The Killing Hills


Chris Offutt - 2021
    His wife is about to give birth, but they aren't getting along. His sister, newly risen to sheriff, has just landed her first murder case, and local politicians are pushing for city police or the FBI to take the case. Are they convinced she can't handle it, or is there something else at work? She calls on Mick who, with his homicide investigation experience and familiarity with the terrain, is well-suited to staying under the radar. As he delves into the investigation, he dodges his commanding officer's increasingly urgent calls while attempting to head off further murders. And he needs to talk to his wife.The Killing Hills is a novel of betrayal--sexual, personal, within and between the clans that populate the hollers--and the way it so often shades into violence. Chris Offutt has delivered a dark, witty, and absolutely compelling novel of murder and honor, with an investigator-hero unlike any in fiction.

Blackwood


Michael Farris Smith - 2020
    Myer, the county's aged, sardonic lawman, still thinks it can prove itself -- when confronted by a strange family of drifters, the sheriff believes that the people of Red Bluff can be accepting, rational, even good.The opposite is true: this is a landscape of fear and ghosts - of regret and violence - transformed by the kudzu vines that have enveloped the hills around it, swallowing homes, cars, rivers, and hiding a terrible secret deeper still.Colburn, a junkyard sculptor who's returned to Red Bluff, knows this pain all too well, though he too is willing to hope for more when he meets and falls in love with Celia, the local bar owner. The Deep South gives these noble, broken, and driven folks the gift of human connection while bestowing upon them the crippling weight of generations. With broken histories and vagabond hearts, the townsfolk wrestle with the evil in the woods - and the wickedness that lurks in each and every one of us.

Bearskin


James A. McLaughlin - 2018
    He’s found a job protecting a remote forest preserve in Virginian Appalachia where his main responsibilities include tracking wildlife and refurbishing cabins. It’s hard work, and totally solitary—perfect to hide away from the Mexican drug cartels he betrayed back in Arizona. But when Rice finds the carcass of a bear killed on the grounds, the quiet solitude he’s so desperately sought is suddenly at risk.More bears are killed on the preserve and Rice’s obsession with catching the poachers escalates, leading to hostile altercations with the locals and attention from both the law and Rice’s employers. Partnering with his predecessor, a scientist who hopes to continue her research on the preserve, Rice puts into motion a plan that could expose the poachers but risks revealing his own whereabouts to the dangerous people he was running from in the first place.James McLaughlin expertly brings the beauty and danger of Appalachia to life. The result is an elemental, slow burn of a novel—one that will haunt you long after you turn the final page.

Dark Origins


Anthony E. Zuiker - 2009
    It is well known among law enforcement personnel that murderers can be categorized on a scale of twenty-five levels of evil, from the naive opportunists starting out at Level 1 to the organized, premeditated torture-murderers who inhabit Level 25.What almost no one knows, except for the elite unnamed investigations group assigned to hunt down the world's most dangerous killers, a group of men and women accounted for in no official ledger, headed by the brilliant but reluctant operative Steve Dark, is that a new category of killer is in the process of being defined.Only one man belongs to this group.His targets:Anyone.His methods:Unlimited.His alias:Sqweegel.His classification:Level 26.

The Deep


Nick Cutter - 2015
    It causes people to forget—small things at first, like where they left their keys…then the not-so-small things like how to drive, or the letters of the alphabet. Then their bodies forget how to function involuntarily…and there is no cure. But now, far below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, deep in the Marianas Trench, an heretofore unknown substance hailed as “ambrosia” has been discovered—a universal healer, from initial reports. It may just be the key to a universal cure. In order to study this phenomenon, a special research lab, the Trieste, has been built eight miles under the sea’s surface. But now the station is incommunicado, and it’s up to a brave few to descend through the lightless fathoms in hopes of unraveling the mysteries lurking at those crushing depths…and perhaps to encounter an evil blacker than anything one could possibly imagine.

Pretty Girls


Karin Slaughter - 2015
    No one knew where she went - no note, no body. It was a mystery that was never solved and it tore her family apart.Now another girl has disappeared, with chilling echoes of the past. And it seems that she might not be the only one.Claire is convinced Julia's disappearance is linked.But when she begins to learn the truth about her sister, she is confronted with a shocking discovery, and nothing will ever be the same...

The Gone World


Tom Sweterlitsch - 2018
    In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL's family--and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can't share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship U.S.S. Libra—a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows first-hand the mental trauma of time-travel and believes the SEAL's experience with the future has triggered this violence.Determined to find the missing girl and driven by a troubling connection from her own past, Moss travels ahead in time to explore possible versions of the future, seeking evidence to crack the present-day case. To her horror, the future reveals that it's not only the fate of a family that hinges on her work, for what she witnesses rising over time's horizon and hurtling toward the present is the Terminus: the terrifying and cataclysmic end of humanity itself.Luminous and unsettling, The Gone World bristles with world-shattering ideas yet remains at its heart an intensely human story.

Malignant


Michaelbrent Collings - 2021
    But the men, led by a killer who calls himself ‘‘Teacher,” have much darker plans in mind.Teacher intends to give a lesson unlike any taught before. Written on flesh, inked in blood. A lesson about monsters.The bell has been rung, the lesson begun. And the lesson is this: The monsters are real, and to them... you are just a plaything.

Strangers on a Train


Patricia Highsmith - 1950
    Guy Haines and Charles Anthony Bruno are passengers on the same train. Haines is a successful architect in the midst of a divorce, Bruno a mysterious smooth-talker with a sadistic proposal: he’ll murder Haines’s wife if Haines will murder Bruno’s father. As Bruno carries out his twisted plan, Guy finds himself trapped in Highsmith’s perilous world, where, under the right circumstances, ordinary people are capable of extraordinary crimes. The inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1951 film, Strangers on a Train launched Highsmith’s prolific career, proving her a master at depicting the unsettling forces that tremble beneath the surface of everyday life.

The Book With No Name


Anonymous - 2006
    This would all be quite ordinary in those rough streets, except that Jensen is the Chief Detective of Supernatural Investigations. The breakneck plot centers around a mysterious blue stone — The Eye of the Moon—and the men and women who all want to get their hands on it: a mass murderer with a drinking problem, a hit man who thinks he's Elvis, and a pair of monks among them. Add in the local crime baron, an amnesiac woman who's just emerged from a five-year coma, a gypsy fortune teller, and a hapless hotel porter, and the plot thickens fast. Most importantly, how do all these people come to be linked to the strange book with no name? This is the anonymous, ancient book that no one seems to have survived reading. Everyone who has ever read it has been murdered. What can this mean?

The Nightmare Within


Glen R. Krisch - 2010
    Once exposed to the real world, the dreams evolve, adapting to their surroundings.From a boy named Kevin, he removes Mr. Freakshow, a nightmare feeding on the trauma of Kevin having recently witnessed his father's murder. Kevin will do whatever it takes to be free of his nightmare, once and for all. Mr. Freakshow will do whatever it takes to realize his immortality. Will Kevin survive his nightmare?

The Long and Faraway Gone


Lou Berney - 2015
    Six movie-theater employees were killed in an armed robbery, while one inexplicably survived. Then, a teenage girl vanished from the annual State Fair. Neither crime was ever solved.Twenty-five years later, the reverberations of those unsolved cases quietly echo through survivors’ lives. A private investigator in Vegas, Wyatt’s latest inquiry takes him back to a past he’s tried to escape—and drags him deeper into the harrowing mystery of the movie house robbery that left six of his friends dead. Like Wyatt, Julianna struggles with the past—with the day her beautiful older sister Genevieve disappeared. When Julianna discovers that one of the original suspects has resurfaced, she’ll stop at nothing to find answers.As fate brings these damaged souls together, their obsessive quests spark sexual currents neither can resist. But will their shared passion and obsession heal them, or push them closer to the edge? Even if they find the truth, will it help them understand what happened, that long and faraway gone summer? Will it set them free—or ultimately destroy them?

The Beresford


Will Carver - 2021
    Expect the unexpected!' Sarah Pinborough‘The strangest and creepiest novel I read all year … persuasive and compulsive’ Ian Rankin‘Ridiculously addictive’ S J Watson***Book of the Year: New Statesman******Book of the Year: Daily Express***_______________Just outside the city – any city, every city – is a grand, spacious but affordable apartment building called The Beresford.There’s a routine at The Beresford.For Mrs May, every day’s the same: a cup of cold, black coffee in the morning, pruning roses, checking on her tenants, wine, prayer and an afternoon nap. She never leaves the building.Abe Schwartz also lives at The Beresford. His housemate, Sythe, no longer does. Because Abe just killed him. In exactly sixty seconds, Blair Conroy will ring the doorbell to her new home and Abe will answer the door. They will become friends. Perhaps lovers. And, when the time comes for one of them to die, as is always the case at The Beresford, there will be sixty seconds to move the body before the next unknowing soul arrives at the door.Because nothing changes at The Beresford, until the doorbell rings…Eerie, dark, superbly twisted and majestically plotted, The Beresford is the stunning standalone thriller from one of crime fiction’s most exciting names._______________‘Equally enthralling and appalling … unlike anything I’ve read in a very long while’ James Oswald‘Creepy and brilliant’ Khurrum Rahman‘Reminiscent of The Shining … a creeping and perfectly crafted novel tinged with dark humour and malice’ Victoria Selman‘A masterfully macabre tale’ Louise Mumford‘I stepped into the imagination of Will Carver and it swallowed me whole’ Matt Wesolowski‘Magnificently, compulsively chilling’ Margaret Kirk‘Fans of Chuck Palahniuk will adore Carver … he is utterly brilliant’ Christopher Hooley‘Devilishly dark and maniacally brilliant’ Raven Crime Reads‘Slick, stylish ... a sharply crafted and delectable slice of entertaining darkness’ The Tattooed Book Geek‘Intense, brilliant, horrific, humorous and everything in between’ Liz Loves Books

A Caller's Game


J.D. Barker - 2020
    Barker. "I'm going to offer you a choice." Controversial satellite radio talk show host, Jordan Briggs, has clawed her way to the top of the broadcast world. She doesn’t hold back, doesn’t spare feelings, and has no trouble sharing what's on her mind. Her rigorous pursuit of success has come at a price, though. Her marriage is in ruins, she hasn’t spoken to her mother in years, and she's distanced herself from all those close to her. If not for her young daughter, Charlotte, her personal life would be in complete shambles.When a subdued man calls into the show and asks to play a game, she sees it as nothing more than a way to kick-start the morning, breathe life into the beginnings of drive-time for her listeners. Against her producer's advice, she agrees, and unwittingly opens a door to the past.Live on the air with an audience of millions, what starts out as a game quickly turns deadly—events long thought buried resurface and Jordan Briggs is forced to reconcile with one simple fact—All decisions have consequences.

The Ex


Alafair Burke - 2016
     And look for Alafair Burke’s latest heart-racing novel of psychological suspense, The Wife, coming in January 2018. Twenty years ago she ruined his life. Now she has the chance to save it. Widower Jack Harris has resisted the dating scene ever since the shooting of his wife Molly by a fifteen-year-old boy three years ago. An early morning run along the Hudson River changes that when he spots a woman in last night’s party dress, barefoot, enjoying a champagne picnic alone, reading his favorite novel. Everything about her reminds him of what he used to have with Molly. Eager to help Jack find love again, his best friend posts a message on a popular website after he mentions the encounter. Days later, that same beautiful stranger responds and invites Jack to meet her in person at the waterfront. That’s when Jack’s world falls apart. Olivia Randall is one of New York City’s best criminal defense lawyers. When she hears that her former fiancé, Jack Harris, has been arrested for a triple homicide—and that one of the victims was connected to his wife’s murder—there is no doubt in her mind as to his innocence. The only question is who would go to such great lengths to frame him—and why? For Olivia, representing Jack is a way to make up for past regrets, to absolve herself of guilt from a tragic decision, a secret she has held for twenty years. But as the evidence against him mounts, she is forced to confront her doubts. The man she knew could not have done this. But what if she never really knew him?