Animal Mysteries

Twitch has three pet chickens, four pigeons, swallows nesting in his bedroom and a passion for bird-spotting. On the first day of the summer holidays, he arrives at his secret birdwatching hide to find police everywhere: a convicted robber has broken out of prison and is hiding in Aves Wood. Can Twitch use his talents for bird-spotting to hunt for the dangerous prisoner and find the missing loot?

In The Case of the Crown Jewels, when the crown jewels go missing from Kennel Palace, it's up to super-sleuth Sherlock Bones and Dr. Catson to solve the crime. But with multiple suspects and a trail that's starting to run cold, will they be able to catch the culprit in time? In The Mystery of the Vanishing Magician, when a famous magician vanishes from a train bound to Paris, Catson is convinced of foul play… but none of the other passengers seem to know anything about the magician. Was he on the train at all?

The town is gripped by a big freeze, and blizzard after blizzard has engulfed the feline community, leaving shops and businesses snowbound. Hettie Bagshot and her sidekick, Tilly Jenkins, have found sanctuary by their fireside but soon they are bucketed into a terrifying nightmare, called to investigate the disappearance of the town's kittens as - one by one - they are taken in the snow. Who are the strange cats living in Wither-Fork Woods?

When Jack discovers that someone is hurting local pets, he's determined that the Twitchers will solve the crime. But the Twitchers are more interested in the rare and endangered bearded vulture spotted heading for Aves Woods. Determined to prove himself, Jack sets off to investigate, only to find himself in deep water. Friendless and alone, Jack must use all his bravery and skills to not only stop a terrible crime, one that could put the bearded vulture in danger, but to prove to his friends that he's a deserving member of The Twitchers after all.

Darkus is miserable. His dad has disappeared, and now he is living next door to the most disgusting neighbours ever. A giant beetle called Baxter comes to his rescue. But can the two solve the mystery of his dad's disappearance, especially when links emerge to cruel Lucretia Cutter and her penchant for beetle jewellery? A coffee-mug mountain, home to a million insects, could provide the answer - if Darkus and Baxter are brave enough to find it.

Maureen's career as a sportswear buyer hits a snag just before Halloween, when the department store declares bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Finn's lost his way as a guide dog after flunking his test for being too friendly and easily distracted. Sadly, only one of them can earn unemployment, so Maureen's facing a winter of discontent in Boston - when she realizes she can't afford her apartment. Salvation comes when she receives a mysterious inheritance: an inn in Haven, Florida.

Hi! I'm Tori Madison, and I hate scrubbing toilets, which is unfortunate because my BFF Hazel and I own Bubbles and Troubles, Blueberry Bay's premier cleaning service. When Mrs. Livingston asked us to sort through the contents of her attic, however, we thought our toilet-scrubbing days were over. That is...until we found her corpse. As if finding our client's body stuffed in a steamer trunk wasn't enough of an upset, someone needed to save her cat from being sent to a local high-kill animal shelter. That person, as it turned out, was me.

Artist Celeste Cabot welcomes the chance to show her paintings at a craft fair in her hometown of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where she and her Chihuahua, Van Gogh, can park her vintage Shasta trailer and sell her creations, too. Unfortunately, her sales take a hit when a customer returns a painting, claiming it's haunted. When a fellow vendor discovers images hidden in Celeste's artwork - and a ghost pays her a late-night visit - she's shocked to realize she has psychic abilities.

With her Let It Bee honey boutique buzzing along nicely, life is as sweet as nectar for Wren Johnson - until she takes a morning walk along the Pacific beach with her Havana Brown cat, Everett, and stumbles upon the body of Agnes Snow, the cranky queen of the local craft fairs, stiff as driftwood. More unfortunate? Clutched in the victim's fist is a label from Wren's homemade beeswax-and-honey lip balm. Which makes Officer Jim Hampton focus his dreamy-blue Paul Newman eyes on Wren as suspect number-one.

Cruel beetle fashionista, Lucretia Cutter, is at large with her yellow ladybird spies. When Darkus, Virginia and Bertolt discover further evidence of her evil, they're determined to stop her. But the three friends are in trouble. Darkus' dad has forbidden them to investigate any further. Hope rests on Novak, Lucretia's daughter and a Hollywood actress, but the beetle diva is always one scuttle ahead....

Ada Goth is the only child of Lord Goth. The two live together in the enormous Ghastly-Gorm Hall. It’s hard for her to make friends and she's rather lonely. Then one day William and Emily Cabbage come to stay at the house, and together with a ghostly mouse called Ishmael they begin to unravel a dastardly plot. Ada and her friends must work together to foil the evil gamekeeper, Maltravers, before it's too late!

Sierra Ravenswood is the new part-time employee of the Flower House, a flower shop in Aerieville, Tennessee. Things take a decidedly negative turn when a customer drops dead in the middle of her new bouquet-arranging workshop at the store. The town is on edge, and Sierra knows that murder is something that an upbeat attitude and a bouquet of sweet-smelling roses can't fix. She's determined to figure out whodunit, before anyone else in town meets an untimely reason for needing funeral flowers.

It's hard being the youngest in a family of witches known for their power. It's even harder when that magical power has all but passed you by. Still, I was doing okay for myself. I like to think I was proving to the rest of my family that magic wasn't a requirement to living. Then Aunt Opal became the prime suspect in a murder investigation. Wouldn't you know it would happen right when everyone else in the family but me was out of town. Now it's up to me to prove her innocence, and a little magic could go a long way in helping me do that.

I drove myself out of New York City, where a man shot himself in front of me. He was a gluttonous man and when his blood came out it looked like the blood of a pig. That’s a cruel thing to think, I know. He did it in a restaurant where I was having dinner with another man, another married man. Do you see how this is going? But I wasn’t always that way.

Thirteen-year-old Ava Bonney is unlike other children. Exceptionally bright, she has an obsessive interest in the rate at which dead animals decompose. The motorway she lives by regularly offers up roadkill, and in the dead of night Ava likes nothing better than to pull her latest discovery into her roadside den so she can study it. But one day when she arrives she stumbles across the body of fellow pupil, Mickey Grant. DI Seth Delahaye is given the case, one of the most challenging of his career.

Trudell Becket, known to her friends as Tru, finds herself in a bind when her library in lovely Cypress, South Carolina, is turned into a state-of-the-art bookless "technological center". A library with no books breaks Tru's book-loving heart. Then the town manager, who was behind the big push for the library's transformation, is crushed by an overturned shelf of DVDs. Tru becomes the prime suspect as she hadn't hid the fact that she hated having all of those wonderful books replaced by tablets and computers.

Holiday time in the Valley, and in the holiday spirit - despite the dismal shape of the finances at the Little Detective Agency - Bernie refers a potential client to Victor Klovsky, a fellow private eye. It’s also true that the case - promising lots of online research but little action - doesn’t appeal to Bernie, while it seems perfect for Victor, who is not cut out for rough stuff. But Victor disappears in a rough-stuff way, and when he doesn’t show up at his mom’s to light the Hanukkah candles, she hires Chet and Bernie to find him.

A grieving young widow, Charlene needed a new start - so she bought a historic mansion, sight unseen, and drove from Chicago to New England to start turning it into a bed-and-breakfast. On her first night in the house, she awakens to find a handsome man with startling blue eyes in her bedroom. Terror turns to utter disbelief when he politely introduces himself as Jack Strathmore - and explains that he used to live here - when he was alive. He firmly believes that someone pushed him down the stairs three years ago, and he won't be able to leave until someone figures out who.

Chet and Bernie are contacted by a terribly scared young woman who seems to want their help. Before she can even tell them her name, she flees in panic. But in that brief meeting Chet sniffs out an important secret about her, a secret at the heart of the mystery he and Bernie set out to solve. It's a case with no client and no crime and yet great danger, with the duo facing a powerful politician who has a lot to lose.

When Chet the dog, "the most lovable narrator in all of crime fiction" (Boston Globe), and his partner, PI Bernie Little of the desert-based Little Detective Agency, arrive to a meeting with hydrologist Wendell Nero, they are in for a shocking sight - Wendell has come to a violent and mysterious end. What did the hydrologist want to see them about? Is his death a random robbery, or something more? Chet and Bernie, working for nothing more than an eight-pack of Slim Jims, are on the case.