French Thrillers

Summer 1923. Lady Eleanor Swift is finally persuaded by her butler, Clifford, to take a villa in the south of France for the season. She plans to do what a glamorous lady abroad should: long lunches on the balcony followed by lazy afternoons lounging by the pool. But when Clifford examines the wine cellar, he discovers there are no decent reds, but there is a very dead body. The victim is famous American movie-star Rex Armstrong. Poor Rex seems to have been stabbed with a sword from the film set. So how did he end up in Eleanor’s villa?

Nancy North and her boyfriend Felix are making the move across London to Harlesden. A new flat, a new area, a new start. Because while Nancy is fine now, she wasn’t fine before. But settling into the new flat and meeting the new neighbours isn’t helped by Felix’s hovering concern. She is all right. She is sticking to her breathing exercises and doctor-prescribed help. So, when their new neighbour Kira Mullen is found dead by suicide, Felix is understandably worried about Nancy’s frame of mind.

When he was 12 years old, Adam Ryan went playing in the woods one day with his two best friends. He never saw them again. Their bodies were never found, and Adam himself was discovered with his back pressed against an oak tree and his shoes filled with blood. He had no memory of what had happened. Twenty years on, Rob Ryan - the child who came back - is a detective in the Dublin police force. He's changed his name. No one knows about his past.

Tax cheats, beware: The Treasury Department's Criminal Investigations Division has a new special agent on its payroll. A recovering tomboy with a head for numbers, Tara's fast becoming the Annie Oakley of the IRS-kicking ass, taking social security numbers, and keeping the world safe for honest taxpayers. Or else. Tara's latest mission finds her in hot pursuit of ice-cream vendor Joseph "Joe Cool" Cullen. Along with frozen treats he's selling narcotics-and failing to report his ill-gotten gains on his tax returns. Over Tara's dead body.

Late spring, 1936. As Kitty Underhay steps onto the sun-drenched station platform in Nice, on orders from Whitehall to track down a missing man, she hopes there will still be time to lie by the pool, preferably with a cocktail in hand. But when she and her husband Matt take a brief evening stroll, instead of finding a perfect croissant, they stumble across a body. Kitty and Matt quickly realise it is Fred Bennett, the man from Whitehall they were hoping to find. Had he simply drunk too much fabulous French wine, or is something fishy going on in this seaside city?

Scarborough House is haunted, and it's not doing much for Donovan Scarborough's investment portfolio. No one wants to buy a place with levitating crockery, or (the wrong kind of) rhythmic pounding throughout the night. Luckily, Melody "I-See-Dead-People" Bittersweet has just launched her own ghostbusting agency with best friend Marina, geeky, keen Arthur, and a one-eared pug called Lestat. They're quick to take the case, even if it has already sort of (definitely) been given to Leo Dark, Melody's rakish, despicable ex.

Jack is stunned to receive a call from his estranged mother, Sybil, asking him to drop everything and come to France. Together with Flora, his fellow sleuth, they pack their suitcases, dreaming of fragrant lavender fields and freshly baked pain au chocolat. It’s only when they arrive that they discover the shocking truth—Sybil’s friend was killed on a street in Paris, and she is desperate for their help.

Still traumatised by her brush with a psychopath, Detective Cassie Maddox transfers out of the murder squad and starts a relationship with fellow detective Sam O'Neill. When he calls her to the scene of his new case, she is shocked to find that the murdered girl is her double. What's more, her ID shows she is Lexie Madison - the identity Cassie used years ago as an undercover detective.

Paris 1946: Sabine Brouillette is a war crimes investigator with the French secret service. She lost her family, including her young son, when her Resistance circuit was betrayed near the end of the war. New evidence comes to light that the traitor was a British double agent who went by the codename 'the Black Fox'. Now her quest for revenge has a single focus: find the Black Fox and kill him.

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.

Blue Laurence has escaped the prison of her aunt's mansion to join the Magnifico Family Circus, a travelling troupe that brings glamour and laughter to country towns gripped by the Depression. Blue hides her crippled legs and scars behind the sparkle of a mermaid's costume; but she's not the only member of the circus hiding a dark secret. The unquenchable Madame Zlosky creates as well as foresees futures. The bearded lady is a young man with laughing eyes. A headless skeleton dangles in the House of Horrors. And somewhere a murderer is waiting...to strike again.

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....

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 Red Room is a terrifying and gripping psychological thriller from the Top Ten bestselling author, Nicci French. Enter the Red Room - where nightmares become reality. He almost took your life. Now his is in your hands… After psychologist Kit Quinn is brutally attacked by a prisoner, she is determined to get straight back to work. When the police want her help in linking the man who attacked her to a series of murders, she refuses to simply accept the obvious.

Killing Me Softly, by the acclaimed and best-selling author Nicci French, is a terrifying journey into the heart of obsession. You have everything. But you give it up for an affair. You're in passionate love. And grave danger.... Alice Loudon couldn't resist abandoning her old, safe life for a wild affair. And in Adam Tallis, a rugged mountaineer with a murky past, she finds a man who can teach her things about herself that she never even suspected. But sexual obsession has its dark side - and so does Adam.

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.

Ce matin-là, Vital Bujold a repêché le corps d’une femme qui, jadis, avait viré le cœur des hommes à l’envers. En Gaspésie, la vérité se fait rare, surtout sur les quais de pêche. Les interrogatoires dérivent en placotages, les indices se dispersent sur la grève, les faits s’estompent dans la vague, et le sergent Moralès, enquêteur dans cette affaire, aurait bien besoin d’un double scotch.

In Broken Harbour, a ghost estate outside Dublin - half-built, half-inhabited, half-abandoned - two children and their father are dead. The mother is on her way to intensive care. Scorcher Kennedy is given the case because he is the Murder squad's star detective. At first he and his rookie partner, Richie, think this is a simple one: Pat Spain was a casualty of the recession, so he killed his children, tried to kill his wife Jenny, and finished off with himself.

This is the story of a rifleman's resourcefulness in a single-handed war against the forces of Napoleon. Separated from his regiment, he uses a band of undisciplined Portuguese guerrillas to battle his way back to his own lines.

Lorsque Gabby, son ancienne amie de fac, l’invite à passer les fêtes en Écosse, dans sa maison isolée au bord du lac, Sasha sait que c’est une mauvaise idée. Douze ans auparavant, alors que Sasha et ses cinq meilleurs amis s’amusaient la veille de Noël, un drame a fait basculer leur amitié à tout jamais. Un drame si terrible que depuis ce soir-là, Sasha n’a plus eu aucun contact avec ses anciens camarades.