A man's corpse is discovered in a Rotherhithe warehouse, chopped up, boiled to avoid identification, and bundled into five Waitrose carrier bags. Our nameless narrator from A14 - the 'Unexplained Deaths' division of the Met - is put on the case. Operating, as usual, with his wit and sheer nerve in place of adequate resources and contacts, the narrator's investigations uncover much more than the murderer. As he probes a world of horror in South London, a terrible secret from his own past em...

When a middle-aged alcoholic is found brutally battered to death on a roadside in West London, the case is assigned to a nameless detective sergeant, a tough-talking cynic and fearless loner from the Department of Unexplained Deaths at the Factory police station. Working from cassette tapes left behind in the dead man?s property, our narrator must piece together the history of his blighted existence and discover the agents of its cruel end. What he doesn't expect is that digging for the tr...

An axe-wielding psychopath carves young Dora Suarez into pieces and smashes the head of Suarez's friend, an elderly woman. On the same night, in the West End, a firearm blows the top off the head of Felix Roatta, part-owner of the seedy Parallel Club. The unnamed narrator, a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police's Unexplained Deaths division, develops a fixation on the young woman whose murder he investigates. And he discovers that Suarez's death is even more bizarre than suspected: the murd...

A plain-clothes copper in Paris, Kleber is 40 years old, drinks hard and smokes fifty a day. He is devoted to his young wife, Elenya, a former prostitute whom he rescued from her pimp, but he is embittered by 22 years on the streets, and his sleep is haunted by dreams of death. Kleber has many enemies, and only one friend: a criminal named Mark. When Kleber is suspended from the police force for punching a fellow officer, his underworld adversaries seize their chance to bring him to heel. ...

This, the third novel in the Factory Series, sees Raymond's nameless detective leave London for a remote village called Thornhill, where he's meant to be looking into the disappearance of a local doctor's wife. How The Dead Live is a haunting, fantastical novel, with a hellish country house at its centre; a mystery with little interest in the mystery, a police procedural with almost no procedure. Instead, and as ever with Raymond, it's a brilliantly unsettling investigation into love and d...

When £17,000 goes missing after a dubious delivery, it isn't long before two thugs catch up with the man responsible. But not everyone's going home alive after they confront him in a seedy Soho bar.

Ten days to Christmas and Tracey Uphill, aged eight, hasn't come home from Sunday school. Her mother, a pretty young prostitute, is desperate. Enter Detective Inspector Jack Frost, sloppy, scruffy and insubordinate. To help him investigate the case of the missing child, Frost has been assigned a new sidekick, the Chief Constable's nephew. Fresh to provincial Denton in an oversmart suit, Detective Constable Clive Barnard is an easy target for Frost's withering satire.Assisted and an...

Discover the classic mystery from Dick Francis, one of the greatest thriller writers of all time'A galloping good yarn, as fast paced as any horse race an utterly entertaining' 5***** Reader Review'Fast paced action from start to finish, Dick Francis is the champion author' 5***** Reader Review'A keep you up all night book, I could hardly bear to put this down' 5***** Reader Review______

‘Reginald Hill stands head and shoulders above any other writer of homebred crime fiction’ ObserverPI can mean many things, but can it really mean a balding, middle-aged lathe operator from a high rise in Luton? Joe Sixsmith thinks it can.His Aunt Mirabelle thinks you’d have to be crazy to hire him, and Joe’s current clients certainly fit the bill. One’s confessing to the brutal murder of his whole family; another thinks she’s a witch. Next to them, the two heavies who beli...

With her abusive ex-husband in prison, Jane Cowan finally has the confidence to accept a new job: head teacher of the primary school in the Kentish village of Wrayford. But her new life is soon disrupted when a mysterious intruder breaks into her school and then later when a child is badly hurt in the playground - only Jane suspects that her fall was not accidental. Are the two incidents connected?After another child suffers life-threatening injuries, Jane must become the pursuer an...

New parents read on... Have you ever wondered, as you look down lovingly at your sleeping baby, what's really going on in that tiny mind? At last a baby tells all... How to be a Little Sod is a baby's eye view of the world - a week-by-week diary of that first traumatic year of life, which makes it quite clear who's suffering the traumas. This bestselling book is absolutely guaranteed to be of no practical use to new parents - but it has helped thousands to get through those disruptive earl...

An outrageously funny novel of adventure, sex, corruption, and crime from one of the greatest British authors of the twentieth century.Michael Cullen is proud to be a bastard. His first memories are of the war, when his mother welcomed every soldier in Britain into her house, and young Michael hid beneath her bed to let the rocking of the springs lull him to sleep. By the time he's eighteen, he's got a pregnant girlfriend, and is staring down a long life of working-...