Missing Joseph

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Elizabeth George

Elena Weaver was a surprise to anyone meeting her for the first time. In her clingy dresses and dangling earrings she exuded a sexuality at odds with the innocence projected by the unicorn posters on her walls. While her embittered mother fretted about her welfare from her home in London, in Cambridge--where Elena was a student at St. Stephen's College--her father and his second wife each had their own very different image of the girl. As for Elena, she lived a life of casual and intense physical and emotional relationships, with scores to settle and goals to achieve--until someone, lying in wait along the route she ran every morning, bludgeoned her to death.Unwilling to turn the killing over to the local police, the university calls in New Scotland Yard. Thus, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, enter the rarefied world of Cambridge University, where academic gowns often hide murderous intentions.For both officers, the true identity of Elena Weaver proves elusive. Each relationship the girl left behind casts new light both on Elena and on those people who appeared to know her best--from an unsavory Swedish-born Shakespearean professor to the brooding head of the Deaf Students Union.What's more, Elena's father, a Cambridge professor under consideration for a prestigious post, is a man with his own dark secrets. While his past sins make him neurotically dedicated to Elena and blind to her blacker side, present demons drive him toward betrayal.From the Paperback edition.

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Elizabeth George

At the great Scottish manor house of Westerbrae, a London theatrical company gathers to hear a controversial new play. By the evening's end, the beautiful playwright has been brutally murdered in her bed-and Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley becomes immediately embroiled in a crime whose genesis is tangled in the obligations of love and the consequences of betrayal. With orders to keep the case from the press as long as possible because of the notoriety of the principal suspects, Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers travel to the isolated estate. Among their suspects: the most powerful theatrical producer in Britain, two of the nation's most beloved stars, and the woman Lynley loves. For Lynley, the investigation requires all the delicacy he can muster-and it forces him to face a personal dilemma as well. For present at Westerbrae on the night of the murder is Helen Clyde, a woman with whom Lynley shares a complicated history and an enduring friendship that has deepened into love. The fact that she occupied the room next to the murder victim cannot be overlooked. The fact that she did not occupy it alone cannot be ignored. Fighting to overcome a jealousy that threatens to cloud his judgment and emotions so troubled they could lead to fatal mistakes, Lynley finds himself beset at every turn by family scandals, fierce theatrical rivalries, and shattering revelations. When the living occupy his thoughts more powerfully than the dead, the question becomes whether he can walk the treacherous line between the clinical detachment of a professional investigator and the seething turmoil of a lover. For in the murder house, motives run very deep indeed. Outraged over what she sees as the kid-glove handling of an upper-crust murder, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers strikes out on her own, putting her career at risk and questioning her deepest professional loyalty as she begins a relentless search into the secrets that haunt not one family but two, and hold them to silence. Filled with menace and suspense, Payment in Blood is as much rooted in the unexplored regions of the human heart as in the unforgiving Scottish countryside, where the blood that binds can also kill.

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Reginald Hill

The internationally bestselling author of "Little Indiscretions" pens a haunting psychological thriller involving cruelty, secrets, and murder at an exclusive private school.

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Ruth Rendell

A classic Chief Inspector Wexford MysteryThe woman's body lay between a silver Escort and a dark-blue Lancia. Concealed by a shroud of dirty brown velvet, it looked like a heap of rags.In the desolate subterranean Barringdean Shopping Centre, Reg Wexford had been too preoccupied to notice anything out of the ordinary, just the time and a red car driving past him too fast.Burden called him home at with the grim news later that evening. The woman had been attacked from behind, perhaps with a thin length of cord wire. Before Inspector Wexford can delve deeper into the curious homicide, he, too, faces death. And Burden, for a while conducting the investigation without the help of his chief's instinctive analytical genius, will blunder down a number of blind alleys.