When Georgie Giraffe decides to become a detective, his family and friends encourage him and bring him cases.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Fans around the world adore the bestselling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series and its proprietor, Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s premier lady detective. In this charming series, Mma Ramotswe—with help from her loyal associate, Grace Makutsi—navigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, good humor, and the occasional cup of tea. This first novel in Alexander McCall Smith’s widely acclaimed The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series tells the story of the delightfully cunning and enormously engaging Precious Ramotswe, who is drawn to her profession to “help people with problems in their lives.” Immediately upon setting up shop in a small storefront in Gaborone, she is hired to track down a missing husband, uncover a con man, and follow a wayward daughter. But the case that tugs at her heart, and lands her in danger, is a missing eleven-year-old boy, who may have been snatched by witchdoctors. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency received two Booker Judges’ Special Recommendations and was voted one of the International Books of the Year and the Millennium by the Times Literary Supplement.

A rather silly detective story in the spirit of Jasper Fforde.

"Now a BBC America TV series event"--Cover.

"A Holmes on the Range mystery" -- Cover.

From the world's #1 bestselling author comes a thrilling new standalone novel where a detective duo of sisters finds themselves in the crosshairs of a dangerous and lawless group. Attorney Rhonda Bird returns home after a long estrangement when she learns her father has died. There she makes two important discoveries: her father stopped being an accountant and had opened up a private detective agency, and she has a teenage half sister named Baby. Baby brings in a client to the detective agency, a young man who claims he was abducted. During the course of the investigation, Rhonda and Baby become entangled in a dangerous case involving a group of overprivileged young adults who break laws for fun, their psychopath ringleader, and an ex-assassin victim who decides to hunt them down for revenge.

When the Wollstonecraft Detective Agency is approached by famous fossil hunter Mary Anning, the team know that this could be their most important case yet. Mary Anning's precious dog has been snatched - to get her back, the kidnappers demand she lie about fake dinosaur bones, and pretend they are genuine. Now the Wollstonecraft detectives have just three days to track down the fossil fakers, and save the integrity of science! The game is afoot- blood-sucking leeches, smoke bombs and diabolical disguises abound. And behind the lies and fakery, a genuine criminal may finally be revealed . . .

Hettie Bagshot has bitten off more than any cat could chew. As soon as she launches her No. 2 Feline Detective Agency, she's bucketed into a case: Furcross, a home for slightly older cats, has a nasty spate of bodysnatching, and three of the residents have been stolen from their graves. Hettie and her sidekick, Tilly, set out to reveal the terrible truth. Is Nurse Mogadon involved in a deadly game? Has the haberdashery department of Malkin & Sprinkle become a mortuary? And what flavour will Betty Butter's pie of the week be?

A fascinating examination of the world of private investigators by a 21st-century private eye. Today's world is complicated: companies are becoming more powerful than nations, the lines between public and corporate institutions grow murkier, and the internet is shredding our privacy. To combat these onslaughts, people everywhere -- rich and not so rich, in business and in their personal lives -- are turning away from traditional police, lawyers, and government regulators toward a new champion: the private investigator. As a private investigator, Tyler Maroney has traveled the globe, overseeing sensitive investigations and untying complicated cases for a wide array of clients. In his new book, he shows that it's private eyes who today are being called upon to catch corrupt politicians, track down international embezzlers, and mine reams of data to reveal which CEOs are lying. The tools Maroney and other private investigators use are a mix of the traditional and the cutting edge, from old phone records to computer forensics to solid (and often inspired) street-level investigative work. The most useful assets private investigators have, Maroney has found, are their resourcefulness and their creativity. Each of the investigations Maroney explores in this book highlights an individual case and the people involved in it, and in each account he explains how the transgressors were caught and what lessons can be learned from it. Whether the clients are a Middle Eastern billionaire whose employees stole millions from him, the director of a private equity firm wanting a background check on a potential hire (a known convicted felon), or creditors of a wealthy American investor trying to recoup their money after he fled the country to avoid bankruptcy, all of them hired private investigators to solve problems the authorities either can't or won't touch. In an era when it's both easier and more difficult than ever to disappear after a crime is committed, it's the modern detective people are turning to for help, for revenge, and for justice.

Since the late 1970s, a subgenre of crime fiction, written by women and featuring a professional woman investigator, has exploded on the popular fiction market. Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones focus on this recent proliferation of women writers of detective fiction, providing the first book-length study of the historical and societal changes that fueled this popularity, along with insightful and entertaining readings of the texts themselves. Walton and Jones place the genre within its aesthetic, social, and economic contexts, reading it as an index of cultural beliefs. Addressing the ways that Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, and others work through the conventions of the "hard-boiled" genre made popular by writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane, the authors show how the male hard-boiled tradition has been challenged and transformed. Issues of child, spousal, and sexual abuse are more likely to surface in women's detective novels, the authors show, and female sleuths face many of the same dilemmas as those who read about them—everyday problems with relationships, parenting, and money. Detective Agency also integrates interviews with authors and publishers, reader surveys, publication data, and analysis of internet discussion groups to present a fascinating picture of the "industry" of women's detective fiction. Authors of these works are powerful players in the publishing system as well as agents of cultural intervention, Walton and Jones claim. They conclude by examining the rise of female detectives in television and film.