January 2026
They know she killed them. They've just never known why. Connie Cross was a trusted pharmacy assistant when she was arrested for the gruesome murders of at least seven strangers. Now, she's serving a whole-life order for the shocking crimes she refuses to explain. Olivia Lang never forgot Connie, the awkward teenager from a south London estate she first met while working for the police. Twenty years later, Olivia is desperate to understand what made Connie turn into a murderer. But as she begins to uncover the truth about the UK's most notorious female serial killer, Olivia risks revealing secrets she's kept hidden for years. Connie is by Charlotte Duckworth.
Darling Mine is by Romy Hausmann. She went missing decades ago. He is still looking for her . . . Julie Nowak has been missing since 7th September 2003. It broke her family. Only her father, Theo, doesn't give up on her. On the 20th anniversary of her disappearance, Theo is contacted by podcaster Liv. She's come across a new lead. But if Theo wants to find out the truth he must be quick before his progressing dementia smothers everything in darkness. Who has taken his daughter? Why does Julie's ex-boyfriend Daniel keep his mother's bedroom door locked, years after she passed away? And is there anything more gruesome than the uncertainty of not knowing what happened to your own child?
True Blue is by Joe Thomas. New Year's Eve 1988. An illegal rave in Hackney. Acid House has arrived in the UK. But the Second Summer of Love is no golden era for Britain. A decade of Thatcher is starting to bite and her planned "Community Charge" will only rub salt in the wounds. Privatisation has lined shareholders pockets, but at what cost? A nation stripped of its assets, going for broke. DC Patrick Noble is assigned to a task force working out of Stoke Newington, gathering evidence of police corruption to use against his new colleagues. But this is a dangerous game. And his underlings - spycop Parker and reluctant civilian Suzie Scialfa - are getting restive. Turns out blackmail and intimidation can only get you so far. Meanwhile, council solicitor Jon Davies is once again lifting stones that shouldn't be lifted - this time plumbing the depths of the deal to privatise water. As the country hurtles towards disorder, in the form of riots that even the Iron Lady can't withstand, Noble walks an inexorable path towards his own inescapable fate. Things can only get better. But first they have to hit rock bottom.
February 2026
The Killing Floor is by Elly Griffiths. Ali Dawson is a police detective who leads a unit that investigates cases so cold her team must travel to the distant past to solve them. But Ali and the team haven't been allowed to time-travel ever since their technical expert, Jones, got stuck in Victorian London, never to be seen again. To distract herself from meaningless tasks, Ali decides to look into a present-day case - an apparent suicide of a young man who fell to his death from a high building. She believes the death is linked to a psychic medium called Barry Power, who convinced the boy he could fly. Ali goes to one of Power's shows where he claims to be in contact with Jones. When Ali notices that evening that her cat, Terry, has gone missing, she decides to go back in time just long enough to prevent Terry from escaping through his open cat flap. A dangerous plan which backfires, and she finds herself once more in Victorian London, where she meets Jones, as well as Power, and the darkly mysterious Cain Templeton with whom Ali has unfinished business from her previous visit to the past . .
Cromarty, The Black Isle, 1831. As seagulls shriek and rise on the coastal winds, a circulating library in the bustling port town of Cromarty is meeting for the first time. Ostensibly united by a love of books, the demands of social convention have brought together a disparate group of people. Charlotte Mackenzie, the remote and fragile wife of the local laird, seeks an escape from a loveless marriage; her best friend, Rachel Mackay, a former governess who is ardently in love with her own older husband, the town's minister; the young schoolmaster, John Learmonth, newly arrived from Edinburgh with secrets in tow; and the gentle bank clerk, Ludovic Cameron who dreams of a new life across the ocean, far from his erstwhile schoolmate, the malevolent Farquhar Hossack. When the laird befriends a wounded officer, a chain of events is set into motion that threatens to upset the delicate equilibrium of the community. Against the backdrop of mass emigrations, an encroaching cholera epidemic, political unrest and the campaign to abolish chattel slavery in the British Caribbean, the people of Cromarty must negotiate their new world and each other, flitting in and out of each other's lives through one extraordinary year. The Cromarty Library Circle is by Shona Maclean.
The Widows is by Anna Smith. One false move could get them killed. Ruby, Bella and Cissy are used to the high life. Married to gangland bosses at the top of their game, the riches of Costa del Sol are at their fingertips, the world at their feet. But when Cissy's husband is brutally murdered, everything changes. With his lifelong friend - the notorious drug lord Tommy Mallon - hellbent on revenge, the three women are forced to go on the run. Soon they find themselves caught up in an explosive struggle for money and power. A new life awaits - but only if they can outrun the one they've left behind.
March 2026
The Move is by J P Delaney. Few beginnings can be deadly . . . Kate and Matt Crowther are finally moving out of London, in search of a better life for their young family. Trade Cottage seems to be the house of their dreams - and they immediately hit it off with the sellers, Rosemary and Paul Finch, who brought up their own family there. When Kate and Matt move in, they're pleased to discover the Finches still very much in evidence: offering advice, introducing them to the local community, and becoming honorary grandparents to Will, 11, and Tilly, 9. But when the Finches take exception to Kate and Matt's renovations, relations with the neighbours sour, and Kate and Matt find themselves subjected to a vicious campaign of hate. But Kate isn't giving up her dream home without a fight. And it turns out Trade Cottage has secrets of its own to reveal - secrets that may endanger the very family Kate has moved there to protect .
Vital Signs is by Kate Webb. Can a killer leave no trace? August 2010. The Tobins - a happy, well-off family - spend a sunny afternoon at a birthday party with friends. By dawn, most of them are dead. It's a crime that grabs headlines and shocks the nation. The key suspect, Aidan Tobin, was known as a loving husband and father, but his desperate attempt to take his own life is as good as a confession. The case begins and ends with him. August 2021. A survivor of the attacks regains a memory of that horrific night. Chloë Tobin never believed her father was guilty. Only six at the time, she is the sole witness to the brutal attacks. Now, she insists that somebody else was involved. Could she be right? DI Matt Lockyer and DC Gemma Broad of Wiltshire Police's cold case unit aren't so sure. But as they begin to investigate, they soon discover there's more to this case than meets the eye. After all, why would a man who had everything destroy it all?
The Dangerous Stranger is by Simon Mason. On a warm and pleasant evening in Oxford, gentle city of poets and scholars, rioters outside a hotel full of asylum seekers set a young refugee on fire. The city - the country - convulses in shock. Is this who we are? It's international news of the very worst kind, and the Chief Constable demands immediate and exemplary action in bringing the perpetrators to justice. The detectives leading the investigation fill him with misgivings, however: DIs Ryan and Ray Wilkins (no relation), Thames Valley's detective pantomime horse, one Oxford-educated, the other Oxford-trailer park. He doesn't understand why they work together. 'Do they even get on?' 'Somehow that doesn't seem necessary,' their Superintendent replies. Who burned the boy alive? Was it a far-right extremist? Was it an ordinary person who had simply gone along to watch and got caught up in the emotion? Could it even be one of the children who were there? Deploying a range of investigative skills, some standard, some unconventional and some frankly nuts, the Wilkinses do what they do: results with chaos. But when they discover that the victim was not an asylum seeker after all, or even a resident of the hotel, the whole investigation kicks into a completely different configuration.
April 2026
Laura never meant to lie, but old habits die hard. When Annie Adams heads to London to visit her mother, Laura, the last thing she expects to find is a dead body. Least of all for it to be Fliss, the budding artist Laura had just taken under her wing. Annie is no stranger to murder - after all, she's solved a few cases already. And something about the way Fliss died feels familiar. She's seen a case like this before. Or read about it, rather, in the journals of her dead Great Aunt Frances, whose close friend was killed in the 1960s in the exact same way: with her heart surgically removed from her chest. As threats pile up on Laura's doorstep, it soon becomes clear that she's next, and that she's hiding something . . . With her mother's life on the line, can Annie find the killer before it's too late? From the gritty streets of 1960s Soho to the lofty galleries of present-day West London, follow Annie and Frances as they race to bring a killer to justice. How to Cheat Your Own Death is by Kristen Perrin.
Fresh from case of the stolen heart, one that shattered his belief in the regime he works for, Samson Kolechko is confronted with a mystery that borders on the impossible. How could a squad of Red Army soldiers have disappeared from the Galician bathhouse, leaving only their boots and their uniforms as evidence they ever existed? Faced with such a fantastical conundrum, Samson resorts to fantastical investigation method: stitching his operative severed ear into a bathhouse worker's jacket, he is able to eavesdrop on his every move. But he discovers far more than he bargained for, uncovering human remains in the stoves and the presence of a sinister religious cult in the city. With his quick-witted new wife Nadezhda at his side, Samson must not only solve the case but navigate the political turmoil that still grips Kyiv as civil war looms and trust between neighbours and comrades is eroded day by day. The Lost Soldiers is by Andrey Kurkov.
May 2026
Just Kill is by Remi Kone. London during a blistering heatwave. A man wakes in the middle of the night, hearing noises from downstairs. He assumes it's a burglar - nothing prepares him for what he finds. Across the city, DI Leah Hutch and DS Benjamin Randle are called to a murder scene outside their jurisdiction. A woman has been killed - the only suspect, a friend from Leah's past who refuses to speak to anyone but her. Meanwhile, fourteen-year-old Zed Okoro's mother has vanished. He will do anything in his power to find her - even if it means risking his own life. As Leah and Randle investigate, they discover a conspiracy with roots far from home. Three incidents. One connection. What secrets make people kill?
In a brilliant feat of literary detective work Master of Lies by Piers Blofeld tells the extraordinary untold story of Anthony Blunt's life as a spy. Based on extensive research into newly released files he is revealed as not simply "the fourth man", but the most dangerous spy of the twentieth century. During the war, as the fate of the world hung in the balance, Blunt's intelligence was being fed straight on to the desks of Hitler, Stalin and Churchill. His hand was secretly guiding our collective fate and his treason led to the deaths of tens of thousands. He casts a shadow which looms large to this day. The official narrative is that Blunt was the least of the Cambridge spies - and yet he was the one who got away with it. While the rest drank themselves to death in dingy Moscow flats, Blunt revelled in his brilliant career as an art historian, Surveyor of the Queen's pictures and Knight of the Realm. He was protected not just by his many friendships with the great and the good, but by the brilliance with which he played the game - his was a secret too big to be told.
June 2026
After Bruno misses several phone calls from Pamela, he worries that something has happened to his beloved horse he keeps at her riding school. But her reason for calling is entirely unexpected: Pamela’s new lodger has been murdered. Bruno knows that Pamela isn’t capable of killing anyone, but then who’s the culprit? And what’s the motive? The dead woman had only just moved to town to take a job at the local nursing home—she had no enemies in the village, and no friends, either. As Bruno wrestles with these complications, the force realizes that Bruno can’t be impartial when Pamela is involved, and assigns the case instead to their rising star rookie, Fabien. Bruno is happy for Fabien to take the lead. After all, Bruno’s been distracted—by his foundering relationship, by a documentary crew determined to transform the sleepy Vézère Valley into a tourist hotspot, by a group of opinionated small businesses Bruno wants to help organize a logistically complicated night market. He can’t seem to catch a break. But when Fabien realizes that the victim is connected to his past, Bruno has to step back in to help. The village has never felt more crowded, and the clock is ticking: Will Bruno and Fabien be able to catch a killer? A Murder in Springtime is by Martin Walker.
