Lifetime

Trainee journalist Annika Bengtzon has secured a summer placement at Sweden’s biggest tabloid newspaper. She’s desperate for this to be her big break, although manning the tip-off phoneline isn’t quite what she had in mind… Until a caller tells her that the naked body of a young woman has been found in a nearby cemetery. As she pieces together details of the young woman’s life, Annika stumbles across video footage that places the main suspect hundreds of miles from the crime scene, right at the time of the murder. Are the police looking for the wrong man?

On a hot July morning on Sweden's idyllic vacation island of Sandhamn, a man takes his dog for a walk and makes a gruesome discovery: a body, tangled in fishing net, has washed ashore. Police detective Thomas Andreasson is the first to arrive on the scene. Before long, he has identified the deceased as Krister Berggren, a bachelor from the mainland who has been missing for months. All signs point to an accident - until another brutalized corpse is found at the local bed-and-breakfast.

A woman's body is found on a frozen lake, bearing the marks of grisly torture. Inspector Anna-Maria Mella knows she needs help with the case - the woman was a key player in a mining company whose tentacles reach across the globe. Lawyer Rebecka Martinsson is desperate to get back to work, to feel alive again after a case that almost destroyed her both physically and emotionally.

It's December in the quiet Swedish town of Kymlinge, and the Hermansson family are gathering to celebrate father Karl-Erik and eldest daughter Ebba's joint landmark birthdays. But beneath the guise of happy festivities, tensions are running high, and it's not long before the night takes a dark and unexpected turn....

Old crimes, new consequences. In wartime Reykjavik, a young woman is found strangled behind the National Theatre, a rough and dangerous area of the city known as 'the shadow district'. An Icelandic detective and a member of the American military police are on the trail of a brutal killer. A 90-year-old man is discovered dead on his bed, smothered with his own pillow. Konrad, a former detective now bored with retirement, finds newspaper cuttings in the dead man's home reporting the shadow district murder....

The unabridged, digital audiobook edition of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s Mercy, Scandinavia’s new bestselling crime phenomenon. Read by the actor Steven Pacey. At first the prisoner scratches at the walls until her fingers bleed. But there is no escaping the room. With no way of measuring time, her days, weeks, months go unrecorded. She vows not to go mad. She will not give her captors the satisfaction.

After a student choir’s practice session at a Helsinki villa turns deadly, Detective Maria Kallio finds herself in the middle of the action - and her first murder case. Someone in the group wanted playboy Tommi Peltonen dead, but that’s one song these suspects refuse to sing. Behind the choir’s jovial facade lies bitter passion, and the victim’s seemingly perfect life hid a host of sins that made him a target of almost everyone in the villa. As a young female - and a redhead to boot - Maria knows that solving this case will help her overcome her perceived shortcoming in the eyes of her colleagues.

Returning to her hometown after the funeral of her parents, writer Erica Falck finds a community on the brink of tragedy. The death of her childhood friend, Alex, is just the beginning. Her wrists slashed, her body frozen in an ice-cold bath, it seems, at first, that she has taken her own life. Erica conceives a memoir about the beautiful but remote Alex, one that will help to overcome her writer's block as well as answer questions about their own past.

Kristina Ohlsson, the number one Swedish best seller, is back with her new thriller. Five brutal murders in two countries. A woman confesses to the killings then leaps off a bridge to her death. Her brother insists she was innocent and wants the case reopened. But how do you vindicate a deceased, self-proclaimed killer? Buried Lies is brilliantly narrated by Andrew Cullum.

The discovery of a corpse washed up on a beach in an Icelandic backwater sparks a series of events that propels the village of Hvalvik's police sergeant Gunnhildur into deep waters. Although under pressure to deal with the matter quickly, she is suspicious that the man's death was no accident and once she has identified the body, sets about investigating his final hours. The case takes Gunnhildur away from her village and into a cosmopolitan world of shady deals, government corruption and violence.

Siglufjörður: an idyllically quiet fishing village in Northern Iceland, where no one locks their doors - accessible only via a small mountain tunnel. Ari Thór Arason: a rookie policeman on his first posting, far from his girlfriend in Reykjavik - with a past that he’s unable to leave behind.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Darkness by Ragnar Jonasson. A young woman, an asylum seeker from Russia, is found murdered on the seaweed-covered rocks of the Vatnsleysuströnd in Iceland. Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdottir of the Reykjavik Police is called to investigate this - the final case in her career before she is forced into retirement. When Hulda starts to ask questions, it isn't long before she realises that no-one can be trusted and that no-one is telling the whole truth.

He’s seen something that could get him killed. But what? Freddie Makin is a spy for hire. For a year he’s been watching Jiang Cheng, an academic whose life seems suspiciously normal. To Freddie it’s just a job: he never asks who’s paying him and why - until the day someone is sent to kill him, and suddenly the watcher becomes the watched. On the run from whoever wants him dead, Freddie knows he must have seen something incriminating. The only trouble is, he has no idea what. Is the CIA behind all this - or does it go higher than that? Have his trackers uncovered his own murky past?

Gracie Dwyer has it all: the handsome husband, the adorable child, the beautiful home and the glittering career. The perfect life. Her new friend, Juliet, doesn't exactly fit in. She's a down-on-her-luck single parent with no money and not much hope. So just what is it that draws Gracie and Juliet together? And when the cracks start to appear in Gracie's perfect life, can both of them survive?

The only witness to a shocking murder is the victim's 10-year-old daughter, Margret. The police turn to the Children's House for their expertise in childhood trauma. The manager, Freyja, doesn't much like the police - especially the detective in charge, Huldar. But she does want to help them protect Margret. And when more people die - their murders heralded by strange messages, texts, and strings of numbers - they will have to work together to crack the riddle before they become targets themselves.