Showing results by publisher "Isis Publishing Ltd" in Mystery

When Effie Coulstoun drops dead on the floor of her bar in a small Spanish town mid-business meeting, her daughter Daniella feels it’s her duty to return for the funeral. But Daniella has been estranged from her mother for over 20 years. Daniella is soon confronted by a hostile group of expat misfits who, along with Effie, are involved in a multi-million-pound property scam. The expats are threatening to implicate Daniella to save themselves. A Spanish detective is investigating Effie’s death. He’s convinced Daniella knows more than she is telling.

1898. When Juan's father is killed while working as a photographer in Cuba, the young man is left with nothing but his last photos amid the chaos as the war between Spain and America escalates. But the images reveal a sinister truth to his father's last moments, and Juan soon realises his death was no accident. The young man travels to Scotland to grieve with his surviving family and soon immerses himself in the study of photography and pioneers a self-timer. When this technology inadvertently solves a crime, it is not long before the device draws the attention of law enforcement.

When the body of a man in 18th-century Highland dress is discovered on the site of the Battle of Culloden, Journalist Rebecca Connolly takes up the story for the Chronicle. Meanwhile, a film being made about the '45 Rebellion has enraged the right-wing group Spirit of the Gael, which is connected to a shadowy group called Black Dawn linked to death threats and fake anthrax deliveries to Downing Street and Holyrood. When a second body - this time in the Redcoat uniform of the government army - is found in Inverness, Rebecca finds herself drawn ever deeper into the mystery.

Jane Ferguson suffers from horrific nightmares which she claims not to be able to explain. And when her traumatised six-year-old daughter finds Jane dead, hanging by the neck in the hallway of the family's seaside home, it is assumed she took her own life. But routine police enquiries reveal evidence indicating that Jane has been murdered, and her businessman husband, Felix, commodore of the local yacht club, becomes the chief suspect. Called in to launch a major inquiry, Detective Inspector David Vogel, discovers that nothing connected with Jane Ferguson's death is as it seems.

Secretly Rosie Strange has always thought herself a little bit more interesting than most people - the legacy her family has bequeathed her is definitely so, she's long believed. But then life takes a peculiar turn when the Strange legacy turns out not just to be the Essex Witch Museum, but perhaps some otherworldly gifts that Rosie finds difficult to fathom.

In 1752, Seamus a'Ghlynne, James of the Glen, was executed for the murder of government man Colin Campbell. He was almost certainly innocent. When banners are placed at his gravesite claiming that his namesake, James Stewart, is innocent of murder, reporter Rebecca Connolly smells a story. The young Stewart has been in prison for 10 years for the brutal murder of his lover, lawyer and politician Murdo Maxwell. Rebecca soon discovers that Maxwell believed he was being followed prior to his murder and his phones were tapped.

Philadelphia, 1844. As violent tensions escalate between 'nativists' and recent Irish immigrants, Edgar Allan Poe’s fears for the safety of his wife, Virginia, and mother-in-law, Muddy, are compounded when he receives a parcel of mummified bird parts. Could his nemesis have returned to settle an old score? Just as odd is the arrival of Helena Loddiges, a young heiress who demands Poe’s help to discover why her lover died at the city’s docks on his return from an expedition to Peru.

When a body is discovered locked inside a church crypt, its throat torn out, the victim is quickly identified as 20-year-old Matthew Flynn, son of one of the city's leading entrepreneurs, who disappeared a year earlier. For forensic psychologist Kate Hanson, the evidence reveals careful planning but also loss of control. It makes no sense. Nor can she and her team agree as to motive. Is it drugs? Money? Sex? The only thing that's clear is that Matthew Flynn had been keeping secrets from his family and friends. Then Kate discovers that another young man is missing. And the case takes a disturbing new twist....

The Cornish village of St Petroc is the sort of place where people come to hide. Tom Killgannon is one such person. An ex-undercover cop, Tom is in the Witness Protection Programme, and St Petroc offers him a chance to live a safe and quiet life. Until he meets Lila. Lila is a 17-year-old runaway. When she breaks into Tom's house she takes more than just his money. His wallet holds everything about his new identity. He also knows that Lila is in danger from the travellers' commune she's been living at.

With his near-fatal stabbing almost a memory, DI Bob Valentine is settling back onto the force - until one of Ayrshire's darkest secrets is unearthed. The skeletal remains of a boy, his hands and feet cable-tied, turns up in a semifoetal position during routine drainage works. The boy is soon identified as a missing child from the 1980s, reopening a cold case that was previously thought unsolvable. When the remains of more children are unearthed, Valentine soon finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy linking the past and present through some of the most shocking crimes of his police career.

It was Mrs Croyden who had been taken by the idea of digging up the history of the family. It seemed to be the kind of thing that everyone was doing nowadays. And once started she became more and more enchanted by the project. Even her husband, George, having seen the ancient photograph of a most attractive girl, long since dead, was taken by the project. The snag was that even Great Aunt Maud, the owner of the photograph, had no idea what had happened to the beautiful girl named Isabella. Apparently she had completely vanished and to the rest of the family had simply become “The Unknown”. Would the mystery ever be solved?

The La Fleur restaurant has a slew of unusual phenomena. Bonnet-clad apparitions pass through walls, blood leaks from ceilings and rats besiege the dining room. Experts from the Great Essex Witch Museum are called in to quell these strange sights. But before Rosie Strange and Sam Stone can do their thing, events turn darker. For La Fleur's chef has been strung up and slaughtered like a pig. More oddly, the only witness, the owner's daughter Mary, swears blind a ghost did it.

When, a year after she went missing, the body of 19-year-old student Elizabeth Williams is discovered in a field near her college, Dr Kate Hanson and her colleagues are faced with a seemingly impossible challenge. With little in the way of forensic evidence, Kate realises that if she is to have any chance of discovering who killed Elizabeth, she must find out what motivated the killer, the reason behind the murder, the why.

Fear grips a town in Colorado as a murderer targets entire families in their own homes. As police and the FBI struggle to contain the situation, they bring in forensic investigator and serial killer expert Darby McCormick. What she finds is a brutal and elusive predator who stays one step ahead of their investigation. As Darby navigates the blood ties and broken promises that divide the locals, she knows that all the while the killer is watching, waiting and circling his next target: her.

What's an editor to do with so many demands? Do you deal with the morning's pile of manuscript submissions first? Or do you concentrate on your ex-lover, whose business partner has just been found dead in their art gallery, slumped over his desk with a gun in his hand? It's another day at Timmins & Ross publishing house, but when sharp-tongued editor Samantha Clair's CID boyfriend is brought in to investigate Frank Compton's death, her loyalties become stretched.

Jack Taylor has again hit rock bottom: one of his best friends is dead, the other has stopped speaking to him. But Jack isn't about to embark on a self-improvement plan. Instead he has taken up a vigilante case against a professor of literature who has a violent habit his friends in high places are only too happy to ignore. And when Jack rescues a preppy American student from a couple of kid thugs, he also unexpectedly gains a new sidekick.

In 1946 Regina Robichard is a rarity. A young New York civil rights lawyer working for Thurgood Marshall, Reggie stumbles across a letter asking her boss to investigate the case of a young black soldier whose body has been found floating in the river in Mississippi. For Reggie, justice is not the only draw to this case. The letter is signed by the reclusive M. P. Calhoun, author of one of the most banned books in the country, a book Reggie loved as a child.

In 2006, three-year-old Phoebe Piper went missing. Despite massive publicity, no trace of her was ever found. Seven years later, Molly Jackson, aged 10, finds her great uncle Dan dead in his bed. Molly remembers nothing of her early years, but she's been sure for ages that she is Phoebe. Now, finally, she has proof. Dan's death brings his sister Janice back to Norfolk where she's reunited with Molly's mother Suze, the daughter she gave up for adoption decades earlier.

For lecturer Sophie Rivers a writing course on the outskirts of Birmingham is a bit of a busman’s holiday. Still, creative inspiration might strike. But then, knowing Sophie’s luck, so might a murderer… She can hardly believe it when a fellow student is found dead in her room. And when a course tutor goes missing, it’s clear that one of the students might be interested in death as a reality rather than a literary concept. But who is responsible? Sophie can’t control her investigative instincts.

North East India, 1923. On the Night Mail to Jamalpur, a man is shot dead in a first class compartment. Detective Inspector Jim Stringer was sleeping in the next compartment along. Was he the intended target?Jim should have known that his secondment to the East Indian Railway would not be the working holiday he had hoped for. Aside from the Jamalpur shooting, someone is placing venomous snakes in the first class compartments of the railway.