Showing results for "The Simon" in Crime Fiction

This is collection of 18 crime stories with a diverse range of characters and scenarios, from guilt-ridden fraudsters to lovesick murderers.

July 2015, Sevenoaks. 12-year-old schoolgirl Alice Johnson went missing while doing her paper round, her bag found discarded on the pavement. At 08.00, she was spotted standing in heavy rain at the side of the busy by-pass. At 11.00, she was seen talking to the driver of a black car in Tonbridge. After that, nothing. Alice was never found. Nine years later the body of another schoolgirl, Joleen Price, is pulled from a nearby lake and a local man named Vince Burns detained. Convinced that Burns is guilty in both cases, SIO Dave Armstrong calls in the Finder.

A DI RYAN WILKINS MYSTERY A four-year-old girl goes missing in plain sight outside her nursery in Oxford, a middle-class, affluent area, her mother only a stones-throw away. Ryan Wilkins, one of the youngest ever Detective Inspectors in the Thames Valley force, dishonourably discharged three...

Recently divorced Cerys thought buying a luxury Tuscan villa would be the fresh start she so desperately needed. But a year later, she's struggling to move on from the pain of her past. Determined to make Villa Lucia a success, she's pinned all her hopes on this season's guests. Until one of them is found murdered in the villa's infinity pool. Now, as the police descend on the property, the secrets of her guests begin to unravel, and Cerys is forced to confront her own demons

Private investigator Atticus Priest is employed by a disgruntled ex-husband to dig up dirt on his estranged wife. But when she goes missing after swimming in the River Avon, Atticus uncovers a conspiracy between five lifelong friends that goes back years. The friends did something when they were younger that they're not proud of. It's something that would land them in a world of trouble if it ever came to light. Something they've been trying to bury ever since. But Atticus finds one secret and then the next.

Edgar Wallace was a bestselling author, journalist, playwright and film director, and the creator of King Kong. A prolific writer and celebrity superstar, he was thought to be responsible for a quarter of all new books read in Britain by the late 1920s. Presented here are full-cast adaptations of four of his classic crime novels, readings of four short detective stories, and vintage recording of Wallace reading one of his own stories. Tying them all together is linking commentary from Edgar Wallace: The Man Who Wrote Too Much?, a documentary celebration of his life.

In The Tower, the thrilling conclusion to Simon Toyne’s bestselling Sanctus trilogy, an ominous countdown has begun that some believe could be the first sign of an imminent global catastrophe. Toyne’s latest thriller opens at the NASA Control Center in Maryland where the center’s director...

“A talented new writer who instinctively grasps the broad rules of superior action thrillers and adapts them with pace, grace, humor, and a keen eye for cinematic effect.” —Daily Telegraph (London) “Toyne’s writing is stellar and downright fun. Get your Dan Brown game face on and step...

Detective Spencer O'Malley had met the girl, Kristina, only a day prior to her death. Nearly falling in love with her on this chance meeting, he learns more about her life through his investigation of her mysterious demise. Kristina and her friends, all children of privilege, were supposedly close. They played, studied and occasionally slept together. Despite this, there were many secrets hidden within their relationship, more than O'Malley could have imagined.

An inmate at Tonsgrove prison is murdered in her cell, but no one is willing to talk to the police. DI Gareth Williams is receiving pressure from above to solve the case – and quickly. Then, a local seventeen-year-old girl vanishes from her home. The close-knit community is shaken and they each have a different theory. Gareth knows that time is of the essence. With two major cases being investigated at the same time, the Beaumaris force is stretched thin. Frustrated at the lack of progress Gareth’s colleague and fiancée, DI Laura Hart, decides to take action: going undercover at the prison.

Callum and his three best friends are celebrating their eighteenth birthdays with an epic camping trip to the mysterious Llanddwyn Island, off the coast of Anglesey. Then Callum disappears, and the others return to the mainland in a state of shock. When his body is discovered, DI Laura Hart is brought in to investigate. Is the murder the work of the Fair Men, a pagan group with a dark history who still hold their ceremonies on the island? Or were the boys less tight-knit than they would have Laura believe?

The beautiful Isle of Anglesey has been rocked by the brutal murders of three female students at a local college. DI Laura Hart is called in to track down the murderer – who the papers have dubbed the Anglesey Ripper – before he strikes again. She quickly identifies a suspect but just as she is about to pounce, he slips through her fingers. Laura and the Beaumaris CID must pursue the serial killer across the island in an increasingly dangerous game of cat and mouse – but he’s always one step ahead of them. And soon, the hunters will become the hunted.

Two months since ex-Police Negotiator Laura Hart was forced back into action after her son’s kidnap, she has re-joined the force as a DI. On her first day, an anonymous tip-off leads to the discovery of a skeleton in a crumbling castle ruin near the seaside town of Beaumaris, Anglesey. Laura can’t wait to prove herself by solving the case and when the investigation leads her to MI5 and the Real IRA, she knows she’s on the trail of something truly explosive. But some people will do anything to stop their secrets coming out – as the rising body count shows.

An idle conversation on the merits of the glorious game with an old Etonian chum is just the excuse Blotto needs to put himself forward for a cricket tour to foreign climes...and so begins the next adventure for our intrepid duo, where the action takes them to India where, as everyone knows, the finest cricket players hail from - as well as the world's most skilled jewel thieves.

Steph spent months planning her perfect birthday celebration. Five days in an idyllic setting with her best friends. Long lazy lunches, crisp white wine by the pool and a climb up the beautiful Mont Ventoux. She couldn't wait. They’ve been there for each other through the good times and the bad. This was the break everyone needed. After their first night partying, they begin their hike. But as the lavender-scented air turns acrid from local wildfires, fierce winds whip up smoke–and tensions in the group. They become separated.

Forensics expert Laughton Rees hunts an unusually clever killer who appears to be staging murder scenes just for her in this twisty new psychological thriller by the bestselling author of the Sanctus trilogy. How do you catch a killer if the victim doesn’t exist? A glamorous woman is murdered...

When a prominent landowner goes missing, private investigator Atticus Priest is drawn into a web of secrets that stretch from the rolling fields of Wiltshire to the darkest corners of the past. The ancient estate of Brookmere—seat of the once-mighty Ainsley family—is crumbling, its future threatened by inheritance disputes, hidden debts, and buried scandal.

Private investigator, Dan Armstrong, lives and works in Florence and knows the world famous Ponte Vecchio well. Usually a magnet for tourists, on this occasion it is the scene of an unexplained death, and Dan finds himself involved in the intriguing case. Dan quickly discovers that the victim, an elderly jeweller, was every bit as hard as the diamonds he sold in his shop on the bridge. Few people liked him, not even his adult children, and his business dealings look murkier than the waters of the River Arno.

In the first months of 2020 there was a spate of murders of Black sex workers in northern cities. One of them was Ella Bailey, last seen talking to a punter in an alley in Sheffield city centre, and although no trace of her was ever found, the punter, Michael Godley, soon confessed to all three murders. Five years later, as another sex worker is murdered in the same district, the bag Ella had been carrying with her reappears, hanging on the door handles of a café, and a local vagrant claims to have seen Ella sitting on a bench in a churchyard near the site of the murder.

The two aristocratic siblings Blotto and Twinks are once again launched into another death-defying adventure, this time in the civil war-torn republic of Jalapeno, in Mexico. But how did they ever get to such a foreign and distant land in the first place? For Twinks it was an easy decision - to escape her mother's match-making attempts she sets out to visit her old friend, Begonia Guiteras, who lives in Jalapeno, which is fortuitously on the doorstep of an Aztec dig Twinks wants to work on.