M. J. Lee

Three severed hands. No clues. A race against time. Three embalmed hands are discovered in a disused Victorian house. Is it the work of a cult? Or a gangland ritual? And what happened to the rest of the bodies? DI Thomas Ridpath is told to investigate. At the same time, the Coroner needs to issue a Presumption of Death certificate on a teenage girl who vanished eleven years ago in mysterious circumstances. What happened to her? Where did she go? When...

Play with fire, and you're going to get burned. The unputdownable new Ridpath crime thriller

In Manchester, a block of flats is burning. The only victim is a middle-aged man, sat watching TV. Are the fire and the man's death an accident or is something more frightening at work?

Meanwhile, DI Ridpath is back with his wife and enjoying work at the Coroner's Office, his myeloma still in remission. But the quiet life is soon shattered

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A child's body in an unmarked grave. A killer waiting to strike again.

A young boy's body is found in a meadow beside the River Mersey. No DNA. No witnesses. No clues. It brings back painful memories of the Moors Murderers.

After two weeks, the police have made no progress finding the killer. The one thing they do know; he will kill again. It is a race against time – and they are losing.

DI Thomas Ridpath has just returned

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Shanghai, 1928. The body of a blonde is washed up on the Beach of Dead Babies, in the heart of the smog-filled city. Seemingly a suicide, a closer inspection reveals a darker motive: the corpse has been weighed down, it's lower half mutilated...and the Chinese character for 'justice' carved into the chest. The moment Inspector Danilov lays eyes on the dismembered body, he realises that he has an exceptional case on his hands. And when the first body...

A family has been found murdered in the heart of 1920s Shanghai. But what could have compelled them to open the door to their killer? Inspector Danilov has always taken a unique approach to detective work. So, when he's asked to investigate the violent death of a fellow police officer, killed in action, he doesn't think twice about turning his attention to a different case altogether: the brutal murder of the Lee family, found massacred in their...

They are waiting for death. He is waiting to kill them. In August 2020, fourteen-year-old Andrew Golding went out for a walk following a row with his mum. He was never seen again. Four years later, when the press discovers police errors in Andrew Golding's case, DI Ridpath is called in to investigate. As Ridpath delves into the case, he slowly discovers something much bigger and far more brutal than he ever expected – a murderer from the past...

As tensions simmer in Shanghai, children go missing…Shanghai 1932: Inspector Danilov hasn't recovered from the death of his child... but across a Shanghai riven with communal tensions, children are going missing. Missing, and then murdered. Who is responsible? Why have the children's bodies been exhibited for all to see? Just as Danilov thinks the stakes couldn't be higher there is a new dimension, Japan, a rising power flexing its muscles. In fractious...

July 8, 1921. Ireland. A British Officer is shot dead on a remote hillside south of Dublin. November 22, 2015. United Kingdom. Former police detective, Jayne Sinclair, now working as a genealogical investigator, receives a phone call from an adopted American billionaire asking her to discover the identity of his real father. How are the two events linked? Jayne Sinclair has only three clues to help her: a photocopied birth certificate, a stolen book...