In The Name Of The Father


Judi Coltman - 2011
    . . not even in His house.Liz’s best friend rode off on the back of a motorcycle when she was 16 years old. Her body parts washed up on the shores of a Virginia beach community days later, prompting Liz’s parents to sequester her away to Richmond, far away from the vicious murder. Now on her own, Liz returns to take back that part of her life and make peace with the events of her 16th summer.John Williams’ heart broke when, after being questioned in the grisly murder, Liz’s parents spirited her away for good, leaving him grieving for his forsaken love. With the guidance of his father, the community preacher, John moves on with a clear understanding of his life’s mission.When another body turns up, savagely hacked-up on the side of the road, safety becomes elusive, even in the small community church where the answers are hidden. Liz and John have to face the truth that the killer is still out there. Watching. Waiting for them.

Every Dead Thing


John Connolly - 1999
    Tortured by the unsolved slayings of his wife and young daughter, he is a man consumed by guilt, regret, and the desire for revenge. When his former partner asks him to track down a missing girl, Parker finds himself drawn into a world beyond his imagining: a world where thirty-year-old killings remain shrouded in fear and lies, a world where the ghosts of the dead torment the living, a world haunted by the murderer responsible for the deaths in his family—a serial killer who uses the human body to create works of art and takes faces as his prize. But the search awakens buried instincts in Parker: instincts for survival, for compassion, for love, and, ultimately, for killing.Aided by a beautiful young psychologist and a pair of bickering career criminals, Parker becomes the bait in a trap set in the humid bayous of Louisiana, a trap that threatens the lives of everyone in its reach. Driven by visions of the dead and the voice of an old black psychic who met a terrible end, Parker must seek a final, brutal confrontation with a murderer who has moved beyond all notions of humanity, who has set out to create a hell on earth: the serial killer known only as the Traveling Man.In the tradition of classic American detective fiction, Every Dead Thing is a tense, richly plotted thriller, filled with memorable characters and gripping action. It is also a profoundly moving novel, concerned with the nature of loyalty, love, and forgiveness. Lyrical and terrifying, it is an ambitious debut, triumphantly realized.

Blacklands


Belinda Bauer - 2009
    Every day after school, while his classmates swap football stickers, Steven goes digging to lay to rest the ghost of the uncle he never knew, who disappeared aged eleven and is assumed to have fallen victim to the notorious serial killer Arnold Avery.Only Steven's Nan is not convinced her son is dead. She still waits for him to come home, standing bitter guard at the front window while her family fragments around her. Steven is determined to heal the widening cracks between them before it's too late. And if that means presenting his grandmother with the bones of her murdered son, he'll do it.So the boy takes the next logical step, carefully crafting a letter to Arnold Avery in prison. And there begins a dangerous cat-and-mouse game between a desperate child and a bored serial killer . . .

No Good Deed


M.P. McDonald - 2010
    It triggers dreams of disasters. Tragedies that happen exactly as he envisions them. He learns that not only can he see the future, he can change it. Then the unthinkable happened and everyone ignored his frantic warnings. Thousands die. Suddenly, the Feds are pounding on his door and the name they have for Taylor isn't urban hero. It's enemy combatant. And, it means they can do anything they want to him. Anything at all.

Itsy Bitsy Spider


Willow Rose - 2013
    She decides to move there with her family, much to her teenage-daughter's regret. One morning a wealthy old woman in her street is found murdered and soon Emma finds herself wrapped in a mystery uncovering the island's dark secrets that not only runs deep within the history of the island but also within her own family. From the author of the International Bestselling books, the Rebekka Franck-series comes a new Scandinavian Mystery destined to keep you up all night. This is the first book in the Emma Frost-series and is followed by Miss Polly had a dolly.

Malevolent


Jana Deleon - 2015
     Everyone wondered about Shaye Archer’s past. Including Shaye. Shaye Archer’s life effectively began the night police found her in an alley, beaten and abused and with no memory of the previous fifteen years, not even her name. Nine years later, she’s a licensed private investigator, with a single goal—to get answers for her clients when there aren’t supposed to be any. And maybe someday, answers for herself. Emma Frederick thought her nightmare was over when she killed her abusive husband, but someone is stalking her and tormenting her with mementos from her past. With no evidence to support her claims, the police dismiss her claims as post-traumatic stress, but Shaye is convinced that someone is deliberately terrorizing Emma…playing a cat and mouse game with only one goal in mind. To kill Emma.

13½


Nevada Barr - 2009
    No stranger to tragedy, Polly was a runaway at the age of fifteen, escaping a nightmarish Mississippi childhood.Lonely, that is, until she encounters architect Marshall Marchand. Polly is immediately smitten. She finds him attractive, charming, and intelligent. Marshall, a lifelong bachelor, spends most of his time with his brother Danny. When Polly’s two young daughters from her previous marriage are likewise taken with Marshall, she marries him. However, as Polly begins to settle into her new life, she becomes uneasy about her husband’s increasing dark moods, fearing that Danny may be influencing Marshall in ways she cannot understand.But what of the ominous prediction by a New Orleans tarot card reader, who proclaims that Polly will murder her husband? What, if any, is the Marchands' connection to the infamous "Butcher Boy" multiple homicide? And could Marshall and his eccentric brother be keeping a dark secret from Polly, one that will shatter the happiness she has forever prayed for?

The Dead Room


Robert Ellis - 2002
    The atrocity kicks off an investigation into a bizarre string of increasingly disturbing murders, all believed to be perpetrated by someone of unprecedented savagery and cunning.As the city's panic rises, civil attorney Teddy Mack is thrown headlong into the grisly homicide case—and into a world of dirty politics and corrupt justice, where deceptions are as deadly as a killer's twisted secrets. Now, another woman is about to meet the same horrific fate as the others. To end a madman's reign, Teddy must enter his maze—a place of unimaginable terror…and shocking revelations.With his second thriller, and more than 375 FIVE STAR Amazon reviews, L.A. Times bestselling author Robert Ellis delivers an explosive read with full-blown characters, a world stacked with twists and turns, and an emotional intensity that burns white hot.

A Familiar Sight


Brianna Labuskes - 2021
    Gretchen White is a specialist in antisocial personality disorders and violent crimes. She’s helped solve enough prominent cases for detective Patrick Shaughnessy that her own history is often overlooked: Gretchen is an admitted sociopath once suspected of killing her aunt. Shaughnessy still thinks Gretchen got away with murder. It’s not going to happen again.When a high-profile new case lands on Shaughnessy’s desk, it seems open and shut. Remorseless teenager Viola Kent is accused of killing her mother. Amid stories of childhood horrors and Viola’s cruel manipulations, the bad seed has already been found guilty by a rapt public. But Gretchen might be seeing something in Viola no one else does: herself.If Viola is a scapegoat, then who really did it? And what are they hiding? To find the truth, Gretchen must enter a void that is not only dark and cold-blooded, but also frighteningly familiar.

The Wicked Girls


Alex Marwood - 2008
    For Kirsty and Amber, it's the first time they've seen each other since that dark day when they were just children. But with new lives – and families – to protect, will they really be able to keep their secret hidden?

Bad Games


Jeff Menapace - 2013
    Some fishing, some barbecue, some games...The Fannelli brothers are heading to Crescent Lake too. Some stalking, some kidnapping, some murder, definitely some games...though not necessarily the type of games the Lamberts had in mind. But it doesn't matter. The Lamberts are going to play whether they like it or not.An intense psychological thriller, Bad Games has the dark, mind-bending chills of The Bad Seed combined with the fish-out-of-water dread and suspense of Deliverance. So let Jeff Menapace's highly anticipated suspense thriller keep you up all night as it delves into the mystery of nature versus nurture when comprehending the evil in man, along with the will and determination an innocent family must summon to fight back against horrific odds.

Ashes to Ashes


Tami Hoag - 1999
    He has already claimed three lives, and he won’t stop there. Only this time there is a witness. But she isn’t talking. Enter Kate Conlan, former FBI agent turned victim/witness advocate. Not even she can tell if the reluctant witness is a potential victim or something more troubling still. Her superiors are interested only because the latest victim may be the daughter of Peter Bondurant, an enigmatic billionaire. When Peter pulls strings, Special Agent John Quinn gets assigned to the case. But the FBI’s ace profiler of serial killers is the last person Kate wants to work with, not with their troubled history. Now she faces the most difficult role of her career—and her life. For she’s the only woman who has what it takes to stop the killer . . . and the one woman he wants next.

If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood


Gregg Olsen - 2019
    Until now.For years, behind the closed doors of their farmhouse in Raymond, Washington, their sadistic mother, Shelly, subjected her girls to unimaginable abuse, degradation, torture, and psychic terrors. Through it all, Nikki, Sami, and Tori developed a defiant bond that made them far less vulnerable than Shelly imagined. Even as others were drawn into their mother’s dark and perverse web, the sisters found the strength and courage to escape an escalating nightmare that culminated in multiple murders.

The Killing Lessons


Saul Black - 2015
    Two violent predators walk through the door. Nothing will ever be the same.When the two strangers turn up at Rowena Cooper's isolated Colorado farmhouse, she knows instantly that it's the end of everything. For the two haunted and driven men, on the other hand, it's just another stop on a long and bloody journey. And they still have many miles to go, and victims to sacrifice, before their work is done.For San Francisco homicide detective Valerie Hart, their trail of victims-women abducted, tortured and left with a seemingly random series of objects inside them-has brought her from obsession to the edge of physical and psychological destruction. And she's losing hope of making a breakthrough before that happens.But the murders at the Cooper farmhouse didn't quite go according to plan. There was a survivor, Rowena's ten-year-old daughter Nell, who now holds the key to the killings. Injured, half-frozen, terrified, Nell has only one place to go. And that place could be even more dangerous than what she's running from.In this extraordinary, pulse-pounding debut, Saul Black takes us deep into the mind of a psychopath, and into the troubled heart of the woman determined to stop him.

A Perfect Husband


Douglas Wickard - 2012
    A rebirth, one might call it. And, she intends to do this spiritual resurrection in a small, abandoned fishing cabin, built over forty years ago by her deceased father.Not quite abandoned…A lethal serial killer has taken up residence in the basement of Sami’s remote cottage, using her father’s carpenter table for a hobby much more sinister than woodcutting.Sequestered deep within forty-two acres of tall pine trees, bristling brooks and fresh water lakes, Sami Saxton is about to fight for her life.The hard truth… nobody will ever hear her scream!"Wickard’s novel colorfully illuminates the two synchronized protagonists, each displaying profound characteristics: Sami has trouble adjusting to her new life and Smitty balances his secret life with his normal one, with a (living) wife and infant daughter at home." ~ Kirkus Reviews