Lifeless

Jessica Clarke had been set alight 20 years ago. Her attacker, quickly tracked down and eager to confess, is still in jail, his career as a hitman for North London gangs now well behind him. So who is harassing Carol Chamberlain, the arresting officer, and claiming that he is one who burned the girl?

Someone, a woman or somebody pretending to be a woman, is writing to convicted rapists in prison, befriending them and then brutally killing them when they are released. DI Tom Thorne must discover the link between these killings and a murder/suicide that took place twenty-five years before; a tragedy to which the only witnesses were two small children, now adults and nowhere to be found. How can you escape a past that will do a lot more than just catch up with you?

When a dead body is found in a North London flat, it seems like a straightforward domestic murder until a bloodstained sliver of X-ray is found clutched in the dead woman's fist - and it quickly becomes clear that this case is anything but ordinary. DI Thorne discovers that the victim's mother had herself been murdered 15 years before by infamous serial killer Raymond Garvey. The hunt to catch Garvey was one of the biggest in the history of the Met and ended with seven women dead.

In a vicious, calculated murder, a victim is selected at Euston Station, followed home, and strangled in front of her child. When a second body is discovered, killed in the same way at King's Cross station, DI Tom Thorne comes to a horrifying conclusion: this is not one killer, but two.

It's rare for a young woman to die from a stroke, and when three such deaths occur in short order it starts to look like an epidemic. Then a sharp pathologist notices traces of benzodiazepine in one of the victim's blood samples and just traceable damage to the ligaments in her neck, and their cause of death is changed from 'natural' to 'murder'.

Perfect strangers. A perfect holiday. The perfect murder.... Three couples meet around the pool on their Florida holiday and become fast friends. But on their last night, their perfect holiday takes a tragic twist: the teenage daughter of another holidaymaker goes missing, and her body is later found floating in the mangroves. When the shocked couples return home, they remain in contact, and over the course of three increasingly fraught dinner parties they come to know one another better.

Full of betrayal, deceit and suspense, Die of Shame is the spectacular new book from number-one best seller Mark Billingham - author of Time of Death and In the Dark, both soon to be major BBC series. Every Monday evening six people gather in a smart North London house to talk about addiction. There they share their deepest secrets: stories of lies, regret and, above all, shame. Then one of them is killed - and it's clear one of the circle was responsible.

It is London 2012 and Stratford in the East End is at the centre of the world. But next to the Olympic Park are some of the poorest and most crime-ridden streets in the city. PI Lee Arnold and his assistant, Mumtaz Hakim, run a detective agency in a community fraught with conflict and tension. Approached by a frightened woman, they start to investigate her stalker. But soon their enquiries turn in a far more sinister direction.

When an undercover police officer is killed and a deadly shipment of pure heroin hits land, it looks as though the operation to bring down Brighton's biggest drug dealer is compromised. But the investigation is in more trouble than either Detective Sergeant Minter or his boss, Tom Beckett, could ever imagine. Embarking on a bloody journey that will set him on a collision course with his team, Minter is pulled back into his own troubled past - to a childhood spent in care and the vicious murder of his closest friend.

The first in a new series by debut author Mark Lock, for fans of Mo Hayder, Belinda Bauer and Mark Billingham. Detective Inspector Hal Luchewski's life is complicated. The stress of his job is getting to him - usually in the form of hard liquor. He's still living in his dead father's shadow, his relationship with his daughter is strained and his love life is complex, to say the least.... Although nearly 40, Hal's still reconciling himself to the fact he's gay.

First a shooting, then a grisly discovery on the common.... Police partners, D.I. Calladine and D.S. Ruth Bayliss race against time to track down a killer before the whole area erupts in violence. Their boss thinks it's all down to drug lord Ray Fallon, but Calladine's instincts say something far nastier is happening on the Hobfield housing estate. Can this duo track down the murderer before anyone else dies and before the press publicise the gruesome crimes?

When former soldier Dan Tyler wakes up in a strange room on a bed covered in blood, with no idea how he got there, he thinks he's stepped into someone else's nightmare. But he's wrong. This is reality.

It's DS Logan McRae's first day back on the job after a year off on the sick, and it couldn't get much worse. Three-year-old David Reid's body is discovered in a ditch: strangled, mutilated and a long time dead. And he's only the first. There's a serial killer stalking the Granite City, and the local media are baying for blood. Soon the dead are piling up in the morgue almost as fast as the snow on the streets, and Logan knows time is running out. More children are going missing. More are going to die.

Gallows View is the first novel in Peter Robinson's best-selling Inspector Banks series. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks has recently moved to the Yorkshire Dales from London to escape the stress of the metropolis. But he soon finds that life in the country is not quite as idyllic as he had imagined. A peeping Tom is frightening the women of Eastvale. Two glue-sniffing thugs are breaking into homes. An old woman may or may not have been murdered....

New York City is thrown into chaos by the assaults of the Bone Collector, a serial kidnapper and killer who gives the police a chance to save his victims from death by leaving obscure clues. The cops go to Lincoln Rhyme, an ex-NYPD forensics expert left paralysed after an accident on the job. Rhyme reluctantly postpones his ambitions towards suicide and puts together a forensic investigation team, enlisting as his eyes and ears young police officer Amelia Sachs.