The Widow


Fiona Barton - 2016
    One who enabled her and her husband to carry on, when more bad things began to happen...But that woman’s husband died last week. And Jean doesn’t have to be her anymore.There’s a lot Jean hasn’t said over the years about the crime her husband was suspected of committing. She was too busy being the perfect wife, standing by her man while living with the accusing glares and the anonymous harassment. Now there’s no reason to stay quiet. There are people who want to hear her story. They want to know what it was like living with that man. She can tell them that there were secrets. There always are in a marriage. The truth—that’s all anyone wants. But the one lesson Jean has learned in the last few years is that she can make people believe anything…

She Lies in Wait


Gytha Lodge - 2019
    Bright and brilliant, they are destined for great things, and the youngest of the group—Aurora Jackson—is delighted to be allowed to tag along. The evening starts like any other—they drink, they dance, they fight, they kiss. Some of them slip off into the woods in pairs, others are left jealous and heartbroken. But by morning, Aurora has disappeared. Her friends claim that she was safe the last time they saw her, right before she went to sleep. An exhaustive investigation is launched, but no trace of the teenager is ever found.Thirty years later, Aurora’s body is unearthed in a hideaway that only the six friends knew about, and Jonah Sheens is put in charge of solving the long-cold case. Back in 1983, as a young cop in their small town, he had known the teenagers—including Aurora—personally, even before taking part in the search. Now he’s determined to finally get to the truth of what happened that night. Sheens’s investigation brings the members of the camping party back to the forest, where they will be confronted once again with the events that left one of them dead, and all of them profoundly changed forever.

The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line


Rob Thomas - 2014
    She's traded in her law degree for her old private investigating license, struggling to keep Mars Investigations afloat on the scant cash earned by catching cheating spouses until she can score her first big case.Now it's spring break, and college students descend on Neptune, transforming the beaches and boardwalks into a frenzied, week-long rave. When a girl disappears from a party, Veronica is called in to investigate. But this is not a simple missing person's case. The house the girl vanished from belongs to a man with serious criminal ties, and soon Veronica is plunged into a dangerous underworld of drugs and organized crime. And when a major break in the investigation has a shocking connection to Veronica's past, the case hits closer to home than she ever imagined.

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead


Sara Gran - 2011
    A one-time teen detective in Brooklyn, she is a follower of the esoteric French detective Jacques Silette, whose mysterious handbook Détection inspired Claire’s unusual practices. Claire also has deep roots in New Orleans, where she was mentored by Silette’s student the brilliant Constance Darling—until Darling was murdered. When a respected DA goes missing she returns to the hurricane-ravaged city to find out why.

Diamonds and Cole


Micheal Maxwell - 2013
    In the past, Cole a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, worked for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine. Now, he’s returned to the paper where he started his career, The Chicago Sentinel. Instead of writing the big stories, he’s doing the work of a rookie reporter. His “big story of the day” is a cat caught in a tree. During its rescue, the cat’s owner takes her Good Samaritan neighbor hostage. Cole witnesses something so disturbing it reawakens the journalist’s desire to write again.Returning to the paper, Cole finds a desperate message asking for help from Ellie, one that got away. The one that has continually haunted his life. Cole drops everything and flies to California. He must find what would make her so desperate, she would call him after so many years. Cole finds her terminally ill, and abandoned by her husband. He discovers while Ellie was heavily medicated, she mistakenly signed a Power of Attorney. Now her estranged daughter Erin’s inheritance, won’t go to her, but her abusive step-father. Cole vows to find the girl and right the situation.The path to keeping his word is blocked at every turn by the husband who abandoned her, his shady real estate deals, violent con men, street thugs and the lure of a fortune in diamonds that unite them. The anger, sorrow, and crippling guilt of twenty years fires Cole's drive to keep a promise, that in the end, will heal and return the soul to the great journalist.Beaten, bloody but determined, Cole Sage conquers greed and hatred with a strength that only love, and a will as hard as diamond, can achieve.

Crashed


Timothy Hallinan - 2012
    Since he first started breaking into houses when he was fourteen years old, he’s never once been caught. But now, after twenty-two years of an exemplary career, Junior has been blackmailed by Trey Annunziato, one of the most powerful crime bosses in LA, into acting as a private investigator on the set of Trey’s porn movie venture, which someone keeps sabotaging.The star Trey has lined up to do all that’s unwholesome on camera is Thistle Downing, America’s beloved child star, who now lives alone in a drug-induced stupor, destitute and uninsurable. Her starring role will be the scandalous fall-from-grace gossip of rubber-neckers across the country. No wonder Trey needs help keeping the production on track.Junior knows what that he should do — get Thistle out and find her help — but doing the right thing will land him on the wrong side of LA’s scariest mob boss. With the help of his precocious twelve-year-old daughter, Rina, and his criminal sidekick, Louie the Lost (an ex-getaway driver), Junior has to figure out a miracle solution.

Three Seconds to Rush


Danielle Stewart - 2016
    She’s positive she’s a good mother and hard worker. So why is she in an alley with a needle in her arm? Waking up in the hospital without her son is terrifying. Being told she can’t have him back nearly crushes her. With her memory spotty and the circumstances incriminating, Tara must fight to learn the truth and wrestle with the idea that maybe her son is better off without her. Reid Holliston defends guilty people for a living and it's slowly killing him. He’s certain there is no such thing as a truly blameless client anymore. When his phone rings with a voice from his childhood his jaded views make him certain Tara is just one more criminal claiming innocence. But even his skepticism isn’t enough to keep him away. Best friends from a lifetime ago, the two must find a way to trust each other again in spite of how the years apart have changed them. Can a promise made in childhood be enough to save them both?

The Watcher


Jo Robertson - 2011
    Working with a single-minded tenacity, she sets out to prove it.Deputy Sheriff Ben Slater hides his personal pain behind the job, but Kate's arrival in his county knocks his world on its axis. He wants to believe her wild theory, but the idea of a serial killer with the kind of pathology she proposes is too bizarre.Together they work to find a killer whose roots began in a small town in Bigler County, but whose violence spread across the nation. A Janus-like killer, more monster than man, he fixates on Kate. The killer wants nothing more than to kill the "purple-eyed girl again."

Death by Chocolate


Sally Berneathy - 2011
    Suddenly Lindsay finds herself battling poisoned chocolate, a dead man who doesn't seem very dead and a psycho stalker. Her best friend and co-worker, Paula, dyes her blond hair brown, hides from everybody and insists on always having an emergency exit from any room. Secrets from Paula's past have come back to put lives in jeopardy. Determined to help Paula and to save her own life, Lindsay enlists the reluctant aid of another neighbor, Fred, an OCD computer nerd. In spite of his mundane existence, Fred possesses tidbits of knowledge about such things as hidden microphones, guns and the inside of maximum security prisons. Lindsay needs more than a chocolate fix to survive all this chaos. Lindsay Powell's only secret is the recipe for her chocolate chip cookies, but she is surrounded by neighbors with deadly secrets. Suddenly Lindsay finds herself battling poisoned chocolate, a dead man who doesn't seem very dead and a psycho stalker. Lindsay needs more than a chocolate fix to survive all this chaos.

Bone Blind


Abigail Padgett - 2011
    When the efforts of local, state and federal investigators failed to cast more light on the crime than the little candle did, the case gathered dust, unsolved and forgotten. But when horror novelist Finn Ryan gets an invitation to dinner from a beautiful but eccentric and reclusive colleague, Tally Serzak, a web of danger sends its first, tentative filaments from that candlelit room. And nothing will ever be the same. Because Finn has secrets. So does Tally. And so does Newton, MA, Police Detective Warren Yost, who found Knock’s body on that cold morning so long ago. Now, on the eve of retirement, Yost decides to solve the old murder and go out with a last hurrah. As Finn’s involvement with the strange Tally reaches an intensity that has him running into walls, he begins to see similarities between himself and his own characters. He’s in a horror novel, except this one is real. There are no ghosts, no zombies or vampires. There is only Tally and an unfolding story Finn doesn’t want to see, but can’t ignore. As she knew he wouldn’t. Warren Yost sees the story as well, but can’t assemble its puzzle until Finn provides a last piece that will lead to a final, and deadly, resolution.

Forgotten Bones


Vivian Barz - 2019
    But when it comes to murder, Officer Susan Marlan never trusts a simple explanation, so she's just getting started.Meanwhile, college professor Eric Evans hallucinates a young boy in overalls: a symptom of his schizophrenia - or so he thinks. But when more bodies turn up, Eric has more visions, and they mirror details of the murder case. As the investigation continues, the police stick with their original conclusion, but Susan's instincts tell her something is off. The higher-ups keep stonewalling her, and the FBI's closing in.Desperate for answers, Susan goes rogue and turns to Eric for help. Together they take an unorthodox approach to the case as the evidence keeps getting stranger. With Eric's hallucinations intensifying and the body count rising, can the pair separate truth from illusion long enough to catch a monster?

The Cove


Catherine Coulter - 1996
    John of Washington, D.C., seeking sanctuary, and FBI Special Agent James Quinlan who's undercover and after her. He's got a murder to solve, and he believes she's the key. But is she really?

The Thinnest Air


Minka Kent - 2018
    Her husband, Andrew, is a charming and successful financial broker. She has two lovely stepchildren and is living in affluence in a mountain resort town. After three years of marriage, Meredith’s life has become predictable. Until the day she disappears.Her car has been discovered in a grocery store parking lot—purse and phone undisturbed on the passenger seat, keys in the ignition, no sign of struggle, and no evidence of foul play. It’s as if she vanished into thin air.It’s not like Meredith to simply abandon her loved ones. And no one in this town would have reason to harm her. When her desperate sister, Greer, arrives, she must face a disturbing question: What if no one really knows Meredith at all? For Greer, finding her sister isn’t going to be easy…because where she’s looking is going to get very, very dark.

Bone Music


Christopher Rice - 2018
    If only the nightmare had ended when she was rescued. Instead, her real father exploited her tabloid-ready story for fame and profit—until Charlotte finally broke free from her ghoulish past and fled. Just when she thinks she has buried her personal hell forever, Charlotte is swept into a frightening new ordeal. Secretly dosed with an experimental drug, she’s endowed with a shocking new power—but pursued by a treacherous corporation desperate to control her.Except from now on, if anybody is going to control Charlotte, it’s going to be Charlotte herself. She’s determined to use the extraordinary ability she now possesses to fight the kind of evil that shattered her life—by drawing a serial killer out from the shadows to face the righteous fury of a victim turned avenger.

Good Girl, Bad Girl


Michael Robotham - 2019
    Half-starved and filthy, she won’t tell anyone her name, or her age, or where she came from. Maybe she is twelve, maybe fifteen. She doesn’t appear in any missing persons file, and her DNA can’t be matched to an identity. Six years later, still unidentified, she is living in a secure children’s home with a new name, Evie Cormac. When she initiates a court case demanding the right to be released as an adult, forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven must determine if Evie is ready to go free. But she is unlike anyone he’s ever met—fascinating and dangerous in equal measure. Evie knows when someone is lying, and no one around her is telling the truth.Meanwhile, Cyrus is called in to investigate the shocking murder of a high school figure-skating champion, Jodie Sheehan, who dies on a lonely footpath close to her home. Pretty and popular, Jodie is portrayed by everyone as the ultimate girl-next-door, but as Cyrus peels back the layers, a secret life emerges—one that Evie Cormac, the girl with no past, knows something about. A man haunted by his own tragic history, Cyrus is caught between the two cases—one girl who needs saving and another who needs justice. What price will he pay for the truth?