Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in Crime Fiction

He is a record collector and a connoisseur of vinyl, hunting out rare and elusive LPs. His business card describes him as the Vinyl Detective, and some people take this more literally than others. For example, the beautiful, mysterious woman who wants to pay him a large sum of money to find a priceless lost recording on behalf of an extremely wealthy yet shadowy client. And so begins a painful and dangerous odyssey in search of the rarest jazz record of them all....

When torrential summer rains uncover a bizarrely tattooed body on a Lake District hillside, old wives' tales also come swirling to the surface. For centuries Lakelanders have whispered that Fletcher Christian staged the massacre on Pitcairn so that he could return home. And there he told his story to an old friend and schoolmate, William Wordsworth, who turned it into a long narrative poem.

Millie Spark can kill anyone. A special effects make-up artist, her talent is to create realistic scenes of bloody violence. Then, one day, she wakes to find her lover dead in her bed. Twenty-five years later, her sentence for murder served, Millicent is ready to give up on her broken life - until she meets troubled film student and reluctant petty thief Jerry. Together, they begin to discover that all was not what it seemed on that fateful night...and someone doesn't want them to find out why.

An eighty-year-old man is found murdered in his home. His age and standing in the community makes finding his killer difficult–why would anyone harm an elderly man? What threat could he possibly be to anyone? With no apparent motive, DS George Cross canvases the community for potential suspects but the man was known as generous, charitable, community-minded. Each interview about who the man is muddies the picture further. So Cross decides to look for who he was–revealing a past that is far less honourable than his present . . .

Joseph O'Loughlin appears to have the perfect life—a beautiful wife, a loving daughter and a successful career as a clinical psychologist. But nothing can be taken for granted. Even the most flawless existence is only a loose thread away from unravelling. All it takes is a murdered girl, a troubled young patient and the biggest lie of his life. Caught in a complex web of deceit and haunted by images of the slain girl, he embarks upon a search that will take him from London to Liverpool and into the darkest recesses of the human mind.

On the Mongolian steppes a general in the People's Liberation Army stakes his career, and his life, on a GPS-free missile guidance system that will change the balance of power on the battlefield. In Bath a young Chinese woman has secured the affections of a young brainiac working on that very...

As a favour, Kate agrees to track down a missing songwriter, Moria Pollock. It was supposed to be a nice simple case, but the search soon leads Kate into the dark underworld of Leeds, Manchester and Bradford – and finally to a shocking confrontation with a killer.

It was a 'team-building' weekend for lawyers, advertising execs, businessmen - oh, and a journalist. Amid the paintballing and flowing Shiraz, the organisers pulled some surprises - stalkers in the forest, power cuts in the night, disappearing staff, disappearing guests. When the only access for...

When terrorists use a drone to bring down a plane on one of London’s busiest shopping centres, it ignites a chain of events that will draw in the innocent and the guilty alike. DC Max Wolfe finds himself caught in the crossfire between a tech-savvy terrorist cell and a revenge-seeking, Bible-quoting murderer called Bad Moses.

ANOTHER EXPLOSIVE THRILLER FROM THE MILLION COPY SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Welcome to the Crazyhouse. Where unwilling contestants play the game of death. The north of England is rocked by two horrifying but bewildering crimes: a £600,000 drugs heist, the couriers and the buyers all slain. And the...

Oxford, 1583. Giordano Bruno, a radical thinker fleeing the Inquisition, is sent undercover to Oxford to expose a Catholic conspiracy against Queen Elizabeth. But he has his own secret mission at the University, which must remain hidden at all costs. When a series of hideous murders are committed, Bruno is compelled to investigate. What he finds makes it brutally clear that the Tudor throne itself is at stake....

Jack Parlabane is an investigative journalist who is not averse to breaking the law for a good story. Scottish parliament is in catatonic shock after experiencing its first dose of Westminster sleaze and the Catholic Church of Scotland is taking advantage of the politicians' discomfort. Behind...

Elizabeth's reign is reaching its winter and England's old adversaries are fading. But in a world on the brink of change, showing any weakness can be fatal. 1598. Nicholas Shelby, physician and reluctant spy for Robert Cecil, has brought his wife and their child home from exile. But he has returned to a dangerous world. Two old enemies are approaching their final reckoning. England and Spain are exhausted by war. In London, Elizabeth is entering the twilight of her reign. In Madrid, King Philip of Spain is dying. Perhaps now is the time for one last throw of the dice.

Lambert Ramkin aka Imperium Dart, techno trickster and ambient music wizard of the 1990s, has gone walkabout, disappearing from his rather palatial home in Kent. This isn't the first time he's pulled a vanishing act, but he's never been gone so long before and his wife — wives, actually; it's complicated — are worried and hire the Vinyl Detective to find the old rascal. They theorize that wherever the missing man is, he won't be able to resist turning up at a record fair somewhere in search of 12-inch white label acid house singles, which he collects compulsively.

Young girls are disappearing around the country, and there is nothing to connect them to one another. Dr Tony Hill sets his team an exercise: they are given the details and asked to discover links between the cases. Only one officer comes up with a theory that is ridiculed….until one of their own is murdered. For Tony Hill, the murder becomes a matter for personal revenge and joined by colleague Carol Jordan, he embarks a game where hunter and hunted can all too easily be reversed.

The remote village of Imber - remote, lost and abandoned. The outside world hasn't been let in since soldiers forced the inhabitants out, much to their contempt. But now, a dark secret threatens all who venture near. Everyone is in danger, and only Harry Price can help. Reluctantly reunited with...

Yeah, yeah, the usual. A crime. A corpse. A killer. Heard it. Except this stiff happens to be a Ponsonby, scion of a venerable Edinburgh medical clan, and the manner of his death speaks of unspeakable things. Why is the body displayed like a slice of beef? How come his hands are digitally challenged? And if it's not the corpse, what is that awful smell?

Edinburgh, haunted by the ghosts of its many writers, is also the cold case beat of DCI Karen Pirie. So she shouldn't be surprised when an author's manuscript appears to be a blueprint for an actual crime. Karen can't ignore the plot's chilling similarities to the unsolved case of an Edinburgh University student who vanished from her own doorstep. The manuscript seems to be the key to unlocking what happened to Lara Hardie, but there's a problem: the author died before he finished it.

January 1941. When Detective Inspector John Jago is called to a house in London's Bloomsbury, he finds the body of a woman who's been attacked and left to die, her only crime seemingly being her kindness to strangers. She's taken victims of the Blitz and the war that's torn Europe apart and given them refuge in her home, but now she's a victim too—of murder. As Jago tries to find out who killed her and why, he uncovers a tangle of damaged hearts and minds.

Five-year-old Jimmy Higgins is brazenly snatched from the middle of a busy airport; but this is no ordinary kidnapping. Jimmy’s mother is Scarlett, a reality TV star who, dying of cancer, entrusted the boy to her friend Stephanie Harker. Now Stephanie, reaching into the past to discover the motive behind the abduction, soon encounters a shocking tale of murder and conspiracy, and is faced by the most difficult choice of her life.