Killings at Badger's Drift


Caroline Graham - 1987
    But when the spinster dies suddenly, her best friend kicks up an unseemly fuss, loud enough to attract the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby. And when Barnaby and his eager-beaver deputy start poking around, they uncover a swamp of ugly scandals and long-suppressed resentments seething below the picture-postcard prettiness.

A Clubbable Woman


Reginald Hill - 1970
    After passing out on his bed for five hours, he comes downstairs to discover communication has been cut off forever - by a hole in the middle of her forehead. Down at the club, passions run high, on and off the field. This is a home game for Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel who knows all the players, male and female. But Sergent Peter Pascoe whose loyalties lie with another code has a few ideas of his own. This is the first appearance together on any field for Dalziel and Pascoe, and already we can feel that electricity of opposite but complementary skills which will take them into the topmost division

From Doon With Death


Ruth Rendell - 1964
    Razor-sharp dialogue. Plots that catch and hold like a noose. These are the hallmarks of crime legend Ruth Rendell. From Doon with Death, now in a striking new paperback edition, is her classic debut novel -- and the book that introduced one of the most popular sleuths of the twentieth century.There is nothing extraordinary about Margaret Parsons, a timid housewife in the quiet town of Kingsmarkham, a woman devoted to her garden, her kitchen, her husband. Except that Margaret Parsons is dead, brutally strangled, her body abandoned in the nearby woods. Who would kill someone with nothing to hide? Inspector Wexford, the formidable chief of police, feels baffled -- until he discovers Margaret's dark secret: a trove of rare books, each volume breathlessly inscribed by a passionate lover identified only as Doon. As Wexford delves deeper into both Mrs. Parsons’ past and the wary community circling round her memory like wolves, the case builds with relentless momentum to a surprise finale as clever as it is blindsiding. In From Doon with Death, Ruth Rendell instantly mastered the form that would become synonymous with her name. Chilling, richly characterized, and ingeniously constructed, this is psychological suspense at its very finest.

The Murder Wall


Mari Hannah - 2010
    Then the brutal killing of a man on Newcastle's Quayside gives Daniels another chance to get it right, and her first case as Senior Investigating Officer. When Daniels recognises the corpse, but fails to disclose the fact, her personal life swerves dangerously into her professional life. But much worse, she is now being watched. As Daniels steps closer to finding a killer, a killer is only a breath away from claiming his next victim

Death Wore White


Jim Kelly - 2008
    Harvey Ellis was trapped - stranded in a line of eight cars by a blizzard on a Norfolk coast road.At 8.15 p.m. Harvey Ellis was dead - viciously stabbed at the wheel of his truck.And his killer has achieved the impossible: striking without being seen, and without leaving a single footprint in the snow . . .For DI Peter Shaw and DS George Valentine it's only the start of an infuriating investigation. The crime scene is melting, the murderer has vanished, the witnesses are dropping like flies. And the body count is on the rise . . .

Songbird


Peter Grainger - 2019
    Then he stopped and took a few breaths. He could hear the two constables making arrangements before they separated, one saying he’d bring the other some tape from the car, and then it was just the summer morning quiet again.” 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, and another member of the CID team will find herself facing an unexpected challenge. And Smith? Gone but not forgotten? Surely, he would say, you cannot write me off with a worn out cliché like that…

A Share in Death


Deborah Crombie - 1993
    But the discovery of a body floating in the whirlpool bath ends Kincaid's vacation before it's begun. One of his new acquaintances at Followdale House is dead; another is a killer. Despite a distinct 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 dramatically when a second murder occurs, and Kincaid and James find themselves in a determined hunt for a fiendish felon who enjoys homicide a bit too much.

Death of a Cozy Writer


G.M. Malliet - 2008
    At an engagement dinner, he announces his secret marriage to beautiful Violet, once charged with her husband's murder. Within hours, eldest son and hated appointed heir Ruthven is found cleaved to death by a medieval mace. When Detective Chief Inspector St. Just arrives, a deadly calm goes beyond the usual English reserve. Soon Sir Adrian is found slumped over his writing desk – an ornate knife thrust into his heart. Using a Cornish brusqueness and brawn, can St. Just find the killer before another victim falls?

Talking to the Dead


Harry Bingham - 2012
    . . . At first, the murder scene appears sad, but not unusual: a young woman undone by drugs and prostitution, her six-year-old daughter dead alongside her. But then detectives find a strange piece of evidence in the squalid house: the platinum credit card of a very wealthy--and long dead--steel tycoon. What is a heroin-addicted hooker doing with the credit card of a well-known and powerful man who died months ago? This is the question that the most junior member of the investigative team, Detective Constable Fiona Griffiths, is assigned to answer.But D.C. Griffiths is no ordinary cop. She's earned a reputation at police headquarters in Cardiff, Wales, for being odd, for not picking up on social cues, for being a little overintense. And there's that gap in her past, the two-year hiatus that everyone assumes was a breakdown. But Fiona is a crack investigator, quick and intuitive. She is immediately drawn to the crime scene, and to the tragic face of the six-year-old girl, who she is certain has something to tell her . . . something that will break the case wide open.Ignoring orders and protocol, Fiona begins to explore far beyond the rich man's credit card and into the secrets of her seaside city. And when she uncovers another dead prostitute, Fiona knows that she's only begun to scratch the surface of a dark world of crime and murder. But the deeper she digs, the more danger she risks--not just from criminals and killers but from her own past . . . and the abyss that threatens to pull her back at any time.

Death in the Stocks


Georgette Heyer - 1935
    Superintendent Hannasyde's consummate powers of detection and solicitor Giles Carrington's amateur sleuthing are tested to their limits as they grapple with the Vereker family - a group of outrageously eccentric and corrupt suspects

The Crow Trap


Ann Cleeves - 1999
    Three women who, in some way or another, know the meaning of betrayal...For team leader Rachael Lambert the project is the perfect opportunity to rebuild her confidence after a double-betrayal by her lover and boss, Peter Kemp. Botanist Anne Preece, on the other hand, sees it as a chance to indulge in a little deception of her own. And then there is Grace Fulwell, a strange, uncommunicative young woman with plenty of her own secrets to hide...When Rachael arrives at the cottage, however, she is horrified to discover the body of her friend Bella Furness. Bella, it appears, has committed suicide - a verdict Rachael finds impossible to accept.Only when the next death occurs does a fourth woman enter the picture - the unconventional Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope, who must piece together the truth from these women's tangled lives...

Frost at Christmas


R.D. Wingfield - 1986
    Her mother, a pretty young prostitute, is desperate. Enter Detective Inspector Jack Frost, sloppy, scruffy and insubordinate. To help him investigate the case of the missing child, Frost has been assigned a new sidekick, the Chief Constable's nephew. Fresh to provincial Denton in an oversmart suit, Detective Constable Clive Barnard is an easy target for Frost's withering satire.Assisted and annoyed by Barnard, Frost, complete with a store of tasteless anecdotes to fit every occasion, proceeds with the investigation in typically unorthodox style. After he's consulted a local witch, Dead Man's Hollow yields up a skeleton. Frost finds himself drawn into an unsolved crime from the past and risks not only his career, but also his life.