Showing results by author "Andy Maslen" in All Categories

How do you stop a killer no one believes exists? DS Kat Ballantyne wants to know why a perfect girl like Rosie Duggan would jump to her death from a multistorey car park. Everyone is saying she took her own life. But Kat is unconvinced. Girls like Rosie—bright, popular, well adjusted, and with her whole life ahead of her—don’t fall from tall buildings. Unless someone pushes them.

DS Kat Ballantyne came to the crime-writing festival for an escape. Instead she’s walked straight into a murder scene. Moments before he’s due on stage, a famous novelist is found dead in a locked room. It looks like natural causes, but Kat sees tiny clues that suggest murder. As she investigates, she uncovers literary rivalries, personal vendettas and hidden agendas. Is there anyone who didn’t have a motive to murder Mark Swift?

A bomb threat at Middlehampton’s Powerhouse music venue sends DS Kat Ballantyne spiralling into a nightmare—her husband and son are inside. As the city reels in terror, Kat fights to keep her family safe while being pulled into another deadly case that may well be connected… A journalist investigating a controversial football club takeover makes a chilling 999 call before collapsing. Hours later, he’s dead. His apparent murder marks the beginning of a dangerous trail of corruption leading to a foreign royal family. Or is the killer closer to home?

As bogus corruption charges loom over her, DS Kat Ballantyne finds herself deskbound and stuck with cold cases. Her hated boss, DI Carver, has given her just one week to explain how £50,000 found its way into her bank account. If she can’t, she’ll be lucky to have a desk at all. Then a close friend calls her from a murder scene, claiming to have strangled a local gangster’s wife. Kat has no choice but to disobey orders and investigate. Despite overwhelming forensic evidence supporting her friend’s confession, something still doesn’t add up…

Detective Inspector Stella Cole was a rising star in London’s Metropolitan Police. Then a hit-and-run driver killed her husband, Richard, a human rights lawyer. Grief drove her to booze and pills. Back at work after a year’s compassionate leave, Stella secretly re-investigates his death and begins to suspect a cover-up. Freelance journalist Vicky Riley was working with Richard to expose corruption buried deep inside the legal system. Unaware that powerful people are out to stop her, she contacts Stella.

A suicide bomber boards a crowded bus in central London. Ex-SAS captain Gabriel Wolfe is having a coffee just yards away. In the ensuing carnage, Gabriel is plunged into a bloody memory of his last, botched mission. Plagued by visions of the dead comrade he left behind, Gabriel now freelances for The Department, a secret British Government hit squad. He wants to take out whoever ordered the attack. Gabriel's desire for vengeance leads him to Eden, the Brazilian rainforest compound of a religious cult called The Children of Heaven.

Barely a month since his promotion to Inspector, DI Ford is called in to investigate the murder of a young nurse and her son in a small flat in Salisbury. There are few clues, and no apparent motive, but Ford can sense that there's a serial killer at work. After all, he knows from brutal personal experience how killers cover their tracks.... It's been six years since Ford lost his wife in a climbing accident - an accident he caused. He is desperate to keep the truth hidden, especially from his son, Sam.

A young female soldier is found on Salisbury Plain, her throat cut and a bloody knife in her dead hand. Everyone assumes that she killed herself. But something doesn’t feel right to DI Ford; the whole scene seems staged. Convinced of foul play, and despite fierce opposition from the army brass and his own superiors, Ford launches a murder investigation.

When you want to take power, call the SAS. A right-wing billionaire is standing for Parliament. He enlists the help of ex-SAS soldier, Gabriel Wolfe. Gabriel left the Army after a covert mission went disastrously wrong and has sworn never to cause another man's death. It quickly becomes clear that Sir Toby Maitland's ambitions extend far beyond a seat as an MP. When an ex-contact in Swedish Special Forces, now working for MI5, contacts Gabriel, he realises he has little choice but to try to stop his employer.

After a dog walker discovers human remains in a badger sett in the idyllic Salisbury countryside, DI Ford is called in to lead the ensuing murder investigation. When a second victim turns up in a nearby pond, Ford is determined to find the connection. Both victims met their fate near the sprawling Alverchalke Estate, ancestral home of a decorated war hero and his family. One was a dogged eco-activist and vocal critic of Lord Baverstock. The other was a petty criminal and poacher, youngest brother of a notorious local crime family.

A former Swedish ambassador lies dead in his swanky Mayfair flat. With his tongue torn out and placed on a Bible. Competing theories swirl. A religious maniac? A psychopath? The truth is far darker than either. DCI Stella Cole’s search for the killer takes her to Sweden. There, she discovers a horrific chapter in the country’s history that throws the case into turmoil. And then more people start dying.

Fifteen years ago, a serial killer was on a rampage murdering young women in Middlehampton. Then, suddenly, the killings stopped, and the murderer was never found… So when the body of another young woman is found bearing the twisted killer’s unique hallmark—the overpowering stench of lavender and an origami heart—DS Kat Ballantyne knows this can only mean one thing: the killer is back.

DS Kat Ballantyne is still reeling from a revelation that turned life as she knew it upside down. But when a dog walker discovers the body of a woman among the standing stones known locally as the Three Sisters, there’s no time to focus on her own troubles. Kat is drawn back to work to investigate. At first, the death appears to be an accident. But then Kat discovers an infinity symbol branded onto the dead woman’s abdomen.

Things have been difficult for Annie since her husband left; her teenage daughter, Isla, has become a ghost of her former self. Annie's terrified that Isla might hurt herself, and she'll lose her, too. So when Annie receives a video of herself crying at Isla's funeral, she's immediately sick to her stomach. Confused and horrified, Annie races upstairs to check on Isla, who is perfectly alive and well. The video has been faked. But who sent it and what do they want?

Gabriel Wolfe is done with ops. Too much blood. Too many friends dead. His days, and nights, haunted by the memory of his murdered wife, Eli. Trying to heal, he spends his time at a gym in an unfashionable part of Paris, teaching martial arts to poor kids. But whether he likes it or not, the call of duty instilled in him as a child and reinforced by his military commanders has only been quieted, not deleted. So when he hears a woman cry out that her sister’s been stabbed, he rushes to help. But his instincts, always so trustworthy, betray him. Now it’s his life in danger.

Far from his old life as an off-books government assassin, Gabriel Wolfe tends his farm. Until one night, armed men arrive in SUVs and attack without mercy. They have reckoned without Wolfe’s unique mix of skills, honed in his years in British Special Forces and as a member of The Department.

A debt of honor owed to a triad boss. A desperate search for his missing sibling, kidnapped as an infant. Both urgent. Both dangerous. Both drawing on all his resources as an ex-SAS member. Gabriel Wolfe feels his loyalty pulled in opposite directions.

Detective Inspector Stella Cole has almost completed her bloody quest to avenge the hit-and-run killings of her husband and daughter. Only one member of the legal conspiracy who murdered them remains. But he happens to be her boss: Detective Chief Superintendent Adam Collier. And he’s not going to go down without a fight. His first move is to have Stella sectioned. While she’s incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital, he hires a Maltese woman to kill her.

Julius Witaarde is the passionate young leader of a White separatist party in South Africa. He dreams of establishing a Whites-only homeland. But dreams like his don't come cheap. Together with two unlikely business partners, one at the highest level of government in South Africa, he moves into ivory smuggling. In the forests of Botswana, a small group of British paras are working with local game wardens to defeat poachers. Halfway round the world, the Royal Family's youngest princess is getting married in Windsor. As church bells ring out, so do shots.

The glamorous CEO of an anti-abortion charity has been found horribly mutilated and strangled to death in her own kitchen. Before long, the killer strikes again, and again. And now the pattern emerges. The victims are all high-profile Christians. Back from the brink of killing herself, and newly promoted to DCI, Stella Cole takes a call from her sergeant that puts her plans on hold. Stella and her team at the Special Investigations Unit are racing to stop the serial killer dubbed “Lucifer” by the media, before he can take another life.