Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Women Sleuths

She is the perfect assassin. A Russian orphan, saved from the death penalty for the brutal revenge she took on her gangster father's killers. Ruthlessly trained. Given a new life. New names, new faces - whichever fits. Her paymasters call themselves The Twelve. But she knows nothing of them. Konstantin is the man who saved her and the one she answers to. She is Villanelle. Without conscience. Without guilt. Without weakness. Eve Polastri is the woman who hunts her. MI5, until one error of judgment costs her everything.

Reporter sleuth Poppy Denby is asked to investigate the mysterious death of an up-and-coming female scientist in an Oxford laboratory known as the Crystal Crypt. The official verdict is that Dr June Leighton died in a tragic accident, but Dr Leighton's lab assistant believes it was murder. However, when Poppy discovers that the colleague has spent time in a mental institution and has an unresolved murder in her own past, Poppy wonders if she is being misled. Then, another female academic is attacked, and Poppy herself becomes a target.

Poppy Denby, Arts and Entertainment Editor at The Daily Globe, covers an exhibition of Russian art, hosted by White Russian refugees, including members of the surviving exiled Romanov royal family. There is an armed robbery, a guard is shot and the largest Faberge egg in the collection is stolen. The egg itself is valuable, but more so are the secrets it contains within - secrets that could threaten major political powers. Suspects are aplenty, including the former keeper of the Faberge egg, a Russian Princess called Selena Romanova Yusopova.

Poppy Denby is intrigued when she is invited to attend the auction for the death mask of Nefertiti. Held on the country estate of Sir James Maddox, a famous explorer, the auction promises to be a controversial and newsworthy affair. Representatives from the world's leading museums are gathering to bid on the mask, which was discovered in Egypt. Poppy quickly sniffs out that the mask was not the only thing found that night: the underground chamber also contained a dead body.

No one thinks very much at all about carwash employee Davey Burnet, until one day he takes the wrong customer's motor for a ride. One kidnapping later, he and the carwash are officially part of Glasgow's criminal underworld, working for a psychopath who enjoys playing games like "Keep Yer Kneecaps" with any poor bastard who crosses him. Can Davey escape from the gang's clutches with his kneecaps and life intact? Perhaps this polis Ally McCoist who keeps nosing around the carwash could help. That's if she doesn't get herself killed first.

DCI Alison McCoist is back: newly promoted and even less popular. Chuck Gardner is the proud owner of both a confidential paper-shredding business and a serious betting habit. When Chuck finds some scandalous paperwork and McCoist investigates a rat-nibbled corpse under a flyover, they are both sucked into a deadly stramash of gangland wars and police corruption.

DI Shona Oliver’s past and present collide when James McGowan, her ex-classmate–now a famous actor–comes to the area to make a Robert Burns biopic. Shona is tasked with keeping him safe during filming on an isolated island in the Solway Firth, and her job is made much harder when a dead man wearing James’s coat is found on the beach in suspicious circumstances. It seems someone wanted James out of the picture.

Fall, 1947. New York City. Private Investigator Ida Davis has been called to New York by her old partner, Michael Talbot, to investigate a brutal killing spree in a Harlem flophouse that has left four people dead. But as they delve deeper into the case, Ida and Michael realize the murders are part of a larger conspiracy that stretches further than they ever could have imagined. Meanwhile, Ida’s childhood friend, Louis Armstrong, is at his lowest ebb.

Mrs Cornelia van Doorn, a wealthy South African widow, has leased Castle Gloaming intending to launch herself and her stepdaughter, Honor, into British society. The castle stands in rugged Welsh countryside, overlooking the foaming River Dee. Its hills are haunted by tales of mythic creatures, including the ghost-dog, Gelert. Its most recent owner, the eighth Earl of Barhaven, has died and Castle Gloaming needs money, which Mrs van Doorn appears to have in abundance.

DI Shona Oliver watches in horror as her fellow officer is pronounced dead. PC Hayley Campbell drowns during a triathlon race in the Solway Firth. The postmortem reveals drugs in Hayley's system, perhaps self-administered performance enhancers. But a puncture wound in the back of her wetsuit suggests something darker. Shona makes slow progress on the case. There are other demands on her attention. The death of her old boss brings Shona under scrutiny. And the drug-related death of a teen at a festival–one which Becca is attending–has Shona on-edge.

On a hot summer's afternoon, Michelle Wentworth enjoys a rare few hours of relaxation. Sunning herself by her pool, she sends her lazy teenage son to fetch her a drink. But instead of a refreshment, Michelle is given a nasty shock when shortly after her child's bludgeoned body is discovered on the doorstep.

The fifteenth title in Mandy Morton's delightful No. 2 Feline Detective Agency series.

It's the end of the summer season in the harbour town of Estepona. The holiday makers are heading home, leaving the British expats to reclaim their little corner of paradise. Among them is art restorer Astrid Swift's estranged father. She's sailed into town to reunite with him but has instead been tasked with catching an internet troll who's been threatening his wife online. Soon Astrid is entwined in the lives of these expats, from the boozy local heckler to the socially awkward beachcomber. And then she discovers a body in the bunker of the golf course.

Dreaded more than the Devil himself, cholera - the 'blue death' - spares no one. As fear grows across the city, Jem Flockhart and Will Quartermain are called to the bedside of a dead man, murdered, and with his throat torn out, in the back room of a brothel. When an innocent man is taken to Newgate, Jem and Will have until execution day to save him. The search for the identity of the corpse, and the killer, takes them to the gates of Blackwater Hall, home to the secretive, and corrupt Mortmain family.

London, 1846. Ramshackle and crumbling, St Saviour's Infirmary awaits demolition. Within its stinking wards and cramped corridors the doctors bicker and fight. Ambition, jealousy and hatred seethe beneath the veneer of professional courtesy. Always an outsider, and with a secret of her own to hide, apothecary Jem Flockhart observes everything, but says nothing. And then six tiny coffins are uncovered, inside each a handful of dried flowers and a bundle of moldy rags.

London, 1851. Restless and bored after a long hot summer, apothecary and poison expert Jem Flockhart decides to redesign her physic garden. But plans are thrown into confusion when a man's skeleton is unearthed from beneath the deadly nightshade, a smaller, child-like skeleton curled at its feet. The body bears evidence of knife wounds to its ribs and arms, and is accompanied by a collection of macabre objects: a brass bowl, a curious coin-like token, a set of tiny ivory sculls.

1941. Rupert and Adelaide Stride are raising their two daughters, Clare and Rosa, in the midst of war. When Rupert is called to fight, he dies on the beaches of Dunkirk, leaving his family to fend for themselves. 2023. Decades later, Clare and Rosa have retreated to the annex, trapped in the place where they were raised: Yew Tree House. When the rooms are put up for rent, Jack Harmon sees the perfect spot for a family holiday with his twins and detective Stella Darnell. But then the children discover a skeleton with a hole in its skull hidden in the brambles of a decommissioned WWII pill box.

Cordelia knows books. An addict-turned-dealer of classic paperbacks, when she's not spending her days combing the charity shops and jumble sales of suburban London for valuable collector's items, she's pining for the woman of her dreams and nimbly avoiding her landlord's demands for rent. The most elusive prize of all, her white whale, has surfaced—a set of magnificent, vintage Sleuth Hound crime novels. Gorgeous, and as rare as they come. Just one problem. They're not for sale. Still, that won't stop a resourceful woman like Cordelia…

Callum is lured to an isolated boathouse by an attractive older woman. When she gets him alone, she knocks him out with a single blow. Surrounded by hills and lakes, Still Waters is home to a close-knit community of wealthy retirees. It's an unlikely setting for violence. The police don't take Callum's disappearance seriously: he's 24-years-old, after all. But Callum's mother, a Still Waters resident, knows that something is very wrong. Then a body is discovered floating in the lake. Head bashed in. But it's not Callum. And someone tweets: Come out to play one last time, Alice.

It's high summer and, with the grisly events at Dorset's Sherborne Hall behind her, Astrid Swift sets sail for the Isle of Wight. She's been asked to value a collection of maritime art owned by a recently deceased millionaire. His surviving daughter has inherited the art along with the family's seafront mansion, The Needle's Eye, and wants to sell up. There are too many memories of her twin sister, a sailing prodigy who went missing at sea three years earlier.