In the early 1990s, "Public Order Defence Squads" in China — usually made up of discharged military personnel, unemployed young adults and local hooligans — were supposed to maintain public order in villages and towns. Most of the time, however, they ended up dealing with all sorts of mundane matters in their towns. The story begins with a mysterious case of serial dog killings. LI Lizhong, leader of the local defence squad, starts an investigation into the case, following a set of strange clues and studying them using piecemeal knowledge of primitive criminology and ichnology. After a string of hijinks, the squad catches the dog killer. However, the evidence also shows that the case is closely related to the accidental death of Lizhong’s father.
A love story. Theo and Frank are on the run from the British Navy in the early 1800's. They hide in the grounds of an abandoned country house and discover it's more than the living they're running from.
This story tells about a woman in her mid-twenties who tries to revive her childhood memories. In order to relive the last moments with her mother, she rapes and murders another woman. The story inquires, not judges, the imperfect soul. Beauty tainted by unusual parental love.
Sandra Carpenter is a London-based dancer who is distraught to learn that her friend has disappeared. Soon after the disappearance, she's approached by Harley Temple, a police investigator who believes her friend has been murdered by a serial killer who uses personal ads to find his victims. Temple hatches a plan to catch the killer using Sandra as bait, and Sandra agrees to help.
An old man has trouble connecting with his young grandson that recently moved in. But then there are a series of mysterious attacks on the elderly, and the grandpa-grandson duo decide to investigate together and bond over the experience.
Jim Hanvey is a genial but top-notch detective who has retired to his country home. An insurance company hires him to find a missing emerald so they won't have to pay out the $100,000 for which the jewel is insured. It doesn't take him long to find the emerald, but he discovers that finding it was the easy part; the difficult part is getting it back to its rightful owner, and he winds up involved in a murder in which an innocent man is framed.
Rights advocate Alice Robinson descends into the depths of an aging prison, seeking to interview a mysterious inmate who has seemingly been locked away and forgotten.
When Laura unearths an old Ouija board in her closet, her roommate, Cindy, uses it and encounters the spirit of a man that had been murdered in their apartment. After Laura later witnesses Cindy being strangled to death, the authorities arrive to find Cindy missing and no evidence of a crime. Laura sets out to convince everyone that the murder was real while evading the man she feels is Cindy's killer.
An Asian woman is found dead in the water of Stockholm's archipelago. She has been murdered and everything indicates that she was a prostitute. Meanwhile a series of break-ins has occurred on an island outside of Stockholm. Suddenly a retired old man is also found dead in his own yard. Now Beck has two cases to solve and they both point in the same direction.
Second world war. In one of the German intelligence schools are preparing sabotage groups of Russian prisoners of war for casting in the USSR. Among them — Nikolai Verezhnikov, who, not being a professional scout, was able to impose their own game and interfere with the plans of the enemy…
Ralphie is an Uber driver and aspiring bodybuilder who is inducted into a libertarian masculinity cult and loses his grip on reality when his repressed desires are awakened.
An engineer and his 5-year old son Rasmus are kidnapped by a group who wants to get their hands on the engineer's latest invention. Three kids become witnesses to the kidnapping and decide to follow the kidnappers to an island and attempt to make a rescue.
Set in 19th-century New York, this mystery begins when a Frenchwoman shows up at the home of one of Napoleon's former marshals. The alcoholic man is badly crippled and slowly dying, but this doesn't stop the forthright lady from pushing him to change his will to include his estranged grandson so that he can help out the struggling French Republic. Unfortunately, the dying man's conniving housekeeper and butler, already planning murder to get the money themselves, overhear her and begin plotting her demise.