The Butcher's Boy


Thomas Perry - 1982
    Back in print by popular demand, this spectacular debut, from a writer of “infernal ingenuity” (The New York Times Book Review), includes a new Introduction by bestselling author Michael Connelly.Murder has always been easy for the Butcher’s Boy—it’s what he was raised to do. But when he kills the senior senator from Colorado and arrives in Las Vegas to pick up his fee, he learns that he has become a liability to his shadowy employers. His actions attract the attention of police specialists who watch the world of organized crime, but though everyone knows that something big is going on, only Elizabeth Waring, a bright young analyst in the Justice Department, works her way closer to the truth, and to the frightening man behind it.

Blue Heaven


C.J. Box - 2008
    Retired cops from Los Angeles, the killers easily persuade the inexperienced sheriff to let them lead the search for the missing children.William and Annie’s unexpected savior comes in the form of an old-school rancher teetering on the brink of foreclosure. But as one man against four who will stop at nothing to silence their witnesses, Jess Rawlins needs allies, and he knows that one word to the wrong person could seal the fate of the children or their mother. In a town where most of the ranches like his have turned into acres of ranchettes populated by strangers, finding someone to trust won’t be easy.With true-to-life, unforgettable characters and a ticking-clock plot that spans just over forty-eight hours, C.J. Box has created a thriller that delves into issues close to the heart: the ruthless power of greed over broken ideals, the healing power of community where unlikely heroes find themselves at the crossroads of duty and courage, and the truth about what constitutes a family. In a setting whose awesome beauty is threatened by those who want a piece of it, Blue Heaven delivers twists and turns until its last breathtaking page.Blue Heaven is the winner of the 2009 Edgar Award for Best Novel.

Sohlberg and the Missing Schoolboy: an Inspector Sohlberg mystery


Jens Amundsen - 2011
    New translation with added material by the author. Chief Inspector Harald Sohlberg returns to the Oslo police district where his career started and almost ended in disgrace and scandal. Although he is experienced with hardened and heartless criminals, C.I. Harald Sohlberg has never met as devious and brilliant a criminal mind as when he is called to investigate an unsolved case in Holmenkollen, one of Oslo’s sleepy and boring suburbs. C.I. Sohlberg meets his match amid the beautiful homes and gardens of Oslo’s well-to-do professional class. An elementary school—Grindbakken Skole, Pilot Hill School—becomes Ground Zero for the most shocking and unforgettable of crimes. Confronted with his own difficult and controversial past, Sohlberg must now find a missing 7-year-old boy who vanished while he was inside his school, surrounded by classmates, teachers, and parents at a science fair. The case brings back memories of Norway’s worst serial predator, Lommemannen The Pocket Man, and his predecessor, The Smiley Face Killer. Chief Inspector Sohlberg has spent decades investigating Norway’s most devious criminals as a Police Chief Inspector in Oslo. Sohlberg has also hunted some of world’s most violent and ruthless criminals as an adviser to Interpol. Years of working abroad for Interpol have made him a stranger to his own country and people. Rumors of his wife joining a religious cult in America certainly don’t help. The Harold Sohlberg crime novel series by Jens Amundsen joins Norway’s best crime detective series, including the Inspector Konrad Sejer series by Karin Fossum, the Inspector Gunnarstranda series by K. O. Dahl, and the Detective Harry Hole series by Jo Nesbø. Dark undercurrents of Norwegian and modern society pull this classic of Nordic noir into new and uncharted waters that are as terrifying as they are thrilling. It’s time to enjoy Sohlberg and the Missing Schoolboy, the debut novel of Jens Amundsen. His novels on Chief Inspector Harald Sohlberg masterfully blend the psychological novel into the crime, suspense, thriller, and detective genre. Sohlberg and the Missing Schoolboy introduces the characters and situations that explode in White Death in Tromsø, the sequel to Sohlberg and the Missing Schoolboy. This book includes the first chapter of White Death in Tromsø.

Cimarron Rose


James Lee Burke - 1997
    Among them is Vernon Smothers' son Lucas, a teenaged boy about whom only Vernon and Billy Bob know the truth. Lucas is really Billy Bob's illegitimate son, and when Lucas is arrested for murder, Billy Bob knows that he has no choice but to confront the past and serve as the boy's criminal attorney. During Lucas's trial, Billy Bob realizes that he will have to bring injury upon Lucas as well as himself in order to save his son. And as a result, Billy Bob creates enemies that are far more dangerous than any he had faced as a Texas Ranger.

Secrets of Seacliff House


Stacey Coverstone - 2012
    A mysterious email sends Kayla to a Maryland beach town and her grandmother’s home, Seacliff House. There, Kayla hopes to discover who she is and why her past has been shrouded in mystery.When Tanner Bishop discovers an old diary among his grandfather’s possessions, his interest is piqued. Some of the entries speak of Pearl, a young woman who abandoned her son and fled Maine for Maryland in 1958. The journalist in Tanner wants to know what became of Pearl once she found her way to Seacliff House. But as the woman’s great-grandson, he needs to know.Kayla quickly learns the whereabouts of her father and meets her formidable grandmother, while Tanner investigates his own connection to Seacliff House.Through a mutual interest in searching out their roots, romance blossoms. But events that cannot be stopped are quickly set in motion—including murder—to reveal secrets of the past that threaten the couple’s hopeful future.

Into the Water


Paula Hawkins - 2017
    Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged. Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother's sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she'd never return. With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present. Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.

All the Good Girls


Willow Rose - 2020
    Four teenagers from one of Miami's affluent neighborhoods are murdered on a boat. Another is found in a dumpster. All five of them go to the same school and are on a list of witnesses to another crime. Because he's in bad standing with his boss, Harry is given the task of protecting a possible future victim, but Harry isn't always known to follow his boss's orders. Soon, he'll risk everything while racing to stop a killer who has left everyone else in the homicide squad shaking in terror. ALL THE GOOD GIRLS is the first book in the Harry Hunter Mystery Series.

A Time For Justice


Nick Oldham - 1996
    But with their Daimler stuck in traffic, and only one of the targets inside, the bomb explodes causing carnage which sets every police force in the country after him. A debut novel introducing DCI Henry Christie.

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 Professor: Book 2


Alexandria Clarke - 2017
    Her team of unexpected allies harbors its own destructive secrets, leading Nicole on a dangerous mission to the heart of the society. As time and options dwindle, can Nicole make one last stand to save herself and her friends?

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...

And Then She Was Gone


Christopher Greyson - 2016
    Only a few more steps and she’d be within its grasp. Stacy Shaw has her whole life ahead of her. New job, new house and now a baby on the way—everything she’s ever hoped for is finally coming true. But on a warm summer night on the way home from work, she vanishes. The police race to find her, but the clues don’t add up. Conflicting facts emerge as her story twists and turns, sending the trail spiraling in all directions. A hometown hero with a heart of gold, Jack Stratton was raised in a whorehouse by his prostitute mother. Jack seemed destined to become another statistic, but now his life has taken a turn for the better. Determined to escape his past, he's headed for a career in law enforcement. When his foster mother asks him to look into the girl’s disappearance, Jack quickly gets drawn into a baffling mystery. As Jack digs deeper, everyone becomes a suspect—including himself. Caught between the criminals and the cops, can Jack discover the truth in time to save the girl? Or will he become the next victim?And Then She Was Gone is part of the Detective Jack Stratton Mystery Series

Primitive Secrets


Deborah Turrell Atkinson - 2002
    When Storm Kayama walks into her lucrative Honolulu law firm one morning, she's shocked--and grieved--to find her adopted uncle at his desk, stiff and cold. Years before, Miles Hamasaki had fulfilled a promise to Storm's father and brought her to be raised with his own family. But, as questions surround Miles' death and her adopted family begins to close ranks, Storm suspects that he has been murdered. Heading to the Big Island for a weekend escape from escalating pressures, she narrowly escapes a terrible accident. Storm takes refuge in the home of her Aunt Maile, a traditional Hawaiian healer, and Uncle Keone, a paniolo on the huge Parker Ranch. There she encounters a legend from her youth and a family totem, or 'aumakua, which Aunt Maile promises will protect her. As Storm struggles to heal her own childhood wounds and bring justice to Hamasaki's killer, she also comes to grip with the rifts in her own life and culture. From the winding cane roads of Hamakua to the seedy side of Honolulu's Chinatown, with a deft juxtaposition of a bustling Honolulu against the island's legends and wild beauty, Atkinson reveals a Hawaii that few visitors ever see.

No One You Know


Michelle Richmond - 2008
    All her life Ellie Enderlin had been known as Lila’s sister. Until one day, without warning, the shape of their family changed forever. Twenty years ago, Lila, a top math student at Stanford, was murdered in a crime that was never solved. In the aftermath of her sister’s death, Ellie entrusted her most intimate feelings to a man who turned the story into a bestselling true crime book—a book that both devastated her family and identified one of Lila’s professors as the killer.Decades later, two Americans meet in a remote village in Nicaragua. Ellie is now a professional coffee buyer, an inveterate traveler and incapable of trust. Peter is a ruined academic. And their meeting is not by chance. As rain beats down on the steaming rooftops of the village, Peter leaves Ellie with a gift—the notebook that Lila carried everywhere, a piece of evidence not found with her body. Stunned, Ellie will return home to San Francisco to explore the mysteries of Lila’s notebook, filled with mathematical equations, and begin a search that has been waiting for her all these years. It will lead her to a hundred-year-old mathematical puzzle, to a lover no one knew Lila had, to the motives and fate of the man who profited from their family’s anguish—and to the deepest secrets even sisters keep from each other. As she connects with people whose lives unknowingly swirled around her own, Ellie will confront a series of startling revelations—from the eloquent truths of numbers to confessions of love, pain and loss.A novel about the stories and lies that strangers, lovers and families tell—and the secrets we keep even from ourselves—Michelle Richmond’s new novel is a work of astonishing depth and beauty, at once heartbreaking, provocative, and impossible to put down.

Blindsided


Jay Giles - 2006
    Matt Seattle, a Sarasota stockbroker, befriends an older stock enthusiast, Joe Jesso. During one of their weekly Wednesday morning sessions, Joe announces he’s gotten married. A week later, Joe dies. Believing Joe may have been the victim of a black widow, Matt hires an investigator to look into Joe’s death. The investigator finds old Joe wasn’t so innocent; he embezzled money from a drug cartel. Suddenly, Matt finds himself battling Joe’s widow and her shyster lawyer who want his money, The National Association of Security Dealers who wants his broker’s license, and, oh yes, the cartel who wants his life. It’s enough to turn any bull into a bear.