Washoe County Library System

“Ms. George proves that the classiest crime writers are true novelists.”—The New York Times

Award-winning author Elizabeth George gives us an early glimpse into the lives of Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, forensic scientist Simon Allcourt-St. James, and Lady Helen Clyde in a superlative mystery that is also a fascinating inquiry into the crimes of the heart. Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton,

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Murder at Boundary Cottage. The townspeople would have said Larking, with the stone rectory and thatched farmhouses, was typical of a thousand other English villages. As it happened, this was true. And everyone in Larking thought they knew everything about everyone else. In that they found they were mistaken...especially the morning the postman found Grace Jenkins murdered. She ahd lived quietly at Boundary Cottage for twenty-one years. But there...

Scotland Yard's Inspector Ian Rutledge brought the Great War home with him, and its horrors haunt him still. On New Year's Eve 1919, he finds a brass cartridge casing, similar to countless others he'd seen on the battlefield, on the steps of a friend's house. Soon there are more, purposely placed where he is sure to discover them. Unexpectedly drawn away from London to a small Northamptonshire village, he investigates the strange case of a local constable...

An unusual case begins for Inspector Hannasyde when a corpse is found in the stocks on an English village green.

""Now tell us about your crime novel. Take my advice and don't try to be intellectual over it. What the public likes is blood." The Surrays and their five children form a prolific writing machine, with scores of treatises, reviews, and crime thrillers published under their family name. Following a rare convergence of the whole household at their Oxfordshire home, Ruth―middle sister who writes "books which are just books"― decides to spend some...

Will's first thought when he saw the man's face: it was like a glove that had been pulled inside out. When police detective, Will Grayson and his partner, Helen Walker, are called upon to investigate the violent death of Stephen Bryan, a gay Cambridge academic, their first thoughts are off an ill-judged sexual encounter, of rough trade gone wrong. But as their investigation widens, their attention focuses on the biography Bryan was writing about the...

Combe Island off the Cornish coast has a bloodstained history of piracy and cruelty but now, privately owned, it offers respite to over-stressed men and women in positions of high authority who require privacy and guaranteed security. But the peace of Combe is violated when one of the distinguished visitors is bizarrely murdered. Commander Adam Dalgliesh is called in to solve the mystery quickly and discreetly, but at a difficult time for him and...

From the Collins Crime Club archive, the second Inspector French novel by Freeman Wills Crofts, once dubbed The King of Detective Story Writers.THE RETURN OF INSPECTOR FRENCH. When young Maxwell Cheyne discovers that a series of mishaps are the result of unwelcome attention from a dangerous gang of criminals, he teams up with a young woman who is determined to help him outwit them. But when she disappears, he finally decides to go to Scotland Yard...

When thirteen-year-old Matthew Whately goes missing from Bredgar Chambers, a prestigious public school in the heart of West Sussex, aristocratic Inspector Thomas Lynley receives a call for help from the lad's housemaster, who also happens to be an old school chum. Thus, the inspector, his partner, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, and forensic scientist Simon Allcourt-St. James find themselves once again outside their jurisdiction and deeply involved...