Book picks similar to
The Wife of a Lesser Man by Sandy Appleyard


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mystery
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The Advocate


Teresa Burrell - 2009
    The search for her brother and her career as a juvenile court attorney collide when she defends a nine-year-old whose father will go to any length to obtain custody. Sabre finds herself immersed in a case with too many unanswered questions. Her quest for the truth takes her coast to coast and five years into the past. Confronted with mysterious clues and strange occurrences, Sabre is threatened by someone wanting to make her suffer the unbearable anguish of losing everything-including her life. As Sabre's passion to find the answers intensifies, she discovers a twisted history of desperation, deceit, and revenge. And she discovers how obscure and treacherous the truth can be.

Ghost Dancer


Maer Wilson - 2014
    She was even going to be on TV for a big national contest. Until a serial killer put an end to her dreams. Now her ghost has come to Thulu and La Fi to save her dog from the killer. La Fi is a medium and Thulu is a finder and together they find justice for the dead. The detectives take the case, but they find more than a lost pup. They discover a heartbreaking secret and a seasoned killer already on the prowl for his next victim. And this time their walk on the darker side of the paranormal puts their own lives at risk. "Ghost Dancer" is the third novelette from the Modern Magics series.

Taken


Chris Jordan - 2006
    But as widowed mother Kate Bickford discovers, everything can change in the blink of an eye. One minute her lanky, amazing, maddening Tommy is begging for ice cream. Then in a terrible instant, he's gone.Opening the door to her Connecticut home, hoping to find her son, Kate comes face-to-face with her son's abductor. He wants money. All she has. And if she doesn't follow something he calls The Method, the consequences will be gruesome.Her comfortable life collapses as precious seconds tick by, and Kate is horrified to uncover the terrible, world-shattering secret she and her son share with a killer who will stop at nothing....

First Life


Elli Buchanan - 2014
    Great premise. Can't wait to read the rest of the instalments.By L Borski on February 5, 2016 If you had the chance to go back and relive the last 25 years of your life, retaining all the knowledge and memories you have now; what would you do? Three very different people from different locations, die at the same moment in time and re-awaken at that moment, only it is 25 years earlier. Two men and one woman are reborn in their young and healthy bodies, but their minds retain the memories of their previous lifetime. Will the abused wife choose a different path? Will the stockbroker choose a different wife? Will the serial killer continue on his spree of murder? Follow the journey of three Re-Runners; Kate, Dylan and Christian through this series of rediscovery, changing fates and finding each other.

What Was Mine


Helen Klein Ross - 2016
    It’s a secret she manages to keep for over two decades—from her daughter, the babysitter who helped raise her, family, coworkers, and friends. When Lucy’s now-grown daughter Mia discovers the devastating truth of her origins, she is overwhelmed by confusion and anger and determines not to speak again to the mother who raised her. She reaches out to her birth mother for a tearful reunion, and Lucy is forced to flee to China to avoid prosecution. What follows is a ripple effect that alters the lives of many and challenges our understanding of the very meaning of motherhood. Author Helen Klein Ross, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, weaves a powerful story of upheaval and resilience told from the alternating perspectives of Lucy, Mia, Mia’s birth mother, and others intimately involved in the kidnapping. What Was Mine is a compelling tale of motherhood and loss, of grief and hope, and the life-shattering effects of a single, irrevocable moment.

The Last Kind Words


Tom Piccirilli - 2012
    Upon the razor-thin edge between love and violence lives a pair of brothers, their bonds frayed by betrayals and guilt, their loyalty to each other their last salvation.Raised to pick a pocket before he could walk, Terry Rand cut free from his family after his older brother, Collie, went on a senseless killing spree that left eight dead. Five years later, only days before his scheduled execution, Collie contacts Terry and asks him to return home. Collie claims he wasn’t responsible for one of the murders—and insists that the real killer is still on the loose.Dogged by his own demons, Terry is swept back into the schemes and scams of his family: His father, Pinsch, a retired cat burglar, brokenhearted because of his two sons. His card-sharp uncles, Mal and Grey, who’ve incurred the anger of the local mob. His grandfather, Shep, whose mind is failing but whose fingers can still slip out a wallet  from across the room. His teenage sister, Dale, who’s flirting dangerously with the lure of the family business. And Kimmie, the woman Terry abandoned, who’s now raising a child with Terry’s former best friend.  Terry pieces together the day his brother turned rabid, delving into a blood history that reveals the Rand family tree is rotten to the roots, and the secrets his ancestors buried are now coming furious and vengeful to the surface.A meditation on how love can confine a person just as easily as it can free him, juxtaposing shocking violence and sly humor, The Last Kind Words is the brilliantly inventive family saga that only a singular talent like Tom Piccirilli could conjure.

The Halo Effect


Anne D. LeClaire - 2017
    Over dinner of lamb tagine, his wife, Sophie, would share news about chorus rehearsals for the upcoming holiday concert, and their teenage daughter, Lucy, would chatter about French club and field hockey. Only Lucy never came home. Her body was found, days later, in the woods.The Eastern Seaboard town of Port Fortune used to be Will’s comfort. Now, there’s no safe harbor for him. Not even when Father Gervase asks Will to paint portraits of saints for the new cathedral. Using the townspeople as models, Will sees in each face only a mask of the darkness of evil. And he just might be painting his daughter’s killer.As Will navigates his rage and heartbreak, Sophie tries to move on; Father Gervase becomes an unexpected ally; and Rain, Lucy’s best friend, shrouds herself in a near-silent fugue. Their paths collide in a series of inextricably linked, dark, dangerous moments that could lead to their undoing…or to their redemption.

You Were Made for This


Michelle Sacks - 2018
    and friendship. Doting wife, devoted husband, cherished child. Merry, Sam, and Conor are the perfect family in the perfect place. Merry adores the domestic life: baking, gardening, caring for her infant son. Sam, formerly an academic, is pursuing a new career as a filmmaker. Sometimes they can hardly believe how lucky they are. What perfect new lives they've built.When Merry's childhood friend Frank visits their Swedish paradise, she immediately becomes part of the family. She bonds with Conor. And with Sam. She befriends the neighbors, and even finds herself embracing the domesticity she's always seemed to scorn.All their lives, Frank and Merry have been more like sisters than best friends. And that's why Frank soon sees the things others might miss. Treacherous things, which are almost impossible to believe when looking at this perfect family. But Frank, of all people, knows that the truth is rarely what you want the world to see.

Magic


Edmond Humm - 2011
    It appears to be a large golden retriever; however, it has one salient attribute that separates it from the rest of the canine world, it possesses the intelligence of an adult human being. After escaping from a genetic research laboratory in Iran, Magic wanders into Iraq, where he befriends Lt. Ryan Quinn. He saves Ryan's life after he is captured by insurgents. In return, Ryan ships Magic back to his Florida home. Ryan has no idea that his big lovable mutt is the result of many generations of genetic tinkering by the Iranian Ministry of Health. Magic can communicate using a computer, but is reluctant to tell anyone about his powers for fear of becoming a lab rat again.

Everything to Lose


Andrew Gross - 2014
    A car ahead of her careens down a hill and slams into a tree. Stopping to help, she discovers the driver dead--and a satchel stuffed with a half a million dollars.That money could prevent her family's ruin and keep her special needs son in school. In an instant, this honest, achieving woman who has always done the responsible thing makes a decision that puts her in the center of maelstrom of dark consequences and life-threatening recriminations--a terrifying scheme involving a twenty-year-old murder, an old woman who's life has been washed out to sea, and a powerful figure bent to keep the secret that can destroy him hidden.With everything to lose, everything she loves, Hilary connects to a determined cop from Staten Island, reeling from the disaster of Sandy, to bring down an enemy who will stop at nothing to keep what that money was meant to silence, still buried.

What the Night Knows


Dean Koontz - 2010
    His name was Alton Turner Blackwood, and in the space of a few months he brutally murdered four families. His savage spree ended only when he himself was killed by the last survivor of the last family, a fourteen-year-old boy. Half a continent away and two decades later, someone is murdering families again, recreating in detail Blackwood’s crimes. Homicide detective John Calvino is certain that his own family—his wife and three children—will be targets in the fourth crime, just as his parents and sisters were victims on that distant night when he was fourteen and killed their slayer. As a detective, John is a man of reason who deals in cold facts. But an extraordinary experience convinces him that sometimes death is not a one-way journey, that sometimes the dead return. Here is ghost story like no other you have read. In the Calvinos, Dean Koontz brings to life a family that might be your own, in a war for their survival against an adversary more malevolent than any he has yet created, with their own home the battleground. Of all his acclaimed novels, none exceeds What the Night Knows in power, in chilling suspense, and in sheer mesmerizing storytelling.

The Absence of Mercy


John Burley - 2013
    Safe from the crime and congestion of city life, it is the perfect place to raise a family . . . or so they thought.Life as the town medical examiner is relatively unhurried for Dr. Ben Stevenson. With only a smattering of cases here and there-car accident victims, death by natural causes-he has plenty of time to spend with his loving wife and two sons. That is until a teenager's body is discovered in the woods and Ben, as the only coroner in the area, is assigned to the case. But as the increasingly animalistic attacks continue, the case challenges Ben in ways he never suspects.With its eerie portrait of suburban life and nerve-fraying plot twists, this is psychological suspense at its best-an extraordinary debut that challenges as much as it thrills.

The Teller


Jonathan Stone - 2012
    When a lonely old man who deposits money at her bank every week gets hit and killed by a delivery truck, Elaine—a good Irish girl from Queens—thinks she’s found the answer to her problems. She’ll just transfer $1 million from the dead man’s account into hers.Except that the lonely old man may not have been who he seemed. And when you take $1 million that isn’t yours, it can cost you…way more.Acclaimed author Jonathan Stone’s pulse-pounding thriller takes readers from the darkest corners of New York’s financial empire into a shadowy hierarchy of wealth and power. The Teller follows the money—and takes readers along for the wild ride.

The Others


Ian C.P. Irvine - 2014
    Who are 'the Others'? Why are an increasing number of people throughout the world developing the ability to see and speak with the dead? Why have a farmers' guild from Iowa secretly enlisted the help of Scottish reporter Peter Nicolson? If they are correct, is the world stumbling blindly into a disaster that could threaten the survival of the human race? And what is contained within the missing 'GM File' that threatens to destroy some of the world's most powerful companies? To what lengths will these companies go to prevent Peter Nicolson uncovering the truth and publishing it to the world? Will Peter Nicolson meet Maciek, his nemesis and erstwhile saviour? And if he does, who will survive?

The Rift


Rachel Lynch - 2021
    But will that mean justice?As a high-ranking woman in the Royal Military Police, Major Helen Scott gets the job done – no matter the task. So when she is pulled in to lead a NATO summit security team in Paris, it barely causes a ripple. Yet within hours she’s dispatched to Lyon on a new mission. One with a complex problem at its heart.Kahlil Dalmani and Fawaz bin Nabil were close in childhood, growing up in the hubbub of Algiers. As men, they are both wildly successful. Yet their paths to fortune have caused a rift. Fawaz’s empire is built on illegal trade, and when his estranged friend refuses to grant a favour he seeks to change Kahlil’s mind the best way he knows how: kidnapping his son, Hakim.Working out of the Interpol headquarters, Helen must unpick a web of deceit that spreads across borders and dates back years. Only by trusting those from her own painful past can she hope to return Hakim to his family. But with her focus on saving one life, she risks overlooking a plan that puts many others in grave danger.An explosive and gripping crime thriller from one of the most brilliant British crime fiction authors of recent years. For fans of Angela Marsons and Lee Child.