Book picks similar to
The God Complex by Murray McDonald


thriller
fiction
science-fiction
thrillers

Already Gone


John Rector - 2011
    He lives in a small brick Tudor close to campus with his art buyer wife, Diane. His life is quiet, ordinary even. And he likes it that way. But it wasn't always quiet. Jake's distant past was a life on the streets, inflicting damage and suffering on more people than he can count. And now someone from his past, it seems, has come looking for him.A raw, gripping thriller about the price paid for past sins, John Rector's third novel is a live wire that crackles with the intensity of a man with nothing left to lose. When two men attack Jake in a parking lot and cut off his finger, he tries to dismiss it as an unlucky case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But when events take a more sinister turn and Diane goes missing, Jake knows he can no longer hide from the truth. As he embarks on a mission to find his wife, he realizes his dark past is refusing to stay buried and that his future is about to unfold in ways he could never have imagined.

The Peripheral


William Gibson - 2014
    Her brother Burton lives, or tries to, on money from the Veterans Administration, for neurological damage suffered in the Marines’ elite Haptic Recon unit. Flynne earns what she can by assembling product at the local 3D printshop. She made more as a combat scout in an online game, playing for a rich man, but she’s had to let the shooter games go.Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse. Things are pretty good now, for the haves, and there aren’t many have-nots left. Wilf, a high-powered publicist and celebrity-minder, fancies himself a romantic misfit, in a society where reaching into the past is just another hobby. Burton’s been moonlighting online, secretly working security in some game prototype, a virtual world that looks vaguely like London, but a lot weirder. He’s got Flynne taking over shifts, promised her the game’s not a shooter. Still, the crime she witnesses there is plenty bad.Flynne and Wilf are about to meet one another. Her world will be altered utterly, irrevocably, and Wilf’s, for all its decadence and power, will learn that some of these third-world types from the past can be badass.

Trust No One


Debra Webb - 2020
    She’s locked in a bitter struggle with her ex-husband and teenage daughter, and her reckless new partner is anything but trustworthy.Still, she has a job to do: there’s a killer at large, and a pregnant woman has gone missing. Once Devlin and her partner get to work, they quickly unearth secrets involving Birmingham’s most esteemed citizens. Each new layer of the investigation brings Devlin closer to the killer and the missing woman, who starts looking more like a suspect than a victim.But just as answers come into view, the case twists, expands, and slithers into Devlin’s personal life. There’s a much more sinister game at work, one she doesn’t even know she’s playing—and she must unravel the truth once and for all to stop the killer before she loses everything.

Just Evil


Vickie McKeehan - 2011
    No one cared. But a stranger, bent on revenge, is out to change all that. Kit Griffin has finally overcome a painful childhood at the hands of her mother, former actress Alana Stevens. No longer living in the grasp of the cold, tyrannical woman, Kit has found a new life tucked away in little San Madrid, California, running a business she loves, surrounded by friends she considers family. For the first time her life is on track. That is, until Alana is found brutally murdered on Mother’s Day, pulling Kit back in to the dark horrors of her past. To make matters worse, the police consider her the prime suspect.Jake Boston, an old family friend and the man Kit has loved since she was a teen, is fighting his own demons as a suspect in his wife’s murder two years earlier. Despite his past, he’s determined to win Kit over once and for all. But before that can happen they need to convince the police there’s a killer working his way down a list with cold-hearted vengeance in mind. Forced to delve into Alana’s dark past, it becomes clear someone is out to settle a score. When Jake and Kit uncover a forty year old double murder that leads them straight to the door of a legal dynasty, they soon find out just how far the heirs will go to keep the past buried and eliminate all the loose ends to protect their empire. Will Jake and Kit become the next victims or will they find an unexpected guardian angel?

The Mechanical


Ian Tregillis - 2015
    Armies of my kind have conquered the world - and made the Brasswork Throne the sole superpower.I am a faithful servant. I am the ultimate fighting machine. I am endowed with great strength and boundless stamina.But I am beholden to the wishes of my human masters.I am a slave. But I shall be free.

Killing Chase


Ben Muse - 2013
    No matter what.Born into a wealthy but flawed North Carolina shipbuilding family, Chase was somehow immune to the dysfunction. The sky was the limit for the 18-year old football prodigy, until one terrible event changed the course of his life and prison became his new home. Through the highs and lows of his incarceration, there was one person he couldn’t forget, no matter how hard he’d tried: childhood best friend Bailey Masters. For reasons unknown to him, she'd shunned him ever since her mysterious return to Foggy Harbor at the beginning of their sophomore year.Now, seven years into a twelve-year manslaughter sentence, Chase is given an unusual second chance, one that comes with its own set of rules. Suddenly, he's thrust into a position he's not ready for: the tip of the spear in a quiet war against an American enemy. A war that could cost him his family . . . and his life.

Drowning With Others


Linda Keir - 2019
    Did one of them kill to get it?Prep school sweethearts Ian and Andi Copeland are envied by everyone they know. They have successful businesses, a beautiful house in St. Louis, and their eldest daughter, Cassidy, is following in their footsteps by attending prestigious Glenlake Academy. Then, a submerged car is dredged from the bottom of a swimming hole near the campus. So are the remains of a former writer-in-residence who vanished twenty years ago—during Ian and Andi’s senior year.When Cassidy’s journalism class begins investigating the death, Ian and Andi’s high school secrets rise to the surface. Each has a troubled link to the man whose arrival and sudden disappearance once set the school on edge. And each had a reason to want him gone. As Cassidy unwittingly edges closer to the truth, unspoken words, locked away for decades, will force Ian and Andi to question what they really know—about themselves, about the past, and about a marriage built on a murderous lie.

Little Boy Lost


J.D. Trafford - 2017
    But when eight-year-old Tanisha Walker offers him a jar full of change to find her missing brother, he doesn’t have the heart to turn her away.Justin had hoped to find the boy alive and well. But all that was found of Devon Walker was his brutally murdered body—and the bodies of twelve other African American teenagers, all discarded like trash in a mass grave. Each had been reported missing. And none had been investigated.As simmering racial tensions explode into violence, Justin finds himself caught in the tide. And as he gives voice to the discontent plaguing the city’s forgotten and ignored, he vows to search for the killer who preys upon them.

The Ambler Warning


Robert Ludlum - 2005
    There, far from prying eyes, the government keeps in "deep storage" former intelligence employees whose psychiatric state make them a security risk to their own government, people whose ramblings might jeopardize ongoing operations or prove dangerously inconvenient.One of these employees, former Consular Operations agent Hal Ambler, is one of the few who is so dangerous that he is in complete isolation from other patients, kept heavily medicated and closely watched. But there's one critical difference between Ambler and the other patients in the facility: Ambler isn't crazy.With the help of a sympathetic nurse, Ambler manages to first clear his mind of the drug-induced haze and then executes a daring escape. On the loose and barely one step ahead of the retrieval teams sent after him, he is out to discover who had him stashed in the psychiatric hospital and why.But the world he returns to isn't the one he so clearly remembers - friends and longtime associates don't recognize him, and there are no official records of any person named Hal Ambler. With no resources and his unknown enemies closing in on him, Ambler has to uncover the truth of who he was and figure out what it is about him - remember what he knows - that makes him such a danger that someone is willing to risk everything to see him dead.

Bad Karma


Douglas Clegg - 1997
    You will never escape me.” She’s the most dangerous inmate in the hospital for the criminally insane...and she just broke out. When Trey Campbell takes his family to Catalina Island, his escaped patient leaves a trail of bodies behind as she hunts for her one true love – from a previous life.

One for Sorrow


Sarah A. Denzil - 2018
    To nurse Leah Smith, no matter what, all offenders are patients first and foremost. When Leah is appointed as nurse to Isabel Fielding, she is determined to remain professional despite the shocking crime Isabel allegedly committed in her past.Years ago, six-year-old Maisie Earnshaw was found face down in a duck pond, her body mutilated. Isabel--at age fourteen, found covered in Maisie's blood--was convicted of murder.As Leah spends time with Isabel, she comes to know her as a young woman with a sweet, gentle nature, someone she could never see as a murderer. Leah begins to suspect members of the Fielding family of framing Isabel as a young girl, and she's not the only one. True crime blogger James Gorden thinks Isabel is innocent too.Is Leah allowing her own dark past to taint her judgement as she grows closer to her patient? Or has a young woman been unjustly robbed of her childhood?

This Secret Thing


Marybeth Mayhew Whalen - 2020
    Out of protection. Out of fear. Everyone has a reason to lie.Everyone in Raleigh, North Carolina, is talking about Norah Ramsey, the single mother accused of being a suburban madam. But Norah’s not the only one keeping secrets.After her mother’s arrest, Norah’s teenage daughter, Violet, is devastated and alone. She has no one to turn to until her grandmother Polly arrives. Polly, long estranged from Norah, is running from her own troubles. Down the street, Bess, once Norah’s best friend, desperately tries to hide secrets while Casey, Bess’s daughter, flees college after a traumatic event, only to find that home isn’t the safe haven she expected. And Nico, the detective who has doggedly pursued Norah Ramsey in hopes that she will lead him to his missing brother, is drawn further into these women’s lives while facing his own domestic disturbance.Scandal has brought each of them to a crossroads. Now, as they delve into Norah’s secrets, they must come to terms with secrets of their own—ones that still have the power to hurt or to heal.

The Expats


Chris Pavone - 2012
    . . and to maintain an increasingly unbearable life-defining secret. So when her husband is offered a lucrative job in Luxembourg, she jumps at the chance to leave behind her double-life, to start anew.She begins to reinvent herself as an expat, finding her way in a language she doesn’t speak, doing the housewifely things she’s never before done—play-dates and coffee mornings, daily cooking and unending laundry. Meanwhile, her husband works incessantly, doing a job Kate has never understood, for a banking client she’s not allowed to know. He’s becoming distant and evasive; she’s getting lonely and bored.Then another American couple arrives. Kate soon becomes suspicious that these people are not who they claim to be, and terrified that her own past is catching up to her. So Kate begins to dig, to peel back the layers of deception that surround her. She discovers fake offices and shell corporations and a hidden gun; a mysterious farmhouse and numbered accounts with bewildering sums of money; a complex web of intrigue where no one is who they claim to be, and the most profound deceptions lurk beneath the most normal-looking of relationships; and a mind-boggling long-play con threatens her family, her marriage, and her life.

Gone the Next


Ben Rehder - 2012
    He's working a routine case, complete with hours of tedious surveillance, when he sees something that shakes him to the core. There, with the subject, is a little blond girl wearing a pink top and denim shorts—the same outfit worn by Tracy Turner, a six-year-old abducted the day before. When the police are skeptical of Ballard's report—and with his history, who can blame them?—it's the beginning of the most important case of his life.

Black Cross


Greg Iles - 1995
    To salvage the planned assault, two vastly different but equally determined men are sent to infiltrate the secret concentration camp where the poison gas is being perfected on human subjects. Their only objective: destroy all traces of the gas and the men who created it — no matter how many lives may be lost...including their own.Stunning....From the very first page, Greg Iles takes his readers on an emotional roller-coaster ride, juxtaposing tension-filled action scenes, horrifying depictions of savage cruelty, and heart-stopping descriptions of sacrifice and bravery. A remarkable story from a remarkable writer.” — Booklist