Book picks similar to
Wanting Radiance by Karen Salyer McElmurray


fiction
durantpubliclibra<br/>ry
female-authors
open-canon

The Night Sister


Jennifer McMahon - 2015
    The three played there as girls until the day that their games uncovered something dark and twisted in the motel's past, something that ruined their friendship forever.Now adult, Piper and Margot have tried to forget what they found that fateful summer, but their lives are upended when Piper receives a panicked midnight call from Margot, with news of a horrific crime for which Amy stands accused. Suddenly, Margot and Piper are forced to relive the time that they found the suitcase that once belonged to Silvie Slater, the aunt that Amy claimed had run away to Hollywood to live out her dream of becoming Hitchcock's next blonde bombshell leading lady. As Margot and Piper investigate, a cleverly woven plot unfolds—revealing the story of Sylvie and Rose, two other sisters who lived at the motel during its 1950s heyday. Each believed the other to be something truly monstrous, but only one carries the secret that would haunt the generations to come.

The Beasts of Juarez: An Atlas Hargrove Novel: Book 2


Ryan Schow - 2021
    

Kyle Achilles Series Complete Collection


Tim Tigner - 2019
     Amazon Prime members can also read this for FREE on a Kindle. To learn how, go to https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/custom... This collection contains all the Kyle Achilles books as of February, 2019, arranged in the suggested reading order. Includes Amazon #1 Bestsellers PUSHING BRILLIANCE, THE LIES OF SPIES, CHASING IVAN, FALLING STARS and TWIST AND TURN. See the individual books for detailed descriptions and reader reviews of the stories destined to keep you reading late into the night. "Achilles is my new Mitch Rapp." —Robert Getty "Reads like Reacher with a little Ludlum and Flynn mixed in.” —Jeff Bowden "My first thought was a new Jack Reacher—only better." —Lucia O'Brien "Think of Tim Tigner as Tom Clancy without the filler." —Larry Nesbit "Every bit as spellbinding as David Baldacci." —Kathryn Grady _______________________________________ PUSHING BRILLIANCE He didn’t do it. He really didn't. But proving it, will be a killer. Imagine Harrison Ford's THE FUGITIVE meets Tom Clancy's HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. ________________________________________ THE LIES OF SPIES The American president sent him... The Russian president caught him... The free world is counting on him... But he doesn't remember. Imagine Robert Ludlum’s THE BOURNE IDENTITY meets Lee Child’s PERSONAL. ________________________________________ CHASING IVAN Europe's smartest criminal, versus America's best spy. And then there's poor Emily, stuck in between. Imagine THE DAY OF THE JACKAL meets BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY. _______________________________________ FALLING STARS Two distressed heroes. Three dastardly crimes. And the slickest heists of all time. Imagine Bin Laden meets Bernie Madoff—and hold on for the ride. _______________________________________ TWIST AND TURN Their plan was brilliant, their tactics cunning, but then came a twist, they never saw coming. Imagine BREAKING BAD meets THE SUM OF ALL FEARS. _______________________________________ Amazon named Tim Tigner an All-Star Author in December, 2017 and every month since for being one of the most popular authors in Kindle Unlimited. His books are recommended for fans of David Baldacci, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Nelson DeMille’s John Corey, Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp, Mark Greaney’s Gray Man, Gregg Hurwitz’s Orphan X, Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne, John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport, Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon, Brad Tayl

Guilty Drive


Hayley Ford - 2021
    Sometimes they never get over it, destined to be alone for the rest of their lives. And no matter how hard they try, they can’t be happy, because the guilt is enough to kill them too.When my husband dies in a freak boating accident, I’m barely able to function, let alone pick up the pieces of my shattered life. Yes, we had our problems, but I never wanted him to die. My friends tell me it’s time for me to move on and when I finally try to put the past behind me, it comes back to me, shattering everything I thought I knew about my past, my husband and my future.Somebody is lying and will do anything to stop me from finding the truth. But I have to know. Did my husband really die in the waters of Broken Sound?

Disappearance at Devil's Rock


Paul Tremblay - 2016
    Feeling helpless and alone, their sorrow is compounded by anger and frustration. The local and state police haven’t uncovered any leads. Josh and Luis, the friends who were with Tommy last, may not be telling the whole truth about that night in Borderland State Park, when they were supposedly hanging out at a landmark the local teens have renamed Devil’s Rock— rumored to be cursed. Living in an all-too-real nightmare, riddled with worry, pain, and guilt, Elizabeth is wholly unprepared for the strange series of events that follow. She believes a ghostly shadow of Tommy materializes in her bedroom, while Kate and other local residents claim to see a shadow peering through their own windows in the dead of night. Then, random pages torn from Tommy’s journal begin to mysteriously appear—entries that reveal an introverted teenager obsessed with the phantasmagoric; the loss of his father, killed in a drunk-driving accident a decade earlier; a folktale involving the devil and the woods of Borderland; and a horrific incident that Tommy believed connected them all and changes everything. As the search grows more desperate, and the implications of what happened becomes more haunting and sinister, no one is prepared for the shocking truth about that night and Tommy’s disappearance at Devil’s Rock.

The Lightness


Emily Temple - 2020
    Yearning to make sense of his shocking departure and to escape her overbearing mother—a woman as grounded as her father is mercurial—Olivia runs away from home and retraces his path to a place known as the Levitation Center.Once there, she enrolls in their summer program for troubled teens, which Olivia refers to as “Buddhist Boot Camp for Bad Girls”. Soon, she finds herself drawn into the company of a close-knit trio of girls determined to transcend their circumstances, by any means necessary. Led by the elusive and beautiful Serena, and her aloof, secretive acolytes, Janet and Laurel, the girls decide this is the summer they will finally achieve enlightenment—and learn to levitate, to defy the weight of their bodies, to experience ultimate lightness. But as desire and danger intertwine, and Olivia comes ever closer to discovering what a body—and a girl—is capable of, it becomes increasingly clear that this is an advanced and perilous practice, and there’s a chance not all of them will survive. Set over the course of one fateful summer that unfolds like a fever dream, The Lightness juxtaposes fairy tales with quantum physics, cognitive science with religious fervor, and the passions and obsessions of youth with all of these, to explore concepts as complex as faith and as simple as loving people—even though you don’t, and can’t, know them at all.

Reprieve


James Han Mattson - 2021
    On April 27, 1997, four contestants make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room in Lincoln, Nebraska, made famous for its monstrosities, booby-traps, and ghoulishly costumed actors. If the group can endure these horrors without shouting the safe word, “reprieve,” they’ll win a substantial cash prize—a startling feat accomplished only by one other group in the house’s long history. But before they can complete the challenge, a man breaks into the cell and kills one of the contestants.Those who were present on that fateful night lend their points of view: Kendra Brown, a teenager who’s been uprooted from her childhood home after the sudden loss of her father; Leonard Grandton, a desperate and impressionable hotel manager caught in a series of toxic entanglements; and Jaidee Charoensuk, a gay international student who came to the United States in a besotted search for his former English teacher. As each character’s journey unfurls and overlaps, deceit and misunderstandings fueled by obsession and prejudice are revealed, forcing all to reckon with the ways in which their beliefs and actions contributed to a horrifying catastrophe.An astonishingly soulful exploration of complicity and masquerade, Reprieve combines the psychological tension of classic horror with searing social criticism to present an unsettling portrait of this tangled American life.

Mr. Splitfoot


Samantha Hunt - 2016
    Splitfoot tracks two women in two times as they march toward a mysterious reckoning.Ruth and Nat are orphans, packed into a house full of abandoned children run by a religious fanatic. To entertain their siblings, they channel the dead. Decades later, Ruth’s niece, Cora, finds herself accidentally pregnant. After years of absence, Aunt Ruth appears, mute and full of intention. She is on a mysterious mission, leading Cora on an odyssey across the entire state of New York on foot. Where is Ruth taking them? Where has she been? And who — or what — has she hidden in the woods at the end of the road?In an ingeniously structured dual narrative, two separate timelines move toward the same point of crisis. Their merging will upend and reinvent the whole. A subversive ghost story that is carefully plotted and elegantly constructed, Mr. Splitfoot will set your heart racing and your brain churning. Mysteries abound, criminals roam free, utopian communities show their age, the mundane world intrudes on the supernatural and vice versa.

The Witch's Kind


Louisa Morgan - 2019
    It is the price of concealing their strange and dangerous family secret.But two events threaten to upend their lives forever. The first is the arrival of a mysterious abandoned baby with a hint of power like their own. The second is the sudden reappearance of Barrie Anne's long-lost husband -- who is not quite the man she thought she married.Together, Barrie Anne and Charlotte must decide how far they are willing to go to protect themselves -- and the child they think of as their own -- from suspicious neighbors, the government, and even their own family...

Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked


Christa Carmen - 2018
    A chainsaw-wielding Evil Dead fan defends herself against a trio of undead intruders. A bride-to-be comes to wish that the door between the physical and spiritual worlds had stayed shut on All Hallows' Eve. A lone passenger on a midnight train finds that the engineer has rerouted them toward a past she'd prefer to forget. A mother abandons a life she no longer recognizes as her own to walk up a mysterious staircase in the woods. In her debut collection, Christa Carmen combines horror, charm, humor, and social critique to shape thirteen haunting, harrowing narratives of women struggling with both otherworldly and real-world problems. From grief, substance abuse, and mental health disorders, to a post-apocalyptic exodus, a seemingly sinister babysitter with unusual motivations, and a group of pesky ex-boyfriends who won't stay dead, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked is a compelling exploration of horrors both supernatural and psychological, and an undeniable affirmation of Carmen's flair for short fiction.

The Sam Archer Series: Books 2-4


Tom Barber - 2017
    Right there with Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan series and Vince Flynn’s Mitch Rapp’ ‘I read all of the books in the Sam Archer series and I cannot say enough good things about each one…I’ve never read a series where each book was just as good as the next’ ‘This is an incredible series...the action is non-stop from beginning to end’ ‘I can't speak highly enough of this author and the 6 books in the Sam Archer series. Riveting reading, great plots always with a twist, and likeable heroes' 'The best series I've ever read' 'Looking forward to reading more from this truly talented writer' Catch three of Sam Archer’s thrilling adventures in this action-packed boxset The Getaway Sam Archer is in New York City for a funeral. After the service, an old familiar face approaches him with a proposition. A team of bank robbers are tearing the city apart, robbing it for millions. The FBI agent needs Archer to go undercover and try to stop them. Blackout Three men have been killed in the UK and USA in one morning. The deaths take place thousands of miles apart, yet are connected by an event fifteen years ago. Before long, Sam Archer and the ARU are drawn into the violent fray. And there’s a problem. One of their own men is on the extermination list. Silent Night A dead body is found in Central Park, a man who was killed by a deadly virus. Someone out there has more of the substance and is planning to use it. Sam Archer must find where this virus came from and secure it before any more is released. But he is already too late. With over 1000 5* reviews for the series on Amazon/Goodreads and Hollywood interest, what are you waiting for?

McIntyre Security Bodyguard Series - Box Set 4


April Wilson - 2021
    She doesn't remember any of it, but she has the bruises and lacerations all over her body as painful reminders of something she just wants to put behind her. The problem is, she can’t move on. Everything she’d ever hoped for was torn away from her that night. The man she’s been crushing on has vowed to restore her sense of safety and security. He’ll stop at nothing to catch the assailant who hurt her. The tragic irony is, now he wants her in his life. But it’s too late now.Mack Donovan has always kept a careful distance from Erin. She’s sweet, beautiful, and innocent - way too young and too good for him. After a career in the military and a stint as a mercenary, he’s done things he's not proud of. He thinks his hands are too dirty to touch her. When he rejects her invitation to attend a New Year’s Eve party, the unthinkable happens. A sexual predator drugs Erin and steals not just her innocence, but her sense of self. Mack will stop at nothing to find him and end him. In the meanwhile, he’s not giving up on Erin. He will show her that not all men are monsters.With This RingAnnie is marrying her best friend today, the love of her life. She's waited years for this day, and she's not going to let anything get in the way. So what if she's nine months pregnant with twins and starting to feel contractions? She only has to make it until the ceremony is done. What could possibly go wrong? As a follow-up novella to Annie and Jake's second chance romance (Redeemed), WITH THIS RING is a heart-warming look at love, romance, family, and childbirth.Collateral DamageWhen Sophie McIntyre's blind date goes horribly wrong, she finds herself running for her life. Dominic Zaretti is a man who gets things done—one who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty in the process. His job is to disappear with Sophie and keep her alive until the threat is neutralized. But when Dominic falls for the curvy, statuesque beauty, he finds himself making the ultimate sacrifice to keep her safe.

Come Closer


Sara Gran - 2003
    A memo to her boss that's replaced by obscene insults. Amanda—a successful architect in a happy marriage—finds her life going off kilter by degrees. She starts smoking again, and one night for no reason, without even the knowledge that she's doing it, she burns her husband with a cigarette. At night she dreams of a beautiful woman with pointed teeth on the shore of a blood-red sea.The new voice in Amanda's head, the one that tells her to steal things and talk to strange men in bars, is strange and frightening, and Amanda struggles to wrest back control of her life. Is she possessed by a demon, or is she simply insane? Described as “a new kind of psychological thriller” by George Pelecanos and “this year's scariest novel” by Time Out New York, Come Closer has become a modern classic “with a kick that will stay with the reader for days afterward” (The Dallas Morning News).

The Stranger's Bedroom


Bijoy Munshi - 2019
    He has been muttering two names in his sleep: Kriti and Rohan. Ravish is an introvert associated with the technology world. Neha is an outrageously curious woman and a firm optimist.What brings them together? Who are Kriti and Rohan and what’s their story?Welcome to this tale of emotions and the fight against consequences of our desire

Theft of Fire


Michael Edelson - 2017
    The mission to destroy a domestic terrorist cell in possession of a nuclear bomb sounds like the opportunity he is looking for, until he realizes that his targets are not terrorists, and that what they have is something infinitely more dangerous than a bomb. On the run with Dr. Grace Llewellyn and the device she calls Prometheus, Markus finds himself pitted against the full might of US intelligence and military forces as they mount the biggest manhunt ever conducted on American soil. He quickly learns that Prometheus represents a technological advancement so profound that it can alter the course of history. But there is another such device already in play, and he, Grace and Prometheus are all that stand between it and the end of human civilization as we know it.