Dead Lagoon

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J.A. Jance

Top ten New York Times bestselling author J.A. Jance brings us another unforgettable mystery featuring Seattle detective J.P. Beaumont, who is fighting to save a frightened child from a brutal murderer.What kind of monster would break into a man's home at night, then slaughter him and his family? The fact that the dead man was a model cop who was loved and respected by all only intensifies the horror. But the killer missed someone: a five-year-old boy who was hiding in the closet. Now word is being leaked out that the victim was "dirty." But Seattle P.D. Homicide Detective J.P. Beaumont isn't about to let anyone drag a murdered friend's reputation through the muck. And he'll put his own life on the firing line on the gang-ruled streets to save a terrified child who knows too much to live.

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Michael Dibdin

Ratking, Vendetta, Cabal, Dead Lagoon, Cosi Fan Tutti--in each of these masterfully suspenseful and atmospheric novels we have met Michael Dibdin's Italian Criminalpol officer Aurelio Zen. Intelligent and urbane (if a little weary), Zen galvanizes us not only with his ability to solve the most intractable crimes but also with his methodology. He is both devious and moral, a slave to the status quo and original in his thinking, amused by his own tor-por and surprised by his drive. Now, in The Long Finish, he is driven by something new: a steelyinstinct for self-preservation coupled with a love of good food and wine. After a riotous and heroic stint in Naples, Zen is back in Rome, meeting with a world-famous film director at the instruction of his superiors. In the privacy of a remarkably well stocked wine cellar, the director--whose influence clearly reaches beyond the entertainment industry--convinces Zen to arrange for the release of the scion of an important wine-growing family, who has been jailed for the murder of his own father. At stake for the director, a connoisseur of Piedmontese wines, is this year's vintage: only the jailed man can ensure the timely harvesting of his family's precious grapes. At stake for Zen: avoiding a posting to the dreaded Sicily.In Alba--an outwardly serene village set among rolling hills that are planted with vines for as far as the eye can see--Zen discovers that only spilled blood can separate a family from its land. And though murder here is rare, it is complex. But at least it's accompanied by heaping plates of pasta, generous shavings of white truffles, and bottomless glasses of wine. If only Zen can keep his policing skills as sharp as his palate is pampered. . . .From the Hardcover edition.

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Ed McBain

Two women are found murdered, several other young women are raped two or three times by the same man, and the men and women of the 87th precinct have their professional skills tested to the limit.

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P.D. James

When the quiet Little Vestry of St. Matthew's Church becomes the blood-soaked scene of a double murder, Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgliesh faces an intriguing conundrum: How did an upper-crust Minister come to lie, slit throat to slit throat, next to a neighborhood derelict of the lowest order? Challenged with the investigation of a crime that appears to have endless motives, Dalgliesh explores the sinister web spun around a half-burnt diary and a violet-eyed widow who is pregnant and full of malice--all the while hoping to fill the gap of logic that joined these two disparate men in bright red death. . . .