The Drop

For LAPD homicide cop Harry Bosch - hero, maverick, nighthawk - the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal. The dead man, Billy Meadows, was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who fought side by side with him in a nightmare underground war that brought them to the depths of hell.

In 1993 Harry Bosch was assigned the case of a missing person, Marie Gesto. The young woman was never found--dead or alive--and the case has haunted Bosch ever since. Thirteen years later Bosch is in the Open Unsolved Unit when he gets a call from the DA's office. A man accused of two killings is willing to confess to several other murders in a deal to avoid the death penalty. One of his victims, he says, is Marie Gesto.

Mickey Haller is a Lincoln lawyer, a criminal defence attorney who operates out of the back of his car, a Lincoln, taking whatever cases the system throws in his path. He's been in the business a long time, and he knows just how to work it. When a Beverly Hills rich boy is arrested for brutally beating a woman, Haller has his first high-paying client in years. The evidence mounts on the defence's side, and Haller might even be in the rare position of defending a client who is actually innocent.

Our hero is Jack McEvoy, a Rocky Mountain News crime-beat reporter. As the story opens, Jack's twin brother, a Denver homicide detective, has just killed himself. Or so it seems. But when Jack begins to investigate the phenomenon of police suicides, a disturbing pattern emerges, and soon suspects that a serial murderer is at work.

A young woman finds herself caught up in a scam which may cost her the one thing she values more than her life.... Cassie Black has been lured back to the criminal profession she gave up--robbing gamblers of their winnings--by a proposition that is just too good to miss. The job goes as planned except that the target has too much money. It can only mean someone very powerful is going to be very angry indeed. Cassie finds herself on the run from a killer who seems to know her every move in advance.

Henry Pierce has a whole new life - new apartment, new telephone, new telephone number. But the first time he checks his messages, he discovers that someone had the number before him. The messages on his line are for a woman named Lilly, and she is in some kind of serious trouble. Pierce is inexorably drawn into Lilly's world, and it's unlike any world he's ever known. It is a night-time world of escort services, websites, sex, and secret identities.

A compelling thriller introducing a driven young detective trying to prove herself in the LAPD. Renée Ballard works the night shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing none as each morning she turns her cases over to day shift detectives. A once up-and-coming detective, she's been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor.

Three stories, brought together in one edition, from 'crime-writing genius' Michael Connelly. In the title story, a fatal accident on Mulholland Drive turns out to be part of an ingenious plot - but is it too ingenious? In Two Bagger, a dedicated cop working for the Gang Intelligence Unit finally gets the payoff he's worked so hard for - but it's not what he's expecting. In Cahoots, a team of scam artists meet for a high-stakes poker game but who is scamming who?

Death is my beat. Those words, spoken by the narrator and hero of The Poet, Jack McEvoy, could also apply to Michael Connelly. Time and time again in these riveting pieces, we make the connection between Connelly the crime reporter and Connelly the novelist: On the day I arrived in Los Angeles I sat in the newspaper editor's office being interviewed for a job on the crime beat.

When a troubled model falls to her death from a snow-covered Mayfair balcony, it is assumed that she has committed suicide. However, her brother has his doubts, and calls in private investigator Cormoran Strike to look into the case.Strike is a war veteran - wounded both physically and psychologically - and his life is in disarray. The case gives him a financial lifeline, but it comes at a personal cost: the more he delves into the young model's complex world, the darker things get - and the closer he gets to terrible danger...

When something distracts Secret Agent Sean King for a split second, it costs him his career and presidential candidate Clyde Ritter his life. But what stole his attention? And why was Ritter shot? Eight years later Michelle Maxwell is on the fast track through the ranks of the Secret Service when her career is stopped short: presidential candidate John Bruno is abducted from a funeral home while under her protection. The similarity between the two cases drives Michelle to reopen investigations into the Ritter fiasco and join forces with attractive ex-agent King.

Lucas Davenport had crossed paths with her before. A rich psychopath, Taryn Grant had run successfully for the US Senate, where Lucas had predicted she'd fit right in. He was also convinced that she'd been responsible for three murders, though he'd never been able to prove it. He was right. A federal marshal now, with a very wide scope of investigation, he's heard rumours that Grant has found her seat on the Senate intelligence committee, and the contacts she's made from it, to be very...useful. 

It's been a while since we first met Lee Child's Jack Reacher in Killing Floor. Fifteen years and sixteen novels later, Reacher still lives off the grid, until trouble finds him, and then he does whatever it takes, much to the delight of listeners and the dismay of villains. Now someone big is looking for him. Who? And why? Hunting Jack Reacher is a dangerous business, as FBI Special Agents Kim Otto and Carlos Gaspar are about to find out.

When quiet Ellen Lang enters Elvis Cole's Disney-deco office, she's lost something very valuable - her husband and young son. The case seems simple enough, but Elvis isn't thrilled. Neither is his enigmatic partner and firepower Joe Pike. Their search down the seamy side of Hollywood's studio lots and sculptured lawns soon leads them deep into a nasty netherworld of drugs and sex - and murder. Now the case is getting interesting, but it's also turned ugly.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Killing Floor by Lee Child, read by Jeff Harding. Killing Floor is the first book in the internationally popular Jack Reacher series. It presents Reacher for the first time, as the tough ex-military cop of no fixed abode: a righter of wrongs, the perfect action hero. Jack Reacher jumps off a bus and walks 14 miles down a country road into Margrave, Georgia. An arbitrary decision he's about to regret.