French Crime Fiction

Cal Hooper thought a fixer-upper in a remote Irish village would be the perfect escape. After 25 years in the Chicago police force and a bruising divorce, he just wants to build a new life in a pretty spot with a good pub where nothing much happens. But then a local kid comes looking for his help. His brother has gone missing and no one, least of all the police, seems to care. Cal wants nothing to do with any kind of investigation, but somehow he can't make himself walk away.

The course of Frank Mackey's life was set by one defining moment when he was 19. The moment his girlfriend, Rosie Daly, failed to turn up for their rendezvous in Faithful Place, failed to run away with him to London as they had planned. Frank never heard from her again. Twenty years on, Frank is still in Dublin, working as an undercover cop. He's cut all ties with his dysfunctional family. Until his sister calls to say that Rosie's suitcase has been found....

Monday, the lowest point of the week. A day of dark impulses. A day to snatch a child from the streets.... The abduction of five-year-old Matthew Farraday provokes national outcry and a desperate police hunt. And when his face is splashed over the newspapers, psychotherapist Frieda Klein is left troubled: one of her patients has been relating dreams in which he has a hunger for a child. A child he can describe in perfect detail, a child the spitting image of Matthew. Detective Chief Inspector Karlsson doesn't take Frieda's concerns seriously until a link emerges with an unsolved abduction twenty years ago....

It’s a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. They’re coming to get rich, but what they bring is trouble. Waiting for them is Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago detective who moved to rural Ireland looking for some peace. He’s found it, more or less – in his relationship with local woman Lena, and the bond he’s formed with tearaway teenager Trey Reddy. As the two men circle the townland with talk of a scheme to find gold in the mountainside, Cal gets ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey.

J’ai lâché le volant une fraction de seconde seulement. Juré. Je ne l’ai pas fait exprès. Pas que je m’en sois voulu, de toute manière. J’étais plutôt indifférente. Sauf que ça allait m’occasionner davantage de problèmes. Je l’ai senti à l’instant où ma voiture a fait une embardée vers la droite. Vers ce piéton qui ne m’a jamais vue venir. Non mais, que fabriquait-il là, aussi, en plein milieu de la nuit?

One night changes everything for Toby. A brutal attack leaves him traumatised, unsure even of the person he used to be. He seeks refuge at his uncle's rambling home, the Ivy House, filled with cherished memories of wild-strawberry summers and teenage parties with his cousins. But not long after Toby's arrival, a discovery is made. A skull, tucked neatly inside the old wych elm in the garden.

Antoinette Conway, the tough, abrasive detective from The Secret Place, is still on the Murder Squad, but only just. She's partnered up with Stephen Moran now, and that's going well - but the rest of her working life isn't. Antoinette doesn't play well with others, and there's a vicious running campaign in the squad to get rid of her.

When beautiful and vivacious Charlotte Salter fails to turn up to her husband Alec’s 50th birthday party, her kids are worried, but Alec is not. As the days pass and there’s still no word from Charlie, her daughter, Etty, and her sons, Niall, Paul and Ollie, all struggle to come to terms with her disappearance. How can anyone just vanish without a trace?

The photo shows a boy who was murdered a year ago.The caption says, "I know who killed him". Detective Stephen Moran hasn't seen Holly Mackey since she was a nine-year-old witness to the events of Faithful Place. Now she's 16 and she's shown up outside his squad room, with a photograph and a story. Even in her exclusive boarding school, in the graceful golden world that Stephen has always longed for, bad things happen and people have secrets.

In a north London high street, a runaway vehicle crashes to a halt. The man in the driving seat was murdered a week earlier. On Hampstead Heath, a bonfire blazes: in the flames lies the next victim. As autumn leaves fall, a serial killer runs amok in the capital, playing games with the police. The death toll is rising fast, and the investigation is floundering. But this is no ordinary killer, and every new victim is intended as a message to just one woman. Because psychologist Frieda Klein is in hiding. And someone is coming to find her....

When a corpse is found floating in the River Thames, the police can at least be sure that identifying the victim will be straightforward. Around the dead man's wrist is a hospital band. On it are the words 'Dr F. Klein'. But psychotherapist Frieda Klein is very much alive. And, after evidence linking her to the murder is discovered, she becomes the prime suspect.

It was an open-and-shut case when 18-year-old Hannah Docherty was arrested for the brutal murder of her family; she's been incarcerated ever since. When psychotherapist Frieda Klein is asked to assess Hannah, she reluctantly agrees. What she finds horrifies her.... Frieda is haunted by the thought that Hannah might be as much of a victim as her family. Frieda soon begins to realise that she's up against someone who'll go to any lengths to protect themselves....

When psychotherapist Frieda Klein left the sleepy Suffolk coastal town in which she grew up she never intended to return. Left behind were friends, family, lives, and loves but alongside them, painful memories; a past she wouldn't allow to destroy her. Then, years later, an old classmate appears in London asking Frieda to help her teenage daughter and long-buried memories resurface. Death soon follows, leaving Frieda no choice but to return home to confront her past.

Bruno Courreges is chief of police of the lovely town of St Denis in the Dordogne. His main wish is to keep the local people safe and his town free from crime. But crime has a way of finding its way to him. For 30 years, Bruno's boss, chief of detectives Jalipeau, known as J-J, has been obsessed with his first case. It was never solved and Bruno knows that this failure continues to haunt J-J. A young male body was found in the woods near St Denis and never identified. For all these years, J-J has kept the skull as a reminder. He calls him 'Oscar'.

Ike Randolph has been out of jail for 15 years, with not so much as a speeding ticket since. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid. The last thing he expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah's white husband, Derek. Ike had never fully accepted his son but is devastated by his loss. Derek's father, Buddy Lee, was almost as ashamed of Derek for being gay as Derek was ashamed that his father was a criminal. Buddy Lee still has contacts in the underworld, though...and he wants to know who killed his boy.

A 15-year-old girl has gone missing in the middle of the night, and the following morning her boyfriend is found brutally murdered in his home. Was the girl responsible, or is she also a victim of a killer? But who would want two teenagers dead? After personal tragedy finds police detective Gemma Woodstock in the coastal town of Fairhaven with her son in tow, she has begged to be part of a murder investigation rather than take the time to figure out how to handle the next stage of her life.

When a skeleton is unearthed in the Martellos' garden, Jane Martello is shocked to learn it's that of her childhood friend Natalie, who went missing 25 years ago. Encouraged by a therapist to recover lost memories, Jane hopes to find out what really took place when she was a child - and what happened to Natalie. But in learning the truth about her and Natalie's past, is Jane putting her own future at terrible risk?

Psychotherapist Frieda Klein's home is her refuge until she returns to find it has become a disturbingly bloody crime scene. Beneath the floorboards the police have found the body of a man she had hired to help protect her. When those closest to Frieda begin to be targeted, the picture becomes more skewed. Unless Frieda can find and stop whoever is threatening her friends and family, her love and loyalty could come at a truly fatal cost.

Bruno's archaeologist friend Clothilde asks him to help Abby, an American woman who wants to settle in the Perigord after a grim divorce back in the United States. Abby hopes to become an official tour guide in the region, specializing in American connections, from Thomas Jefferson to Henry Miller, from the Lindbergh family to the paratroopers who dropped into the region in the summer of 1944 to support the Resistance. But that long ago summer suddenly pushes its way into the present with the revelation of three sets of bones buried deep in the woods.

Young and athletic, London cycle courier Astrid Bell is bad luck - for other people. First Astrid's neighbour Peggy Farrell accidentally knocks her off her bike - and not long after is found bludgeoned to death in an alley. Then, a few days later, Astrid is asked to pick up a package from a wealthy woman called Ingrid de Soto, only to find the client murdered in the hall of her luxurious home. For the police, it's more than coincidence. For Astrid and her six housemates, it's the beginning of a nightmare.