Showing titles in Animals

As the sticky heat of August settles over Florence, Dan Armstrong is ready for a well-earned break—sightseeing with fiancée Anna, daughter Tricia and her fiancé Shaun. But when a British man is found dead inside the city's magnificent Duomo, Dan's plans quickly change. The victim, Tristan Angel, is a super-wealthy arms dealer with a saintly name and a devilish reputation. But what was he doing in the cathedral, and who decided to make it his final confession?

When a retired detective superintendent chooses to take a culinary tour of the British Isles, he hopes to find tasty treats and delicious bakes...what he finds is murder, mayhem, and mystery everywhere he goes. His dog, Rex Harrison, a former police dog fired for having a bad attitude, does his best to steer the humans in the right direction, but he cannot understand why they don’t just use their noses–the answers are right there if they would just employ their strongest sense!

When crime novelist Phoebe opens the post and receives an invitation to her own funeral, she’s horrified. Not least because the date of her death is marked as tomorrow. Deciding it’s nothing more than a prank from an enemy from her past, she determines to put it to the back of her mind. But the next morning, when her completely infuriating postman (who likes to think himself her no.1 literary critic) rings her doorbell, a parcel of poisoned pen-nibs explodes in his face. Forced to confront the fact her correspondence is more RIP than RSVP, Phoebe realises someone must want her dead.

Former actress and lifestyle guru Donna Bruce is found dead in her sauna cabin, the victim of a swarm of bees. With the town buzzing about whodunit, reporter Odelia Poole and Detective Chase Kingsley are on the case. Meanwhile, Max, Odelia’s blorange tabby, has a crisis of his own—he’s been put on a strict diet! Weak, cranky, and deprived of snacks, solving crimes is harder than ever. And to make matters worse, Odelia has put Harriet, her mother’s white Persian, in charge of the feline investigation! Harriet’s idea of detective work? Scrolling through celebrity gossip and watching cat videos.

1923. Lottie Sprigg is a lowly maid. But when she's hired by a wealthy heiress, she embarks on a thrilling journey across Europe and beyond. Lottie's expecting exciting exploits and spectacular sights. But she's not expecting murder . . . In Venice, Lottie befriends a famous opera singer after reuniting him with his lost dog. Early the next morning, the singer's corpse is found floating in the Grand Canal.

After months of travel, former maid Lottie Sprigg returns to Fortescue Manor in the rolling hills of Shropshire. Her arrival coincides with a celebratory dinner to mend a family feud. But the flow of champagne dwindles to a trickle when a body is found in the library. Who committed the atrocity? Suspicion falls on several characters: some above stairs and some below....

London, 1941: Miss Jane Treen is at her desk, strong black coffee in hand and fluffy ginger cat by her side, when her top-secret government work is interrupted by an urgent call to Devon. A woman has been found dead in a lake in a place where she shouldn’t have been. Jane needs to gather the clues and find the killer before someone else from the agency gets hurt… Shy and handsome code-breaker Arthur Cilento is bewildered by the arrival of the efficient Miss Treen and her cat Marmaduke.

England, 1941. When Jane Treen is summoned to her boss’s office at the end of a long day, she smooths down her tweed skirt and makes them both another strong pot of coffee. Brigadier Remmington-Blythe slides a folded copy of the evening newspaper towards her, with one small article circled in red ink. A body has been found on an English beach in the little seaside town where she grew up, and he wants her to investigate. Jane is used to managing secret agents and spies, but she is now part of The Secret Detective Agency, England’s answer to solving the most mysterious murders.

Juno is feeling ready – at last – to start dating again, after losing her husband some years ago. She is sure she can make time from being a Village Detective, indeed it might help distract her from her crush on hunky (but far-too-young!) pub landlord – Mil. So she’s signed up to an exclusive new dating app and cannot wait. But when one of the founding investors in that same dating app drops dead in front of fellow Village Detective Phoebe in a nearby hotel, Juno knows she’ll have to put her love life on hold.

A shadowy master criminal has been kidnapping experts from the food industry and stealing both food and equipment. The crimes are so unrelated no one in the world had noticed the connections. No one except Albert Smith, that is. He’s got almost nothing to go on, but with every place he visits, he gets just a little closer to the truth. He’s not working alone though, his faithful sidekick, Rex Harrison the former police dog is right there with him. Can the two of them pull off the impossible and find the man Albert chose to dub ‘the Gastrothief’?

Olivia Greer's trip to the small town of Lily Rock has not been the relaxing getaway she hoped for. She was run off the road by a tailgater. Rescued by a handsome stranger. A friend was found dead. Oh, and now Olivia is the prime suspect in the murder. She really should have stayed home.

Hobbes: Unhuman Series, Books I-IV. It contains: I - Inspector Hobbes and the Blood, II - Inspector Hobbes and the Curse, III - Inspector Hobbes and the Gold Diggers, and IV - Inspector Hobbes and the Bones.

London, 1941. Miss Jane Treen is faced with another mysterious disappearance within her Secret Detective Agency’s team. Tabitha Moore, a government typist, was on her way to meet Jane with vital information about some secret codes. But she didn’t turn up for work and has seemingly vanished without trace. Then Jane and her colleague, handsome codebreaker Arthur Cilento, receive a call: a body has been found, and it matches Tabitha’s description…

Private investigator Dan Armstrong can't believe his luck when he's invited to the luxury villa of none other than Alice Graceland, movie legend and queen of the silver screen. Alice isn't looking to bankroll Dan's writing, but instead she wants him to play host at a murder mystery evening with a glamorous (but suspiciously tense) collection of Hollywood royalty. It should be a meeting of old friends - but just how friendly are they? As the murder mystery evening takes a sinister turn, Dan and Oscar find themselves navigating more than the city's canals to find the truth.

It's the day of the Christchurch Dog Show. The whole town is aquiver with excitement. The ladies of the Charity Shop Detective Agency are hoping to make lots of new furry friends. After a very dramatic Best Biscuit Catcher competition, Fiona, Sue, and Daisy from the Dogs Need Nice Homes charity shop come across a shocking scene. The dog show's vet is performing CPR on a woman. The ladies rush over, but it's too late. Back at the shop, the ladies learn that the poor woman was murdered. Someone injected Sylvia Steadman with something very nasty indeed.

Majestic mountain views, whisky by the fire and… a murder to solve? Join Ally McKinley at her cosy little guesthouse in the Scottish Highlands as she tackles her first puzzling case!For recently retired Ally McKinley, the tiny village of Locharran is the perfect place to open the guesthouse of her dreams in a lovingly restored old Scottish malthouse. Before long she is making friends with the locals, including Hamish Sinclair, the earl who owns the nearby castle. But things take an unexpected turn when her first paying guest is found sprawled across her cobblestoned courtyard.

A Halloween Ball. A missing friend. A serial killer’s return? Ellie Byrne is ready to enjoy a Halloween masquerade ball at her bed and breakfast with friends, but when her friend mysteriously disappears, Ellie’s evening takes a dark turn. Just as Mia is found, shaken but unharmed, another body is discovered, and it looks like the infamous Clue Killer may have resurfaced after 20 years of silence. With a murderer on the loose, Ellie, with the help of her snarky cat Cleo and loyal dog Lola, must dig deep into the town’s secrets.

Vivienne Rose, owner of Desert Doulas, arrives home from work to find cops swarming the place and a body floating in her pool. Her silver fox next-door neighbor, mentalist Rex Redondo, admits that he’s the one who saw the body and called the police. But his involvement in this is far from over. When the police stop investigating the case, due to a personnel shortage, Viv calls on Rex and his roommate, ex-marine Sutton Greer, to help her track down the killer.

Some of the greatest music ever committed to vinyl has come out of Italy. And some of the greatest music to come out of Italy is the rich diversity of soundtracks composed for the indigenous film industry–particularly for gruesome thrillers known as ‘gialli’. The maestros who composed for these include Ennio Morricone, Piero Piccioni, Armand Trovajoli…And Valerius Passeri. He was one of the finest composers of this genre and his original LPs from his 1960s heyday fetch a fortune from collectors. No one disputes that Passeri was a genius… The argument is whether or not he was a murderer.

Morgan Winters wants an ordinary life: A job at a bookstore, an apartment she can barely afford, and a healthy amount of existential dread. Her brother (AKA "The Ruiner") ruins that when he shows up on her bedroom windowsill, transformed into a talking cat. He claims it's due to a date gone horribly wrong, but Morgan's not buying it. Still, when he begs her to take him to a witch who can change him back into a human, she reluctantly agrees. Family is family. When they arrive in Hollowbeck—a suspiciously small and suspiciously magical town—they find the witch. Only she's dead.

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.

When Ella accepts a mysterious job in the picturesque town of Gloamington, all she wants is six weeks of peace and a place to call home. Instead, she finds herself assistant to Malcolm Fawkes, a renowned paranormal detective with no memory of hiring her—or much of anything else.

Private investigator, Dan Armstrong, lives and works in Florence and knows the world famous Ponte Vecchio well. Usually a magnet for tourists, on this occasion it is the scene of an unexplained death, and Dan finds himself involved in the intriguing case. Dan quickly discovers that the victim, an elderly jeweller, was every bit as hard as the diamonds he sold in his shop on the bridge. Few people liked him, not even his adult children, and his business dealings look murkier than the waters of the River Arno.

It's almost Christmas, and Gwinny Tuffel's thoughts are on what she'll buy for DI Birch and whether she can adopt another furry friend. But sorting through her late father's papers leads her into his mysterious past, pointing to an enigmatic liaison with someone now living in a Somerset commune. Gwinny and DI Birch find themselves unexpectedly snowed in with a group of retired spies, along with an energetic Cocker Spaniel, and embroiled in a murder case. Will they uncover the culprit and escape in time for Christmas?

The fifteenth title in Mandy Morton's delightful No. 2 Feline Detective Agency series.

Who knew a seven-foot nutcracker could be a murder weapon? Finding the body of the toy store owner Betty King is the latest in a list of reasons Michael Bellemare feels far from jolly this holiday season. Having secured jobs for two local teens at the store, obligation leads Michael to help uncover the killer and clear both their names. Unfortunately, the mounting evidence seems to point to one of the teens. Partnering with detective Janis Jets, Michael listens in as Janis interviews residents and learns more about the hold Betty King had over Lily Rock. Possible mob ties. A runaway dog.

It's been years since screenwriter Georgie Johansen last visited her Aunt Olivia's farm in the coastal town of Twilight Cove, and things have certainly changed. First of all, it's now an animal sanctuary, and then there's the new farmhand who's as mysterious as he is handsome. Her first day on the farm, Georgie encounters the eccentric Dorothy Shale, an older woman who lives in a cabin in the woods. There are rumours that Dorothy's a witch, but Georgie doesn't believe that. Although, Dorothy does have an unusual magical presence around her.

My life was going just fine by most standards. I ran a successful business in a tight-knit magical community, and lived just blocks from a beautiful lake and series of hiking trails. Then Selene showed up. According to some magical code I inherit my aunt's ancient familiar; a grumpy 10-pound cat with a broken filter.

Join Francie and the gang one last time as they team up to fight their most savage enemy of all: Kong’s fleas… Yes, they’ve got to find the Baron and his sixth cursed book before untold horrors are unleashed on the town. Of course a wealthy widow was poisoned at the first annual poetry slam competition. And by now you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that an avant-garde performance art troupe has moved into Francie’s backyard and rehearsals consist of bongos, glitter and panda costumes.

After spending Christmas with her adoptive mother, dog-mom and amateur sleuth, Eve, is glad to be back home in Granite. She’s ready to get back to her normal life and is committed to following her New Year’s resolutions. Unfortunately the best of her intentions go out the window when a blizzard causes a power outage for the whole town.