OVER 40 NEW STORIES FROM BRITAIN’S LEADING CRIME WRITERS Leading editor and reviewer Maxim Jakubowski has compiled another beguiling collection of the year’s best new short crime fiction from the UK. Ian Rankin’s perennially popular Edinburgh cop, Inspector Rebus, makes an unexpected comeback in a short, but intriguing story, ‘The Very Last Drop’, and the collection closes with another Rankin story, ‘Driven’. Making their first appearance in the series are many luminaries such as Kate Atkinson, Louise Welsh, Stephen Booth, Christopher Brookmyre, Colin Bateman, A. L. Kennedy, Sheila Quigley, Lin Anderson, Simon Kernick and David Hewson. Also represented are exciting up-and-coming...

Introducing glamorous private investigator Patrick de Courvoisier in this stylish new mystery series. Content to leave his controversial past behind him and enjoy a more relaxed, hedonistic lifestyle on a converted houseboat in the glamorous French resort of Cannes, enigmatic Englishman Patrick de Courvoisier is known as 'Le Limier' or 'Fixer'. People come to him with their problems - and he fixes them. However, when Camille Ager asks Patrick to find her sister, Angele Valette, star of the new movie The Black Pearl, Patrick's laidback lifestyle is dealt a terminal blow. Last seen at the film's lavish launch party on board the luxurious black yacht owned by Russian oligarch Vasily...

A hen night in Glasgow leaves the bride-to-be dead on a toilet floor. Her body is twisted, her face wears a terrifying grin. Who would kill a girl just before her wedding? Dr Rhona MacLeod and her team are called in to find out. As they go through the evidence, they find themselves in a world where sex is bought and sold, and nothing is what it seems. / A Prequel to Driftnet/

Private investigator Patrick de Courvoisier unearths a shocking wartime secret in this stylish Cannes-based mystery series. Brother Robert from the abbey on St Honorat, a picturesque island off the French coast, has requested Patrick de Courvoisier's help in locating a valuable painting which has disappeared from the monastery's vaults. At the same time, an old enemy from Patrick's past has arrived in Cannes in search of a different stolen painting. As it becomes increasingly clear that the two investigations are linked, Patrick's enquiries lead him to uncover a shocking wartime secret: a secret the British Royal family would prefer to keep hidden...

When Amy MacKenzie agrees to attend a meeting at a local spiritualist church, the last person she expects to hear calling to her from beyond the grave is her son. The son whom she'd only spoken to an hour before. Then the body of a young man is found inside a neolithic stone circle high above the city of Glasgow and forensic scientist Rhona MacLeod is soon on the case. DI Michael McNab is certain it's a gangland murder, but Rhona isn't convinced. When a second body is found in similar circumstances, a pattern begins to emerge, of a killer intent on masterminding a gruesome Druidic game that everyone will be forced to play ...

Where the hell had the kid found a human skull? McNab heard an intake of breath behind him as someone else made out the shape in the torchlight. A metre away now, McNab crouched on a level with the child. 'Where did you find that, Emma?' he said softly. She stared at him. 'I was lost. I heard them calling me.' When Claire regains consciousness after a stranger causes her car to crash in a snowstorm, she is frantic to discover her nine-year-old daughter Emma missing from the back seat. Then Emma is found in the woods nearby, unharmed but cradling a child's skull. She claims it 'called to her' -- and she can hear another voice nearby... Meanwhile, forensic scientist Rhona MacLeod is trying...

The clown suddenly appeared beside a group of kids at the candy floss van, bringing Kira to an abrupt halt. Then it began. The rapid heartbeat, the burst of perspiration, the gasping breath. The baby lurched inside her, as though sharing her panic. When the body of a pregnant teenager is found in a Hall of Mirrors with the full-term foetus surgically removed, forensic scientist Rhona MacLeod is called in to assist the police. Suspicion falls on Jeff Coulter, a psychotic inmate at a nearby hospital whose hobby is making Reborns -- chillingly realistic baby dolls intended for bereaved parents or those unable to conceive. But how could he have orchestrated the murder from a secure mental...

A young woman - a prostitute - has been brutally slain and left across a grave in Glasgow's sprawling cemetary, the Necropolis. Rhona Macleod, called in to carry out forensic investigations, has no doubt that the depraved killer's motives were sexual. When the removal of the girl's corpse from the city of the dead reveals another woman buried secretly underneath, the case trakes on a disturbing new dimension. This man has killed before - and will again. When another girl is reported missing, Rhona knows she has to track him down and stop the pattern from repeating itself.

'..the face that stared at him through the glass was his mum's, but it didn't look like her. Stephen's mouth dropped open and real fear grabbed his stomach. His mum's face was chalk white, her mouth twisted in pain. Behind her was a dark shadow. Stephen dropped the bones. ' A six year-old boy has vanished, his mother and grandmother horrifically murdered. At the scene, forensic scientist Rhona Macleod finds a chilling African talisman, made from the bones of a child. Can she decipher its meaning and track Stephen down before he becomes the next link in the killers' chain?

"The left foot had been severed from the leg ten centimetres below the patella. Both fibula and tibia bones were divided at the same place. All the toes were intact, although the nails had disintegrated or been eaten off during the foot's time in the water." Dr Rhona Macleod travels north to investigate a grisly discovery - a severed foot, caught in a fishing net off the Isle of Skye. Where is the rest of the body, and who is the dead man? What links him to a sinister secret society in America? And why is the Ministry of Defence so keen to shut down the case? Rhona's investigations embroil her in an international conspiracy from which she will be lucky to escape unharmed..