A SILENT VOW Spain, 2020. When ex-pat fugitive Jack Cleland watches his girlfriend die, gunned down in a pursuit involving officer Cristina Sanchez Pradell, he promises to exact his revenge by destroying the policewoman. A SILENT LIFE Cristina’s aunt Ana has been deaf-blind for the entirety of her adult life: the victim of a rare condition named Usher Syndrome. Ana is the centre of Cristina’s world — and of Cleland’s cruel plan. A SILENT DEATH John Mackenzie — an ingenious yet irascible Glaswegian investigator — is seconded to aid the Spanish authorities in their manhunt. He alone can silence Cleland before the fugitive has the last, bloody, word

In 1989, a killer dumped the body of twenty-year-old Lucie Martin into a picturesque lake in the West of France. Fourteen years later, during a summer heatwave, a drought exposed her remains — bleached bones amid the scorched mud and slime. No one was ever convicted of her murder. But now, forensic expert Enzo Macleod is reviewing this stone cold case — the toughest of those he has been challenged to solve. Yet when Enzo finds a flaw in the original evidence surrounding Lucie’s murder, he opens a Pandora’s box that not only raises old ghosts but endangers his entire family

A man is washed up on a deserted beach on the Hebridean Isle of Harris, barely alive and borderline hypothermic. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. The only clue to his identity is a map tracing a track called the Coffin Road. He does not know where it will lead him, but filled with dread, fear and uncertainty he knows he must follow it. A detective crosses rough Atlantic seas to a remote rock twenty miles west of the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. With a sense of foreboding he steps ashore where three lighthouse keepers disappeared more than a century before — a mystery that remains unsolved. But now there is a new mystery — a man found bludgeoned to death on that same rock, and DS George Gunn must find out who did it and why. A teenage girl lies in her Edinburgh bedroom, desperate to discover the truth about her father's death. Two years after the discovery of the pioneering scientist's suicide note, Karen Fleming still cannot accept that he would wilfully abandon her. And the more she discovers about the nature of his research, the more she suspects that others were behind his disappearance. Coffin Road follows three perilous journeys towards one shocking truth — and the realisation that ignorance can kill us

IF YOU FLEE FATE... When Detective Sime Mackenzie is sent from Montreal to investigate a murder on the remote Entry Island, 850 miles from the Canadian mainland, he leaves behind him a life of sleeplessness and regret. FATE WILL FIND YOU... But what had initially seemed an open-and-shut case takes on a disturbing dimension when he meets the prime suspect, the victim’s wife, and is convinced that he knows her — even though they have never met. And when his insomnia becomes punctuated by dreams of a distant Scottish past in another century, this murder in the Gulf of St. Lawrence leads him down a path he could never have foreseen, forcing him to face a conflict between his professional duty and his personal destiny

What has happened to Jacques Gaillard? The brilliant teacher who trained some of France's best and brightest at the Ecole Nationale d'Administration as future Prime Ministers and Presidents vanished ten years ago, presumably from Paris. Talk about your cold case. The mystery inspires a bet, one that Enzo Macleod, a biologist teaching in Toulouse instead of pursuing a brilliant career in forensics back home in Scotland can ill afford to lose. The wager is that Enzo can find out what happened to Jacques Gaillard by applying new science to an old case. Enzo comes to Paris to meet journalist Roger Raffin, the author of a book on seven celebrated unsolved murders, the assumption being that Gaillard is dead. He needs Raffin's notes. And armed with these, he begins his quest. It quickly has him touring landmarks such as the Paris catacombs and a chateau in Champagne, digging up relics and bones. Yes, Enzo finds Jacques Gaillard's head. The artifacts buried with the skull set him to interpreting the clues they provide and to following in someone's footsteps-maybe more than one someone-after the rest of Gaillard. And to reviewing some ancient and recent history. As with a quest, it's as much discovery as detection. Enzo proves to be an ace investigator, scientific and intuitive, and, for all his missteps, one who hits his goals including a painful journey toward greater self-awareness

Hidden Faces is a remarkable novel, a thriller of great sensitivity by an exciting new writer. Scottish reporter Colin Bannerman is sent to Brussels to write a series of articles about the Common Market. His editor asks him to stay at the home of a newspaper colleague for the duration of his visit. Bannerman dislikes the man, Slater, intensely but unexpectedly forms an attachment to Tania, Slater’s young, autistic daughter. Shortly after Bannerman’s arrival, Slater and a junior minister at the EEC, Robert Gryffe, are assassinated. Tania accidentally witnesses the crime and the murderer is given instructions to find and kill her. Meanwhile the local police are instructed to cover-up the double murder for political reasons. But Bannerman is determined to find out and reveal the truth

Husband and wife Niamh and Ruaridh Macfarlane co-own Ranish Tweed, a company that weaves its own special variety of Harris cloth. When Niamh learns of Ruaridh’s affair with the Russian designer Irina Vetriv and witnesses the pair be blown up by a car bomb in Paris, her life is left in ruins. She returns to the Isle of Lewis with her husband’s remains and finds herself the prime suspect in her murder case. A French detective is sent to the Hebrides to look into her past and soon Niamh and the detective are working together to discover the truth

A CITY IN QUARANTINE London, the epicenter of a global pandemic, is a city in lockdown. Violence and civil disorder simmer. Martial law has been imposed. No-one is safe from the deadly virus that has already claimed thousands of victims. Health and emergency services are overwhelmed. A MURDERED CHILD At a building site for a temporary hospital, construction workers find a bag containing the rendered bones of a murdered child. A remorseless killer has been unleashed on the city; his mission is to take all measures necessary to prevent the bones from being identified. A POWERFUL CONSPIRACY D.I. Jack MacNeil, counting down the hours on his final day with the Met, is sent to investigate. His career is in ruins, his marriage over and his own family touched by the virus. Sinister forces are tracking his every move, prepared to kill again to conceal the truth. Which will stop him first — the virus or the killers?

FIVE DREAMS OF FAME Glasgow, 1965. Jack Mackay dares not imagine a life of predictability and routine. The headstrong seventeen-year-old has one thing on his mind — London — and successfully convinces his four friends, and fellow band mates, to join him in abandoning their homes to pursue a goal of musical stardom. FIVE DECADES OF FEAR Glasgow, 2015. Jack Mackay dares not look back on a life of failure and mediocrity. The heavy-hearted sixty-seven-year old is still haunted by the cruel fate that befell him and his friends some fifty years before, and how he did and did not act when it mattered most — a memory he has run from all his adult life. London, 2015. A man lies dead in a bedsit. His killer looks on, remorseless. What started with five teenagers five decades before will now be finished

The macabre discovery of a truck full of dead Chinese in southern Texas brings together again the American pathologist Margaret Campbell with Li Yan, the Beijing detective with whom she once shared a turbulent personal and professional relationship. Forced back into an uneasy partnership, they set out to identify the Snakehead who is behind the 100-million-dollar trade in illegal Chinese immigrants which led to the tragedy in Texas — only to discover that the victims were also unwitting carriers of a deadly cargo. Li and Margaret have a biological time-bomb of unimaginable proportions on their hands, and an indiscriminate killer who threatens the future of humankind

Margaret Campbell is a forensic pathologist from Chicago. Li Yan is a Beijing detective with a horribly burned corpse on his hands. She has a broken life behind her, a lonely future dedicated to her profession in front. He has survived two decades of violent change by marrying himself to a career which now promises, at last, to bring him the respected place in Chinese society that his family lost in the Cultural Revolution. Neither of them is ready for the consequences of asking the wrong questions about the dead man — the ones that lead to the terrifying truth

It has been a whirlwind few years for Li Yan and Margaret Campbell. Nowadays, both are busy juggling their huge professional workloads — Li as the newly promoted chief of Beijing’s serious crime squad, and Campbell as lecturer at the University of Public Security — with the day-to-day raising of their young son, Li Jon. When a desperate mother appeals to Campbell’s own maternal instincts, Li agrees to look into the disappearance of a 17-year-old Beijing girl, Jiang Meilin. Yet Li’s investigation soon turns from a favour into a full-scale murder enquiry. And when he receives an anonymous note he learns Jiang Meilin’s death is tied to a dangerous underground trade, and a dark marital rite from China’s past

In a sleepy French village, the body of a man shot through the head is disinterred by the roots of a fallen tree. A week later a famous art critic is viciously murdered in a nearby house. The deaths occurred more than seventy years apart. Asked by a colleague to inspect the site of the former, forensics expert Enzo Macleod quickly finds himself embroiled in the investigation of the latter. Two extraordinary narratives are set in train — one historical, unfolding in the treacherous wartime years of Occupied France; the other contemporary, set in the autumn of 2020 as France re-enters Covid lockdown. And Enzo’s investigations reveal an unexpected link between the murders — the Mona Lisa. Tasked by the exiled General Charles de Gaulle to keep the world’s most famous painting out of Nazi hands after the fall of France in 1940, 28-year-old Georgette Pignal finds herself swept along by the tide of history. Following in the wake of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa as it is moved from château to château by the Louvre, she finds herself just one step ahead of two German art experts sent to steal it for rival patrons — Hitler and Göring. What none of them know is that the Louvre itself has taken exceptional measures to keep the painting safe, unwittingly setting in train a fatal sequence of events extending over seven decades. Events that have led to both killings. The Night Gate spans three generations, taking us from war-torn London, the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, Berlin and Vichy France, to the deadly enemy facing the world in 2020. In his latest novel, Peter May shows why he is one of the great contemporary writers of crime fiction

Innocence is a force more potent, sometimes, than evil. For it has no concept of its own power to destroy. The Noble Path is the story of two people who become its victims. Jack Elliot is a man without a soul. A discredited British Army officer, he kills now for money. For him life is cheap — even his own. Only death comes expensive. And when Ang Yuon, a wealthy Cambodian refugee, asks him to cross from Thailand to rescue his wife and children from the Khmer Rouge, Elliot demands an extravagant fee. For this time he expects, perhaps hopes, to die. But even Elliot is unprepared for the scale of suffering inflicted on an innocent Cambodian people, or for the curse it brings him — a reason to live. Lisa is Elliot’s teenage daughter, stepping into the unknown in search of the father she has never met. Following him as far as Bangkok, she falls foul of his ruthless Thai associates. In her innocence she sees the obsequious Tuk. Than as no more than a concerned friend of her father, and the beautiful, bewitching Grace as his talented protégé. She does not realise that Tuk’s business interests encompass girls as well as guns, and that Grace is a cunning procuress who can find any number of buyers for an innocent English girl... In the fetid jungles of Cambodia or on the storm-tossed South China Sea, in the opulent mansions of Bangkok or in its seamy back streets, Elliot and Lisa tread the hard path of enlightenment, and head inexorably towards a final, unexpected and devastating encounter

A top Chinese swimmer kills himself of the eve of an international event — shattering his country's hopes of victory against the Americans. An Olympic weightlifter dies in the arms of his Beijing mistress — a scandal to be hushed up at the highest level. But the suicides were murder, and both men's deaths are connected to an inexplicable series of "accidents" which has taken the lives of some of China's best athletes. In this fifth China Thriller, Chinese detective Li Yan and American pathologist Margaret Campbell are back in Beijing confronting a sinister sequence of murders which threatens to destroy the future of international athletics

Crime-scene photographer Michael Kapinsky’s life is a mess. He is staggering to come to terms with the recent death of his wife and the financial burden she left behind. Then his psychologist persuades him to enter a virtual world called Second Life to participate in a new kind of group therapy. There, in the persona of his avatar — Brad Pitt look-alike Chas Chesnokov — Michael soon discovers that murder is not confined to the real world. Victims whose crime scenes he has attended in the Southern California resort of Newport Beach have had their avatars clinically executed in the virtual world. Co-opted into the Twist of Fate Detective Agency, Chas embarks upon an investigation with exotic dancer and escort girl. Together they uncover a series of killings and a financial scam that is netting the murderer millions of real dollars. But when Michael is tempted by the money that mysteriously appears in Chas’ Second Life account, both his real and virtual lives are put in danger

Всемирно известный, любимый критиками и публикой, Питер Мэй вновь удивляет читателей своим криминальным триллером, описывая мир, скорого наступления которого никто не мог предвидеть и в котором мы все оказались в 2020 году. «Локдаун» – это виртуозно написанный роман, в котором каждый тщательно выверенный факт стоит на своем месте. «Локдаун» – это Лондон на фоне глобальной эпидемии. Эта книга, которая описывает опыт выживания в закрытом городе под угрозой смертельного вируса, была написана в 2005 году, но 15 лет назад показалась издателям неправдоподобной дистопией, а сейчас удивляет и пугает своим правдоподобием, которое до дрожи напоминает предвидение

Жестяной ящик, замурованный в катакомбах Парижа… Полиция находит в нем золотой кулон, старинный стетоскоп, военный крест, берцовую кость и… череп. Экспертиза устанавливает — череп принадлежит известному политику, бесследно исчезнувшему десять лет назад. Но… зачем убийца положил в ящик все остальное? За расследование берется Энцо Маклеод, давно отошедший от дел британский криминалист, которому под силу раскрыть даже самое изощренное преступление…

Пекин — город, за внешне респектабельным фасадом которого скрыто множество тайн. И детективу «убойного» отдела Ли Яню хорошо известны самые темные стороны жизни столичных улиц… Однако еще никогда ему не приходилось сталкиваться с таким трудным и необычным делом… Три трупа — за одну ночь. Два убийства — и одно самосожжение. На первый взгляд между жертвами вообще нет связи. Но Ли Янь и его коллега из США, патологоанатом Маргарет Кэмпбелл, приходят к неожиданному выводу: они имеют дело с тремя убийствами, тесно связанными между собой. И ключом к разгадке может стать имя сгоревшего «самоубийцы», обнаруженного в парке… Кто он? Почему с ним расправились столь необычным способом? Ли и Маргарет шаг за шагом приближаются к разгадке. Но за каждым их шагом следит таинственный убийца, готовясь нанести следующий удар…

Сюжет романа «Скала» разворачивается на острове Льюис, далеко от берегов северной Шотландии. Произошло жестокое убийство, похожее на другое, случившееся незадолго до этого в Эдинбурге. Полицейский Фин Маклауд родился на острове, поэтому вести дело поручили именно ему. Оказавшись на месте, Маклауд еще не знает, что ему предстоит раскрыть не только убийство, но и леденящую душу тайну собственного прошлого. Питер Мэй, известный шотландский автор детективов и телесценарист, снимал на Льюисе сериал на гэльском языке и провел там несколько лет. Этот опыт позволил ему придать событиям, описанным в книге, особую достоверность. Картины сурового, мрачного ландшафта, безжалостной погоды, традиционной охоты на птиц погружают читателя в подлинную атмосферу шотландской глубинки

Детектив Дин Маклауд возвращается на родину — остров Льюис. Он уволился из полиции и его единственная цель — забыть прошлое: гибель маленького сына и развод с женой. Но, едва начав готовиться к восстановлению дома своих давно умерших родителей, бывший детектив вынужден отложить планы. В трясине торфяного болота найден неопознанный труп с перерезанным горлом и следами пыток. Опознать личность «болотного человека», как называют такие «находки» местные полицейские обычно почти невозможно — он мог пролежать в торфяной трясине и тысячу лет. На предплечье мертвеца детективы обнаруживают портрет Элвиса Пресли, а эксперты сообщают о его генетической идентичности с ДНК местного фермера Тормода, страдающего маразмом и плохо соотносящего прошлое и настоящее. Вместе с расследованием убийства на поверхность всплывают трагическое прошлое, семейные тайны и Дину приходится расследовать дело, ведь дочь старого фермера, Маршели — первая и единственная любовь бывшего детектива и хочет знать правду о своем отце

Питър Мей (р. 1951 г.) е шотландски писател и сценарист. Книгите му се продават в милионни тиражи във Великобритания и по света. Трилогията за остров Луис му носи редица награди за литература в Европа и Америка. „Черната къща“ — първата част от поредицата, — която излиза най-напред във Франция (2009), е определена от вестник „Юманите“ като „шедьовър“. Тя му спечелва няколко отличия, сред които Наградата на френските читатели „Сезам“ за най-добър криминален роман за 2011 година, „Книга на годината“ (2011) на британския сайт за криминална литература и трилъри Crime Thriller Hound, както и американската награда „Бари“ за криминален роман на годината за 2013-а. Остров Луис е най-отдалеченият и красив остров в Шотландия, където над тежкото ежедневие надделява единствено страхът на хората от Бог. Но под лустрото на християнските ценности се крият езически привички, преплетени с жажда за кръв и отмъщение. Брутално убийство на острова довежда тук детектив Фин Маклауд, който разследва друг случай със същия почерк в Единбург. Сам израснал на това забулено в мъгли място, Фин бързо се връща обратно в миналото си. За него то е наситено със спомена за ужасна трагедия. Мъжете на острова ревностно пазят древна традиция — ежегодния лов на птицата гуга. Той неизбежно поставя на тежки изпитания духа и тялото на участниците. Докъде ще отведе съдбите им този път? „Черната къща“ е майсторски заплетен психологически трилър, в чийто криминален сюжет изпъква тъмната страна на душата и фактът, че от миналото си не можеш да избягаш. Смразяващ мизансцен за завладяващ роман… Впечатляващо написан

Питър Мей (р. 1951 г.) е шотландски писател и сценарист. Книгите му се продават в милионни тиражи във Великобритания и по света. Трилогията за остров Луис му носи редица награди за литература в Европа и Америка. Сред отличията, които печели Човекът от остров Луис (книга II от поредицата), са призът на читателите на френския вестник Телеграм и наградата за най-добър шотландски криминален роман на годината (2012). Героят от Черната къща, детектив Фин Маклауд, се завръща на родния остров в опит да залепи парченцата от разпиляното си минало и да намери душевен покой. Но вместо това неволно бива въвлечен в разследване на ново убийство. Мумифициран труп на човек, убит по особено жесток начин, е изровен от торфените блата на острова. Следите отвеждат към Тормод Макдоналд — възрастен фермер с напреднала деменция и баща на бившата любима на Фин, Маршели. Изкусно заплетената мистерия поема по неведоми пътища и стига до спомена за друга една изживяна любов… с неочакван край. В криминалния сюжет са вплетени чисто човешките истории на героите в едно почти забравено от Бога кътче от света и точно това прави книгата толкова вълнуваща. Спомени и настоящи страсти, ревност, подозрения и разкаяние — емоционалните тайни на този мрачен остров са по-дълбоки и от торфените му блата, където се крият трупове с минало. Описанието на атмосферата на острова е толкова впечатляващо, колкото и сюжетът. Черната къща беше изключително добра книга. Човекът от остров Луис е превъзходна книга

Третата, завършваща част от поредицата сблъсква Фин Маклауд с отдавна забравени призраци от миналото. Като шеф на охраната на голямо частно имение на острова бившият полицай е натоварен с разследването на бракониерството в района, което придобива застрашителни размери. Работата му го отвежда при Уистлър Макаскил, близък негов приятел от тийнейджърските години и… пазител на дълго прикривана тайна. Срещата придобива неочакван и зловещ развой и докато Фин се опитва да събере парчетата от миналото, разбира, че разкриването на истината ще разруши бъдещето. Трите книги може да бъдат четени като самостоятелни романи, но кумулативният им ефект е по-мощен — характерите на героите добиват пълнокръвни очертания, а историята и фолклорът на Хебридските острови, неизменна част и от тази книга, ни потапят в дълбините на това загадъчно място. „Въпреки че ние трудно да се сбогуваме с Фин, можем да поздравим Мей за това, че се придържа към представата си за идеално изградена трилогия.” Индипендънт