Omar Yussef is a schoolteacher in Bethlehem, struggling to teach history unfettered by politics. When a PLO soldier is murdered, and a Palestinian Christian is arrested for the crime (and accused of being a collaborator with the Israelis), Yussef launches his own investigation, convinced that the accused, a former student, is innocent. Yussef knows he is not a brave man ("What an old fool you are, scrambling about in a battle zone in your nice shoes;"), but his determination to stand up for his friend outweighs the futility of his quest, even if it means jeopardizing his family.

In the small town of Ystad, a pair of seemingly random events takes place within a matter of days: two teenage girls with no apparent motive brutally beat and stab a taxi driver to death, and a remarkably healthy man checks his bank balance at an ATM and then collapses dead on the sidewalk. After two more odd murders, Wallander becomes convinced that the incidents are all connected. The recurring clues demonstrating the vulnerability of society in the electronic age remain just outside of the Luddite inspector's understanding. But once he detects a conspiracy to collapse the world's financial infrastructure on a specific date, Wallander, whose position at work is already imperiled, ignores office politics and protocol to stop the would-be revolutionary.

Two murders committed 400 years apart form the core of British author Mills's outstanding second novel. In 1958,Cambridge undergraduate Adam Strickland, who's studying a curious Tuscan Renaissance garden for his art historythesis, is equally intrigued by both the garden of the Villa Docci estate and its elderly owner, Signora Francesca Docci.Built by the villa's first owner, Federico Docci, in 1577, the garden was intended as a memorial to his wife, Flora, whodied when she was only 25. In the course of his research, Adam begins to sense that events, both past and present, are not as clear-cut as they appear. In particular, he discovers that there are several versions of the death of Signora Docci's oldest son, Emilio, who was shot by the villa's German occupiers at the end of WWII. Adam is hailed by all when he comes up with a novel theory explaining Flora's death in 1548, but when he begins to speculate on Emilio's demise, he finds himself in serious danger.

When Harriet Vane attends her Oxford reunion, known as the "Gaudy," the prim academic setting is haunted by a rash of bizarre pranks: scrawled obscenities, burnt effigies and poison-pen letters -- including one that says, "Ask your boyfriend with the title if he likes arsenic in his soup." Some of the notes threaten murder; all are perfectly ghastly; yet in spite of their scurrilous nature, all are perfectly worded. And Harriet finds herself ensnared in a nightmare of romance and terror, with only the tiniest shreds of clues to challenge her powers of detection, and those of her paramour, Lord Peter Wimsey.

Grimes’s intricate Richard Jury mystery brings the Scotland Yard superintendent to a shady London hotel to investigate the murder of wealthy bachelor Billy Maples. Jury discovers connections between the murder case and the distant past through Maples's grandfather, who served as one of Britain's top code breakers during WWII. Allusions to the literarythemes of Henry James lend depth. The superintendent also encounters some major romantic complications in the form of gorgeous Det. Insp. Lu Aguilar, the lead detective on the case, and Scotland Yard pathologist Phyllis Nancy. Ably abetted by his longtime amateur colleague, Melrose Plant, Jury deftly and doggedly pursues the killer.

A gripping, if depressing, tale of identify theft and elder abuse displays bestseller Grafton’s storytelling gifts. By default, Millhone, a private investigator in the small Southern California town of Santa Teresa, assumes responsibility for the well-being of an old neighbor, Gus Vronsky, injured in a fall. After Vronsky's great-niece arranges to hire a home 100 aide, Solana Rojas, Millhone begins to suspect that Rojas is not all that she seems. Since the reader knows from the start that an unscrupulous master manipulator has stolen the Rojas persona, the plot focuses not on whodunit but on the battle of wits Millhone wages with an unconventional and formidable adversary.