Justice is worth every sacrifice.Part 2 of 8 in the chilling, high-octane FBI thriller TOUGH JUSTICE from NYT bestselling author Carla Cassidy and Tyler Anne Snell, Carol Ericson and Gail Barrett.He’s got his eye on her . . . and won’t quit until she’s dead!Special Agent Lara Grant is back in her enemy’s sights, but this time she’s not alone. She has a brand-new team and Lara knows she’ll need to trust them with her life. Starting now.When a lead becomes a victim, Lara and her team are thrown. Lara put Moretti away for life – so how can a guy who is in prison still be pulling strings? There’s only one way to find out.But when Lara comes face-to-face with the monster from her past, will she get answers? Or unleash hell?Tough Justice: Exposed (Part 1 of 8) by Carla CassidyTough Justice: Watched (Part 2 of 8) by Tyler Anne SnellTough Justice: Burned (Part 3 of 8) by Carol EricsonTough Justice: Trapped (Part 4 of 8) by Gail BarrettTough Justice: Twisted (Part 5 of 8) by Gail BarrettTough Justice: Ambushed (Part 6 of 8) by Carol EricsonTough Justice: Betrayed (Part 7 of 8) by Tyler Anne SnellTough Justice: Hunted (Part 8 of 8) by Carla Cassidy
When the hunter becomes the hunted…Serial-killer hunter Nick Shade built his legendary career chasing monsters—sadistic criminals with a gruesome thirst for death. When he rescued Montgomery detective Bobbie Gentry from horrific captivity and helped her reclaim her life, he didn't intend to be a hero. Or a target. But now a copycat murderer haunts him, and reuniting with Bobbie is his best chance at neutralizing the threat.Bobbie can't forget the nightmares of her trauma—or the man who saved her. Working with Nick to outmaneuver the person behind a deadly vendetta feeds her hope that there's more to her world than ghosts and destruction. Maybe joining Nick's search for a killer is about gratitude. Maybe it's nothing more than cold revenge. But the only way they can protect themselves is to trust each other.
The delight of Christmas shoppers at the unveiling of a London department store’s famous window display turns to horror when one of the mannequins is discovered to be a dead body…Mander’s Department Store in London’s West End is so famous for its elaborate window displays that on Monday mornings crowds gather to watch the window blinds being raised on a new weekly display. On this particular Monday, just a few weeks before Christmas, the onlookers quickly realise that one of the figures is in fact a human corpse, placed among the wax mannequins. Then a second body is discovered, and this striking tableau begins a baffling and complex case for Inspector Devenish of Scotland Yard.Vernon Loder’s first book The Mystery at Stowe had endeared him in 1928 as ‘one of the most promising recruits to the ranks of detective story writers’. Inspired by the glamour of the legendary Selfridges store on London’s Oxford Street, The Shop Window Murders followed, an entertaining and richly plotted example of the Golden Age deductive puzzle novel, one of his best mysteries for bafflement and ingenuity.This Detective Club classic is introduced by Nigel Moss, who looks at how Loder’s books are still acclaimed today by reviewers for being ‘as different from the standard whodunits of his colleagues as champagne is to soda water.’
‘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 believe Joe is hiding their illicit drugs seem almost normal.As Joe stumbles his way through bodies, gangsters and hostile police officers, he is protected by a combination of sheer luck and the help of a new lady friend. And soon it seems like he might just surpass everyone’s expectations…
‘Few writers in the genre today have Hill’s gifts: formidable intelligence, quick humour, compassion and a prose style that blends elegance and grace’ Sunday TimesJoe Sixsmith is going west, though only as far the Llanffugiol Choral Festival in Wales. But his plans are interrupted when they happen upon a burning house with a mysterious woman trapped inside.Joe risks life and limb to rescue the woman, only to be roped in to the investigation by the police officer in charge. Suddenly surrounded by a bevy of suspicious characters, he soon realizes that this case is much more than just arson.Aided by little more than his acute instinct for truth, Joe moves forward over the space of a single weekend to uncover crimes which have been buried for years.
This brand new edition of the first novel to feature the officer and gentleman detective Colonel Wickham Gore includes the first ever reprint of the only Colonel Gore novella, Too Much Imagination.Colonel Gore is reunited with old friends at a dinner party to mark his return from service in Africa, but is shocked to discover that one of them has fallen victim to a callous blackmailer. When the antagonist is found dead, Gore finds that civilian life can be as challenging as anything in the army, especially when one of your friends may have become a killer . . . but which one?Once famous in the West End and on Broadway for plays written as ‘Anthony Wharton’, Dublin-born Alexander McAllister had become a publican in Surrey when, as ‘Lynn Brock’, his writing career took off again with the creation of country detective Colonel Wickham Gore. Described by Rose Mcaulay as ‘a very clever writer: a gift for drawing life-like people and a lively sense of dramatic incident’, Brock became a pillar of the Golden Age with his Colonel Gore whodunits and pioneering psychological novels including the lurid Nightmare.This Detective Club classic is introduced by Rob Reef, author of the John Stableford mysteries, and for the first time reprints the only Colonel Gore novella, Too Much Imagination, a country house murder story from a rare 1926 American pulp magazine.
The classic crime novel featuring blind detective Max Carrados, whose popularity rivalled that of Sherlock Holmes, complete with a new introduction and an extra short story.In his dark little curio shop Julian Joolby is weaving an extravagant scheme to smash the financial machinery of the world by flooding the Oriental market with forged banknotes. But this monster of wickedness has not reckoned on Max Carrados, the suave and resourceful investigator whose visual impairment gives him heightened powers of perception that ordinary detectives overlook.Max Carrados was a blind detective whose stories by Ernest Bramah appeared from 1914 alongside Sherlock Holmes in the Strand Magazine, in which they often had top billing. Described by George Orwell as among ‘the only detective stories since Poe that are worth re-reading’, the 25 stories were collected in three hugely popular volumes, culminating in a full-length novel, The Bravo of London (1934), in which Carrados engages in a battle of wits against a fiendish plot that threatens to overthrow civilisation itself.This Detective Club classic is introduced by Tony Medawar, who investigates the impact on the genre of Bramah’s blind detective and the relative obscurity of this, the only Max Carrados novel. This edition also includes the sole uncollected short story ‘The Bunch of Violets’.As well as on the page, the Max Carrados stories have been a firm favourite on television and film, played over the years by (among others) Robert Stephens, Simon Callow and Pip Torrens, and read on audio by Arthur Darvill and Stephen Fry.
This exciting thriller by the late Frank Froest, himself a detective of international fame, will satisfy the most exacting of detective story connoisseurs. Against a familiar London background we have here a tale of breath-taking adventure – knifing, arson, racing-taxicabs, and shooting-to-kill.Lost in a London fog, young Jimmie Hallett is accosted by a frightened woman who hands him a package and flees. Within hours, he is being questioned about the murder of the girl’s father and a dangerous international conspiracy. Can genial detective Weir Menzies, even with all the resources of Scotland Yard behind him, succeed in outwitting a faceless gang of organised thieves and killers?Frank Froëst, the highly decorated Superintendent of Scotland Yard’s C.I.D., began his retirement from the Metropolitan Police by writing The Grell Mystery, acclaimed as the first crime novel to incorporate authentic police procedures. With George Dilnot, co-author of the story collection The Crime Club, Froëst wrote one more novel, the ambitious and thrilling The Rogues’ Syndicate, published in 1916 and also released as a silent movie, Millionaire Hallet’s Adventure. The book was republished in April 1930 by the Detective Story Club, but was inadvertently sourced from an abridged, Americanised version called The Maelstrom.This Detective Club classic restores the full text of the British first edition, and includes an introduction by the Detective Story Club’s original series editor, F. T. Smith.
From the Collins Crime Club archive, the third standalone novel by Freeman Wills Crofts, dubbed ‘The King of Detective Story Writers’.Seymour Merriman’s holiday in France comes to an abrupt halt when his motorcycle starts leaking petrol. Following a lorry to find fuel, he discovers that it belongs to an English company making timber pit-props for coal mines back home. His suspicions of illegal activity are aroused when he sees the exact same lorry with a different number plate – and confirmed later with the shocking discovery of a body. What began as amateur detective work ends up as a job for Inspector Willis of Scotland Yard, a job requiring tenacity, ingenuity and guile . . .Freeman Wills Crofts’ transition from civil engineer on the Irish railways to world-renowned master of the detective mystery began with The Cask when he was fully 40 years old; but it was his third novel, the baffling The Pit-Prop Syndicate, that was singled out by his editors in 1930 as the first for inclusion in Collins’ prestigious new series of reprints ‘for crime connoisseurs’.This Detective Club classic is introduced by John Curran, author of The Hooded Gunman, and includes the bonus of an exclusive short story by Crofts, ‘Danger in Shroude Valley’.
A sensational wartime crime novel about a BBC announcer who abuses his position to commit crimes against the rich and famous…By day Ernest Bisham is a velvet-voiced announcer for the BBC; the whole country recognises the sound of his meticulous pronouncements. By night, however, Mr Bisham is a cat-burglar, careless about his loot, but revelling in the danger and excitement of his running contest with Scotland Yard. But as he gets away with more and more daring escapades, there will come a time when he goes too far . . .When Donald Henderson’s Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper caused something of a sensation, his publishers were keen to capitalise on their author’s popularity, quickly reissuing The Announcer (originally published under his pen-name ‘D. H. Landels’) with the more alluring title A Voice Like Velvet. Despite a small edition of just 3,000 copies, it was his best reviewed work, as suspenseful and offbeat as his earlier success.This Detective Club classic includes an introduction by The Golden Age of Murder’s Martin Edwards, who explores Henderson’s own BBC career and the long established tradition of books about gentlemen crooks. The book also includes a rare Henderson short story, the chilling ‘The Alarm Bell’.