DonateAre you participating in the 2023 Adult Summer Reading Challenge but need help with this specific bingo square? We’ve got some suggestions for you! Browse through the titles and click to access the catalog record. Happy reading!
The following titles are all police procedurals.
Looking for more summer reading suggestions? Check our blog archive for more!
The Black Echo / Michael Connelly (Harry Bosch #1) For maverick LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal . . . because the murdered man was a fellow Vietnam “tunnel rat” who had fought side by side with him in a hellish underground war. Now Bosch is about to relive the horror of Nam. From a dangerous maze of blind alleys to a daring criminal heist beneath the city, his survival instincts will once again be tested to their limit.
The Darkest Evening / Ann Cleeves (Vera Stanhope #9) Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope is driving gingerly through the Northumberland countryside snow when she encounters a stalled car with no driver and a baby secured in the backseat. Grabbing the baby, she hustles to the nearest house—the seen-better-days Brockburn, where her father grew up and where a Christmas party is now blasting away. And there’s a woman out front, lying dead in the snow.
The Dry / Jane Harper (Aaron Falk #1) After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke’s steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime. But now more than one person knows they didn’t tell the truth back then, and Luke is dead. Amid the worst drought in a century, Falk and the local detective question what really happened to Luke.
In the Woods / Tana French (Dublin Murder Squad #1) As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours. Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox — his partner and closest friend — find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.
The Man Who Smiled / Henning Mankell (Kurt Wallander #4) A lawyer, driving home through the fog, stops after he sees “a human-sized effigy” propped on a chair in the middle of a deserted highway. Gustaf Torstensson gets out of the car to investigate, is hit from behind and was “dead before his body hit the damp asphalt.” The police accept the assailant’s claim that it was an accident, but when Torstensson’s son, Sten, is shot dead just two weeks later, the brooding Detective Chief Inspector Kurt Wallender, who’s on sick leave and vowing to retire from the Ystad police force, decides to pursue the killer and resume his career.
Missing, Presumed / Susie Steiner (DS Manon Bradshaw #1) Edith Hind, a 24-year-old Cambridge graduate student, goes missing, leaving behind only a smear of blood and signs of a struggle at the flat she shares with her boyfriend. The pressure is on Det. Sgt. Manon Bradshaw, who excels at her job but has suffered a string of dreary Internet dates, and the rest of the Cambridgeshire Major Incident Team, since Edith’s father is Sir Ian Hind, physician to the royal family. Every scrap of case information is fodder for the press, who pounce on the more salacious aspects of Edith’s personal life, even as Manon and the team discover that the answers might be linked to something much more serious.
Naked in Death / J.D. Robb (In Death #1) Eve Dallas is a New York police lieutenant hunting for a ruthless killer. In over ten years on the force, she’s seen it all — and knows her survival depends on her instincts. And she’s going against every warning telling her not to get involved with Roarke, an Irish billionaire — and a suspect in Eve’s murder investigation. But passion and seduction have rules of their own, and it’s up to Eve to take a chance in the arms of a man she knows nothing about.
Now You See Me / Sharon J. Bolton (Lacey Flint #1) One night after interviewing a reluctant witness at a London apartment complex, Lacey Flint, a young detective constable, stumbles onto a woman brutally stabbed just moments before in the building’s darkened parking lot. Within twenty-four hours, a reporter receives an anonymous letter that points out alarming similarities between the murder and Jack the Ripper’s first murder — a letter that calls out Lacey by name. If it’s real, and they have a killer bent on re-creating London’s bloody past, history shows they have just five days until the next attempt.
The Pledge / Kathleen Kent (Betty Rhyzyk #3) Things are looking up for Detective Betty Rhyzyk. She’s settled into a happy marriage and been promoted to Sergeant in the Dallas Police Department. But when a hostage stand-off puts her on the phone with legendary cartel leader The Knife, things take a turn. The Knife has heard a rival is making a play for the streets of Dallas — none other than Evangeline Roy. The matriarch of a ruthless cult, Evangeline also happens to hold a personal vendetta against Betty. So who better to draw Evangeline out of hiding? Betty’s got two weeks to catch her. Or else.
The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan (Cormac Reilly #1) In 1993, police detective Cormac Reilly is called to a house in Kilmore, County Mayo, where he finds 15-year-old Maude Blake and her five-year-old brother, Jack, alive; in an upstairs bedroom lies the body of their alcoholic mother, dead of a drug overdose. In 2013, Jack’s body turns up in a Galway river after an anonymous caller claims he saw Jack jump in. Jack’s girlfriend, Aisling Conroy, is sadly willing to accept the obvious conclusion that it was suicide. But Maude, newly back from Australia, is convinced it was murder. Based on new information, Cormac investigates the now 20-year-old death of the mother, while Maude and Aisling try to figure out what actually happened to Jack.
The Sinner by Tess Gerritsen (Rizzoli & Isles #1) When two Boston nuns are found brutally beaten — one fatally and one with a scintilla of life left in her — it’s up to homicide detective Jane Rizzoli to find the perpetrator. Medical examiner Dr. Maura Isles has the unlucky fortune to discover that the murdered nun, a young woman about to make her final vows, hid untold secrets from the rest of the aging convent. Both fallen Catholics, Rizzoli and Isles seek to reconcile the viciousness of the crimes with the seeming blind faith of the victims.
The Snowman by Jo Nesbo (Harry Hole #7) On a cold Norwegian night, a young boy named Jonas wakes to find his mother missing from their home. Outside, in Jonas’s yard, stands a solitary snowman wearing his mother’s favorite scarf. Brought in to investigate the disappearance is frayed-around-the-edges police detective Harry Hole, who soon learns he’s dealing with a serial killer calling himself the Snowman. As Hole delves into the case, he begins to suspect the Snowman has been murdering women for years. And to make matters worse the killer has chosen Hole as his opponent in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with twists and turns designed to drive the detective insane.
Still Life by Louise Penny (Chief Inspector Armand Gamache #1) Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, has been found dead in the woods. The locals are certain it’s a tragic hunting accident and nothing more, but Gamache smells something foul in these remote woods, and is soon certain that Jane Neal died at the hands of someone much more sinister than a careless bowhunter.
Sworn to Silence / Linda Castillo (Kate Burkholder #1) Kate Burkholder, a former Amish resident of Painters Mill, OH, is returning as police chief sixteen years after a series of brutal murders took place there. When a new victim is found on her watch, she struggles with a secret that could hurt both her and her family.
The Vanishing Season by Joanna Schaffhausen (Ellery Hathaway #1) Ellery “Ellie” Hathaway is the only cop in Woodbury, Mass., convinced that the baffling disappearances from the small town — one every July for the past three years — are connected to each other, and to sadistic imprisoned serial killer Francis Michael Coben. She’s also the only one of Coben’s victims to survive. Fearing the worst as the July window once again looms, Ellie reluctantly reaches out to the one person who might help: FBI profiler Reed Markham, who cracked the Coben case 14 years earlier and rescued her.