Bath and North East Somerset Libraries

When a rare stamp is stolen and a dead body is found, Peter Diamond is brought in to solve the case. But it isn’t a simple matter and he travels many a cul-de-sac, often stumbling across unsuspected secrets and motives.

They were meant to be safe on Fleet Ward: psychiatric patients monitored, treated, cared for. But now one of their number is found murdered, and the accusations begin to fly.

Was it one of his fellow patients? A member of staff? Or did someone come in from the outside? DC Alice Armitage is methodical, tireless, and she’s quickly on the trail of the killer. The only problem is, Alice is a patient too.

You know Penny Coyne. The little old lady who has solved multiple murders in her otherwise sleepy village, despite bumbling local police. A razor-sharp mind in a twinset and tweed.

You know Johnny Hawke. Hard-bitten LAPD homicide detective. Always in trouble with his captain, always losing partners, but always battling for the truth, whatever it takes.

Against all the odds, against the usual story, their worlds are about to collide. It starts with a dead writer and a mysterious wedding invitation. It will end with a rabbit hole that goes so deep, Johnny and Penny might just come to question not just whodunnit, but whether they want to know the answer.

Colm Healy used to be a policeman until, haunted by the murder of a young mother and her two children, his life unravels. Then, left with nothing but the hunt for a killer, he disappears. That’s when Missing Person’s Investigator David Raker gets involved.

Raker knows Healy; had tried to help him. But now, instead of getting Healy back on his feet he’s got to find him. And it’s a search that even Raker’s long experience of the missing can prepare him for; a trail of darkness and deceit in which nothing is quite what it seems.

In the UK, someone is reported missing every 90 seconds. Just gone. Vanished. In the blink of an eye.

DCS Kat Frank knows all about loss. A widowed single mother, Kat is a cop who trusts her instincts. Picked to lead a pilot programme that has her paired with AIDE (Artificial Intelligence Detective Entity) Lock, Kat’s instincts come up against Lock’s logic.

But when the two missing person’s cold cases they are reviewing suddenly become active, Lock is the only one who can help Kat when the case gets personal.

AI versus human experience. Logic versus instinct. With lives on the line can the pair work together before someone else becomes another statistic?

Young women are being discovered dead across the Old Town, all having suffered similarly gruesome ends. In the New Town, medical student Will Raven is about to start his apprenticeship with the brilliant and renowned Dr Simpson.

Simpson’s patients range from the richest to the poorest of this divided city. His house is like no other, full of visiting luminaries and daring experiments in the new medical frontier of anaesthesia. It is here that Raven meets housemaid Sarah Fisher, who recognises trouble when she sees it and takes an immediate dislike to him.

She has all of his intelligence but none of his privileges, in particular his medical education. With each having their own motive to look deeper into these deaths, Raven and Sarah find themselves propelled headlong into the darkest shadows of Edinburgh’s underworld.

Cambridge, 1583. About to graduate from Corpus Christi, Kit Marlowe spends his days studying Virgil and Aristotle, and his nights carousing in the Blue Boar with his friends.

But when one of them is discovered lying dead in his King’s College room, Marlowe refuses to accept the official verdict of suicide.

She started as a maid in an aristocratic London household, studied her way into Garton College at Cambridge, then became a front line nurse in WW1. Now she has set up on her own as a private investigator – with a case that will force her to confront the ghost of her past.

1851 and the city of London anticipates the grand opening of the Great Expedition. The London to Birmingham mail train is looted and derailed and Detective Colbeck fights to untangle a web of murder, blackmail and destruction.

It’s wintertime in New York, and for the first time since Irish immigrant Molly Murphy started her early-20th-century detective agency, she is completely snowed in with work.

While she’s proving to be quite the entrepreneur and is very much in demand by some of Broadway’s brightest stars and Fifth Avenue’s richest families, she has to grudgingly admit that if she’s going to work more than one case at a time, then she’s going to need some help.

Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favourite bench, his cat waiting for him when he comes home. His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now.

Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. As a private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. She’s currently on a remote island keeping world-famous author Rosie D’Antonio alive. Which was meant to be an easy job.

Then a dead body, a bag of money and a killer with their sights on Amy have her sending an SOS to the only person she trusts. A breakneck race around the world begins, but can Amy and Steve stay one step ahead of a deadly enemy?

Margery and Clementine are enjoying a peaceful middle-age together in the small, idyllic town of Dewstow, and eagerly awaiting retirement from their work on the front line serving meals to the students at Summerview secondary school.

Their calm life is shattered when their kitchen manager is found dead in the school’s walk-in freezer. The police are adamant that it’s an open-and-shut case of accidental death. Margery and Clementine are convinced there’s something far more nefarious going on, and they take it upon themselves to investigate.

As they inch closer to the truth, it becomes clear that someone will stop at nothing to keep the pair quiet. Will the perpetrator get their just-desserts before their time runs out?

Mma Ramotswe is not one to sit about. Her busy life gives her little time for relaxation (apart from the drinking of tea, of course, which is another matter altogether).

Nonetheless, she is persuaded to take a holiday from the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. But Mma Ramotswe finds it impossible to resist the temptation to follow the cases taken on by her business partner, Mma Makutsi, and to interfere in them – at one remove.

This leads her to delve into the past of a man whose reputation has been called into question. Meanwhile, Violet Sephotho, Mma Makutsi’s arch enemy, has had the temerity to set up a new secretarial college – one that aims to rival that great institution, the Botswana Secretarial College.

Will she get her comeuppance? It will be a close-run thing.

When a young woman is attacked walking home from her local supermarket, Bea Jordan, a smart but unfulfilled checkout girl, is determined to investigate. Colleagues and customers become suspects, secrets are uncovered.

While fear stalks the town, Bea finds an unlikely ally in Ant, the seemingly gormless new trainee, but risks losing the people she loves most as death comes close to home.

It’s time to solve the murder of the century. Forty years ago, Steven Smith found a copy of a famous children’s book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations.

Wanting to know more, he took it to his English teacher Miss Isles, not realising the chain of events that he was setting in motion. Miss Isles became convinced that the book was the key to solving a puzzle, and that a message in secret code ran through all Twyford’s novels.

Then Miss Isles disappeared on a class field trip, and Steven’s memory won’t allow him to remember what happened. Now, out of prison after a long stretch, Steven decides to investigate the mystery that has haunted him for decades.

Was Miss Isles murdered? Was she deluded? Or was she right about the code? And is it still in use today?

Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected that she was being blackmailed.

Then came the news that she had taken her own life. But, before he found all the clues, he was murdered.

At Baskerville Hall on the grim moors of Devonshire, a legendary curse has apparently claimed one more victim. Sir Charles Baskerville has been found dead.

There are no signs of violence, but his face is hideously distorted with terror. Years earlier, a hound-like beast with blazing eyes and dripping jaws was reported having torn out Hugo Baskerville’s throat. Is Sir Henry Baskerville, younger heir to the estate, now in danger?

Enter Sherlock Holmes, summoned to protect Sir Henry from the fate that threatens the Baskerville family. As Holmes and Watson begin to investigate, a blood-chilling howl from the fog-shrouded edges of the great Grimpen Mire signals that the legendary hound of the Baskervilles is poised for yet another murderous attack.

Shabby and lumbering, with a face like a Norfolk dumpling, Father Brown makes for an improbable super-sleuth.

But his innocence is the secret of his success: refusing the scientific method of detection, he adopts instead an approach of simple sympathy, interpreting each crime as a work of art, and each criminal as a man no worse than himself.

The body was that of a tall, stout man wearing only a pair of gold pince-nez. Lord Peter Wimsey knew what the corpse was supposed to be

His problem was to find out the truth about whose body had found its way into Mr Alfred Thipps’ bathroom.

Inevitably Maigret was a hostile presence in the Majestic. He constituted a kind of foreign body that the hotel’s atmosphere could not assimilate. Not that he looked like a cartoon policeman. He didn’t have a moustache and he didn’t wear heavy boots. His clothes were well cut and made of fairly light worsted.

Who is Pietr the Latvian? Is he a gentleman thief? A Russian drinking absinthe in a grimy bar? A married Norwegian sea captain? A twisted corpse in a train toilet? Or is he all of these men? In Simeon’s first novel featuring Maigret, the laconic detective is taken from grimy dive bars to luxury hotels as he solves this strange enigma.