Showing results by publisher "Oakhill Publishing" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

December 1882. Attending the opening of the new Natural History Museum, reporter Alec Lonsdale and his colleague Hulda Friederichs are shocked to discover a body in the basement, hacked to death. Suspicion falls on three cannibals, brought from the Congo as museum exhibits, who have disappeared. But Alec discovers that three other men have been similarly murdered, and when he and Hulda discover a letter in the victim's home warning of a catastrophic event planned for Christmas Eve, they find themselves in a race against time. 

Kim Philby, the so-called Third Man in the Cambridge spy ring, was the Cold War's most infamous traitor, a Soviet spy at the heart of British intelligence. Philby joined Britain's secret service MI6 during the war and went on to head the section tasked with rooting out Russian spies before becoming the service's chief liaison officer with the CIA. He betrayed hundreds of British and US agents to the Russians and compromised numerous operations inside the Soviet Union.

Bremen, 1951. An MI6 officer, haunted by an SS atrocity, kills a Nazi war criminal in the ruins of a U-boat bunker. The German turns out to be a CIA asset being rat-lined to South America. Britain, 1947. A young cabinet minister negotiates a deal with Moscow trading Rolls-Royce jet engines for cattle fodder and wood. The fates of the two men become entwined as one rises through MI6 and the other to Downing Street where, in the mid-1970s, a secret plot unfolds on both sides of the Atlantic to overthrow the prime minister. Can MI6 officers Catesby and Bone prevent it?

Inspector Montalbano is awake at dawn, sitting on his porch, when his attention is caught by a seagull that falls from the sky, performing a strange dance, before lying down to die. Montalbano is perplexed by what he has witnessed and the scene hangs over him like an omen. About to depart for a holiday with his girlfriend Livia, Montalbano makes a quick trip to the police station to tie up loose ends. But when his dear colleague Fazio is discovered missing, Montalbano instead launches a desperate search for his lost friend....

In the shadowy hallway of clockmaker Johannes Carver's house a policeman is found murdered, the arrow-tipped minute hand of a monumental antique clock embedded in his neck. For Dr Gideon Fell this is the only case that has ever really frightened him, and before he can solve it he must find answers to some seemingly impossible questions. Why was Calvin Boscombe standing near the corpse with a silencer on his gun? Who locked the attic door? And what has become of the 16th-century death-watch?

Laos, 1972. The Communist Pathet Lao has taken over. Most of the educated class has fled, but 72-year-old Dr Siri Paiboun, a Paris-trained doctor, remains and is appointed state coroner. When three bodies are recovered from a reservoir, Dr.Siri establishes the cause of death was not drowning - they seem to have been electrocuted. And then there is the inexplicable death of a Party bigwig's wife at a banquet. Dr.Siri doesn't think her death was from natural causes.

It is 1958. Newly promoted Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard is on a Continental trip with his older brother, Rod, who is taking the entire family on 'the Grand Tour' for his 51st birthday. After a concert in Vienna, Frederick Troy is approached by an old friend - Soviet spy Guy Burgess, who says something extraordinary: 'I want to come home.' MI5 send an agent to debrief Burgess - but the man is gunned down yards from the embassy, and Troy finds himself a suspect. As he fights to prove his innocence, Troy finds that Burgess is not the only ghost who returns to haunt him.

At 12.16 a.m. on Wednesday, June 5, 1968, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot and mortally wounded in the service pantry of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. A 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, was found holding the smoking gun and convicted of murder. That is the official history - but Tim Tate and Brad Johnson have uncovered a different story.

Grace Daniels is distraught after her daughter's body is found in a Leicestershire country lane. Her only solace is the reemergence of Faye, an old friend who seems to understand her loss. DI Will Jackman delves into the case until a family tragedy and a figure from his past threaten to derail him. When the police discover another victim, the spotlight falls on Grace. Can Jackman find the killer before she is convicted of a crime she didn't commit?

1851. Wealthy businessman Jacob Welland is dying of consumption and implores private detective Laetitia Rodd to find his beloved brother, whom he has not seen for 10 years. An impoverished Oxford scholar who left college to live as a wandering hermit, Joshua Welland has been spotted in a gypsy camp, where it was rumoured he was learning great secrets. 

London, 1882. Alec Lonsdale, a young reporter on the Pall Mall Gazette, is working on a story about a fatal house fire. But the postmortem on the victim produces shocking results: Patrick Donovan's death was no accident. But why would someone murder a humble shop assistant and steal part of his brain? When a second body is discovered, its throat cut, and then a third, Lonsdale and his spirited female colleague, Hulda Friederichs, begin to uncover evidence of a conspiracy that reaches to the highest echelons of Victorian society.

Following a gruelling operation in Paris, Liz Carlyle’s bosses post her to MI5’s counter-espionage desk, but they haven’t counted on the fallout from Putin’s incursions into the Ukraine. Liz needs to track down a Russian spy who has entered the UK before he completes his fatal mission. Meanwhile, the intelligence services are in the spotlight. In response to the debate raging around privacy and security, they hire Jasminder Kapoor, a controversial civil rights lawyer, to explain the issues to the public.

John Holderness, known to the women in his life as ‘Wilderness’, comes of age during World War II in Stepney, breaking in to houses with his grandfather. After the war, Wilderness is recruited as MI5’s resident ‘cat burglar’ and finds himself in Berlin, involved with schemes in the booming black market that put both him and his relationships in danger.

A man lies dying in a hospital in upstate Vermont. The nurses know only that he is an academic at a nearby university, but they have been instructed to call the FBI should anyone visit their patient. News of this suspected Russian illegal soon reaches MI5, where Liz Carlyle has been contacted by Mischa, a top secret source who is requesting a clandestine rendezvous in Berlin. 

In April 1956, at the height of the cold war, Khrushchev and Bulganin leaders of the Soviet Union are in Britain on an official visit. Chief Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard is assigned to be the official bodyguard and to spy on the Soviets. Soon after, a Royal Navy diver is found dead in a mutilated state in Portsmouth Harbour. Troy embarks on an investigation that takes him to the rotten heart of MI6, to the distant days of his childhood and into the dangerous arms of an old flame.

As the Luftwaffe make their last desperate assault on the city, Londoners take to the shelters once again and eagerly await the signal for D-Day. In the East End children lead police to a charred, dismembered corpse buried in a bombsite. The victim is German, and it soon becomes clear that this is no ordinary murder.

Having shot someone in the chaos of 1963 Berlin, Joe Wilderness finds himself locked up, with little chance of escape. But an official pardon through his father-in-law, Burne-Jones, a senior agent at MI6, means he is free to go. His newest operation will take him back to Berlin, now the dividing line between the West and the Soviets. When the Russians started building the Berlin Wall in 1961, two 'Unfortunate Englishmen' were trapped on opposite sides. In 1965 there is a plan to exchange the prisoners on Berlin’s bridge of spies.

Geneva, 2012. When a Russian intelligence officer approaches MI5 with vital information about the imminent cyber-sabotage of an Anglo-American Defence programme, he refuses to talk to anyone but Liz Carlyle. But who is he, and what is his connection to the British agent? At a tracking station in Nevada, US Navy officers watch in horror as one of their unmanned drones plummets out of the sky. Is this a Russian plot to disable the West’s defences? Or is the threat coming from elsewhere?

Cambridge spy Guy Burgess was a supreme networker. He also set a gold standard for conflicts of interest, working variously for the BBC, MI5, MI6, the War Office, the Ministry of Information and the KGB. Yet Burgess was never challenged by Britain's spy catchers: his superiors were convinced he was too much of a liability to have been recruited by Moscow. Now, with a major new release of hundreds of files into the National Archives, Purvis and Hulbert reveal just how this charming establishment insider was able to fool everyone for so long.

England 1321: Deep in the countryside lies an isolate village governed by a sinister regime of Owl Masters. But their dark status quo is disturbed by the arrival of a house of religious women. Why do their crops succeed when village crops fail, their cattle survive despite the plague? Accusations of witchcraft and heresy run rife, while the Owl Masters rain down hellfire and torment on the women, who must look to their faith to save them from the lengthening shadow of evil... a shadow with predatory, terrifying talons.