Detective Kyochiro Kaga of the Tokyo Police Department has just been transferred to a new precinct in the Nihonbashi area of Tokyo. Newly arrived, but with a great deal of experience, Kaga is promptly assigned to the team investigating the murder of a woman. But the more he investigates, the greater number of potential suspects emerges. It isn’t long before it seems nearly all the people living and working in the business district of Nihonbashi have a motive for murder.  

Yoshitaka, who was about to leave his marriage and his wife, is poisoned by arsenic-laced coffee and dies. His wife, Ayane, is the logical suspect - except that she was hundreds of miles away when he was murdered. The lead detective, Tokyo Police Detective Kusanagi, is immediately smitten with her and refuses to believe that she could have had anything to do with the crime. His assistant, Kaoru Utsumi, however, is convinced Ayane is guilty. While Utsumi’s instincts tell her one thing, the facts of the case are another matter.

Manabu Yukawa, the physicist known as "Detective Galileo", has traveled to Hariguara, a once-popular summer resort town that has fallen on hard times. He is there to speak at a conference on a planned underwater mining operation, which has sharply divided the town. One faction is against the proposed operation, concerned about the environmental impact on the area, known for its pristine waters. The other faction, seeing no future in the town as it is, believes its only hope lies in the development project.

Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother who thought she had finally escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day to extort money from her, threatening both her and her teenaged daughter Misato, the situation quickly escalates into violence and Togashi ends up dead on her apartment floor.

In Riversend, an isolated rural community afflicted by an endless drought, a young priest does the unthinkable, killing five parishioners before being taken down himself. A year later, accompanied by his own demons from wartime reporting, journalist Martin Scarsden arrives in Riversend. His assignment is to describe how the townspeople are coping. But as Martin meets the locals and hears their version of events, he begins to realize that the accepted wisdom - that the priest was a pedophile whose imminent exposure was the catalyst for the shooting - may be wrong.

Jackson Brodie has relocated to a quiet seaside village in North Yorkshire, in the occasional company of his recalcitrant teenage son Nathan and ageing Labrador Dido, both at the discretion of his former partner Julia. It’s a picturesque setting, but there’s something darker lurking behind the scenes. Jackson’s current job, gathering proof of an unfaithful husband for his suspicious wife, seems straightforward, but a chance encounter with a desperate man on a crumbling cliff leads him into a sinister network - and back into the path of someone from his past. 

Who is JT LeBeau? A best-selling crime writer whose words have gripped the world. The only mystery greater than his stories is his true identity. One woman thinks she's found him - her husband has millions in the bank and a letter for the enigmatic author. But the truth is far more twisted.... 

DC Fiona Griffiths is bored. It's been months since she had a good corpse, let alone a decent murder to deal with, and it's frankly driving her nuts. And then comes the news, and she has to literally stop herself from jumping with joy: not just a murder but a decapitation, with an antique sword no less, and a murder scene that has been laid out like a particularly gruesome crossword clue.

When Fiona Griffiths is tasked to look through a stackload of cold cases, her bosses don't expect her to find anything of interest. But then she finds that an impossible robbery really happened. That a nailed-on suicide was anything but. That the dead security guard was almost certainly murdered. Before long, Fiona is embroiled in what will become the toughest case of her career so far - one that forces her to enter the heart of darkness, and a journey that will test her mental toughness to its very limits.

When the body of a young woman is found in an old 'dead house' - the annexe where the dead were stored before burial in medieval times - of a tiny Welsh church, it seems that past and present have come together in a bizarre and horrifying way. For DC Fiona Griffiths, the girl - a murder victim whose corpse was laid out with obvious tenderness - represents an irresistibly intriguing puzzle, given Fiona's unusual empathy with the dead.

Ein unschuldig wegen Mordes zum Tod Verurteilter soll hingerichtet werden. Der ehemalige Gefängnisaufseher Kihara und der auf Bewährung entlassene Jun'ichi erhalten den Auftrag, den wahren Täter zu finden. Für das ungleiche Ermittlerduo beginnt damit nicht nur ein dramatischer Wettlauf gegen die Zeit, sondern beide müssen sich auch ihrer eigenen Vergangenheit stellen.

In Killing Commendatore, a 30-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious 13-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna.

In North Devon, where the rivers Taw and Torridge converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his father's funeral takes place. The day Matthew turned his back on the strict evangelical community in which he grew up, he lost his family, too. Now he's back, not just to mourn his father at a distance but to take charge of his first major case in the Two Rivers region, a complex place not quite as idyllic as tourists suppose.

Tokyo resident Keiko Furukara has never fit in - neither in her family, nor in school - but when at the age of 18 she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of national convenience store chain Smile Mart, she realizes instantly that she has found her purpose in life. Delighted to be able to exist in a place where the rules of social interaction are crystal clear (many are laid out line-by-line in the store's manual), Keiko does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and mode of speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a "normal" person excellently, more or less.

Anna Byrne is a jailhouse librarian. In a place where hope is hard to find, the power of books can be a light in the dark. For some of the prisoners, her work is life-changing. Like Michael Hudson, her best student, who's been locked up awaiting trial before his sudden release. He's relieved to be free - to 'come uptown', as they say - but can't shake the question: why is the witness who put him behind bars suddenly refusing to testify? There's a man who might have the answer, but he wants something first.