The team at Brandon Library share some of their favourite crime and thriller mysteries, all set here in East Anglia! Browse our staff recommendations and pick up a copy from your local library.
Want more suggested books? Take a look at our recommendations.
Death on Cromer Beach
Ross Greenwood
A brutal double murder on a Norfolk beach horrifies the town of Cromer. The way the victims died is chilling and so Norfolk’s Major Investigation Team task DS Ashley Knight to manage the case. It soon becomes clear that the murders were carefully planned and the finger of suspicion points to an organised crime gang, but as the evidence mounts, a more sinister theory emerges.
Ashley has been allocated a young but opinionated partner in Hector Fade, and sparks soon fly. Annoyingly for Ashley, Hector is no pushover and looks destined for great things. When the pair delve into the case, they struggle to understand who would inflict such suffering on their victims and hope the crime is a one off from a deranged individual.
But then another body is found. There’s a killer on the loose who wants them to believe that the beach has a memory. They must be caught, or others will meet their end by the sea.
The Water Clock
Jim Kelly
In the snowbound landscape of the Cambridgeshire fens, a body is discovered, locked in a block of ice. High on Ely Cathedral a second corpse is found, grotesquely ‘riding’ a stone gargoyle.
Journalist Philip Dryden knows he’s onto a great story when forensic evidence links both victims to one terrifying event in 1966. But the murders also offer Dryden the key to a very personal mystery. Who saved his life two years ago? And, more importantly, who left his wife to die?
The answer will bring Dryden face to face with his own guilt, his own fears – and a cold and ruthless killer…
The Safe House
Nicci French
Samantha Laschen is a doctor specialising in post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s moved to the coast to escape her problems and to be alone with her young daughter.
But now the police want her to take in Fiona Mackenzie, a girl whose parents have been savagely murdered. Yet by allowing Fiona in, Sam is exposing herself – and her daughter – to risks she couldn’t possibly have imagined…
Because She Looked Away
Alison Bruce
After the sudden death of her sister, devastated detective DS Ronnie Blake relocates to Cambridge to help her brother Alex raise their sister’s young son, Noah. She reports for her first day but instead finds herself being questioned by a special investigations unit, nicknamed the DEAD Team.
With a small group of six, led by DI Fenton, the once-successful DEAD team has a single outstanding case, Operation Byron, and the failure to resolve it threatens the unit’s existence. Their most promising lead is an anonymous note linking three seemingly unconnected people: a convicted fraudster, a dead academic – and Ronnie’s sister Jodie.
When Ronnie is denied information about Operation Byron, she follows a lead slipped to her by Malachi, the youngest member of the team, and makes a discovery which links Operation Byron to a disturbing unsolved murder.
Crime on the Fens
Joy Ellis
Nikki Galena is a tough detective inspector – maybe too tough, because she has just been given a final warning. Her only hope is to team up with another loner, DS Joseph Easter, the man they call Holy Joe, in a bid to save her tattered reputation.
The town is being terrorised by gangs of violent thugs, all wearing identical hideous masks. Then a talented young female student goes missing on the marsh and Nikki and Joseph find themselves joining forces with a master criminal in their efforts to save her.
They need to look behind the masks, but when they do, they find something more sinister and deadly than they ever expected…
Unnatural Causes
P.D. James
Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh had been looking forward to a quiet holiday at his aunt’s cottage on Monksmere Head, one of the furthest-flung spots on the remote Suffolk coast.
With nothing to do other than enjoy long wind-swept walks, tea in front of the crackling wood fire and hot buttered toast, Dalgliesh was relishing the thought of a well-earned break.
However, all hope of peace is soon shattered by murder. The mutilated body of a local crime writer, Maurice Seaton, floats ashore in a drifting dinghy to drag Adam Dalgliesh into a new and macabre investigation.
Set on the remote Suffolk coast, this is a thrilling work of crime fiction possessing all of the qualities which distinguish P.D. James as a novelist.
The Norfolk Mystery
Ian Sansom
Professor Morley’s guide to Norfolk is a story of bygone England; quaint villages, eccentric locals – and murder!
It is 1937 and disillusioned Spanish Civil War veteran Stephen Sefton is stony broke. So when he sees a mysterious advertisement for a job where ‘intelligence is essential’, he applies.
They start in Norfolk, but when the vicar of Blakeney is found hanging from his church’s bellrope, Morley and Sefton find themselves drawn into a rather more fiendish plot. Did the Reverend really take his own life, or was it – murder?
The Crossing Places
Elly Griffiths
Dr Ruth Galloway is called in when a child’s bones are discovered near a prehistoric site on the north Norfolk salt marshes. Are they the remains of a local girl who disappeared ten years earlier – or are the bones much older?
DCI Harry Nelson refuses to give up the hunt for the missing girl. Since she vanished, someone has been sending him creepy anonymous notes about ritual sacrifice. He knows that Ruth’s expertise and experience could help him finally to put this case to rest.
But when a second child goes missing, Ruth finds herself in danger from a killer who knows she’s getting ever closer to the truth.
Sidney Chambers and the Perils of the Night
James Runcie
1955. Canon Sidney Chambers, loveable priest and part-time detective, is back. Accompanied by his faithful Labrador, Dickens, and the increasingly exasperated Inspector Geordie Keating, Sidney is called to investigate the unexpected fall of a Cambridge don from the roof of King’s College Chapel, a case of arson at a glamour photographer’s studio and the poisoning of Zafar Ali, Grantchester’s finest spin bowler.
Alongside his sleuthing, Sidney has other problems. Can he decide between his dear friend, the glamorous socialite Amanda Kendall and Hildegard Staunton, the beguiling German widow? To make up his mind Sidney takes a trip abroad, only to find himself trapped in a web of international espionage just as the Berlin Wall is going up.
The Hardwick Heath Killer
Michelle Kidd
The call comes at midnight on a stormy March night. A body has been found hanging from a tree on Hardwick Heath. In the dead man’s pocket is a handwritten note: SORRY. LIFE IS JUST TOO HARD. LOVE TO YOU ALL.
Detective Nicki’s instincts tell her this was no suicide – but someone has gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like one.
Three days later, a second body is found floating in a pond, just a few miles away. But the victim didn’t drown.
The police are treating the deaths as separate cases. Then Nicki uncovers a link between the two dead men – and the case takes a shocking twist.
As she unearths a series of secrets stretching back twenty years, Nicki and her team find themselves in a race against time before more people die.
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