and an astonishing murder plot.Outwardly, The Radcliffes are a typical suburban family. But anyone close enough to them will know that it’s all for show.Matt and Nikki’s life is perfect. They’re happily married, work great jobs, and are raising two loveable teenage sons.Anthony and Belinda have it all—the looks, the big house by the water, and a successful business.Vaughn and Paige couldn’t be more in love, and they can’t wait to start a family of their own.But underneath, each couple is in crisis and there is one cause. Out of options and their backs against the wall, they discover that murder isn’t a tool reserved only for criminals.

    Help! Help me, please.Daphne Mayfield sought a moment of quiet in a park—a break from city life, a tense relationship, and chronic overwork—but then an elderly woman makes a desperate plea. Daphne is reluctant to get involved when she’s not sure what’s happening, but she wants to help the stranger. Is the rambling old lady the victim of a crime or a victim of dementia?As her unease grows, Daphne can’t let go of the encounter. No matter what her boyfriend or her friends say. No matter what the retired homicide detective warns. Though she knows she’s meddling in other people’s lives, her instincts scream that the danger is real.With each increasingly bold intervention, Daphne involves herself in someone else’s crisis until she’s in too deep to turn back. She’s not just fighting for a stranger’s life…she’s fighting for her own.

    . .One by one, the victims are carefully captured, toyed with, then subjected to a slow and agonizing death. Piece by piece, his exquisite plan takes shape. The police can't yet see the beauty in his work--but soon, very soon, they will. . . Than Being Left Alone. . . In the lonely woods around Grizzly Point, Montana, four bodies have been discovered. Detectives Selena Alvarez and Regan Pescoli have been hoping for a career-making case, but this is a nightmare. Even with the FBI involved, Selena and Regan have nothing to go on but a killer's cryptic notes, and the unsettling knowledge that there is much worse to come. . . To Die. . . When Jillian Rivers opens her eyes, she's trapped in a mangled car. Then a stranger, claiming to be a trail guide named Zane McGregor, pries her free. Though she's grateful, something about him sets Jillian on edge. And if she knew what lay out there in the woods of Montana, she'd be truly terrified. Because someone is waiting... watching... poised to strike and make Jillian the next victim...

    While Scott throws himself back into his law practice in Los Angeles, Kat is hesitant to rejoin the workplace and instead spends her days shell-shocked and confused, unable to focus.When an unwelcome face from Kat’s past in England emerges—the beautiful and imposing Sarah Cherrington—Kat’s marriage is thrown into a tailspin. Now wealthy beyond anything she could have imagined as a girl, Sarah appears to have everything she could need or want. But Sarah has an agenda and she wants one more thing. Soon Kat and Scott are caught up in her devious games and power plays.Against the backdrops of Southern California and Sussex, in spare and haunting prose, Mary McCluskey propels this domestic drama to its chilling conclusion.

    They never found the killer. The police blamed him, as did everyone else.He's been alone since her death. Confined to the house where she was murdered, forced to live a hermit's existence as he struggles with his grief and self-loathing. But there's hope: a beautiful woman, a woman who looks uncannily like his dead wife, moves into the house across the road and befriends him.Joesph Lee's life seems to be improving, but after the light at the end of the tunnel there's another descent into a world of darkness, because the stunning look-alike, and the imposing structure of house 23, are hiding disturbing secrets.House 23 is a dark suspense thriller. A gripping, and often disturbing, story with a mystery twist.

    Her marriage crumbling, her routine shattered, Maris walks away from her pampered life as a Bay Area mom the day she receives a call from Ron, father of her daughter’s killer. Wracked with guilt over his son’s actions (and his own possible contribution to them), he asks Maris a single question: should he jump?With a man’s life in her hands, Maris must decide, perhaps for the first time, what she truly wants. Retribution? Forgiveness? Or something more? Having lost everything, she’s finally free to recreate herself without the confining labels of “wife,” “mother,” or “mourner.” But will this shocking offer free her, or destroy her?

    It is a sin she can never forgive herself for, so she pushes away the man she loves most, knowing that he would eventually hate her for what she’s done, the same way she hates herself.Twenty years later, Abby’s husband, Nate, is also living with a deep sense of guilt. He was the driver who first came upon the scene of Abby’s accident, the man who pulled her to safety before the car erupted in flames, the man who could not save her brother in time. It’s this guilt, this regret that binds them together. They understand each other. Or so Nate believes.In a strange twist of fate, Liam (her old lover—possibly her true soulmate) moves in with his own family next door, releasing a flood of memories that Abby has been trying to keep buried all these years. Abby and Liam, in a complicit agreement, pretend never to have met, yet cannot resist the pull of the past—nor the repercussions of the dark secrets they’ve both been carrying…

    One phone call unravels that tidy world when she is summoned to the bedside of her critically ill mother, whose dying declaration stuns her. She is the adopted daughter of a murdered prostitute with an entire family she’s never met. After her mother’s funeral, Joal decides to stay in Indiana to figure out who she really is and poke around the edges of her birth family. As an investigative reporter, Joal has unraveled hundreds of sordid business deals and personal relationships. Eventually someone reveals the truth, but her mother’s murder isn’t the cliché “prostitute killed by pimp.” The answer may lie with the only witnesses. Her grandmother, the matriarch who tries to keep the family together. Her two brothers, one now a supremely optimistic minister and the other an overly pessimistic doctor. Or the murderer himself, now incarcerated in an Indiana prison.From the homey heartland of Indiana to the humid jungles of Vietnam, Joel follows two stories riddled with criminal acts and hidden agendas. Her work sends her overseas to follow a homebuilder Ponzi scheme while at home she widens the net to include some more colorful members of her family. Unwittingly, they all provide little pieces to a puzzle that begins to come together revealing a conspiracy of silence that has been suppressed for over three decades.Shooting Star is first and foremost the story of a woman trying to reclaim her shattered identity. Only by uncovering the essential truths about the mother she never knew can she put some kind of stability back into her life. Solving a thirty year old murder and finding her place in a family she never knew existed are just added bonuses.

    Stacy and Roger seem to have it all: a wonderful marriage, a luxury Upper East Side apartment with all the accoutrements of the wealthy, and two endearing young children enrolled in private schools. But what appears to be the good life to their family and friends is not what it seems in this fast-paced, suspenseful novel that shows the sinister effects of a destructive marriage and the pursuit of the privileged life. Thurm, who according to the New York Times Book Review, writes brilliantly of the battle of the sexes, has done so again in The Good Life.

    Kate Moore is looking for a way out of the poverty and violence of her childhood. When a chance encounter on a transatlantic ocean liner brings her face-to-face with the handsome heir to a Chicago fortune, she thinks she may have found her escape—as long as she can keep her past concealed.After exchanging wedding vows, Kate quickly discovers that something isn’t quite right with her husband—or her new family. As Mrs. Matthew Lemont, she must contend with her husband’s disturbing past, his domineering mother, and his overly close sister. Isolated at Lakecrest, the sprawling, secluded Lemont estate, she searches desperately for clues to Matthew’s terrors, which she suspects stem from the mysterious disappearance of his aunt years before. As Kate stumbles deeper into a maze of family secrets, she begins to question everyone’s sanity—especially her own. But just how far will she go to break free of this family’s twisted past?

    The crime is eerily similar to a twenty-year-old cold case: another victim, brutally murdered, found in the Delaware River. Lead detective Parker Reed is intent on connecting the two murders, but the locals are on lockdown, revealing nothing.The past meets the present when Becca Kingsley, who returns to Portland to be with her estranged but dying father, runs into Parker, her childhood love. As the daughter of the former police chief, Becca's quickly drawn into the case. Coming home has brought something ominous to the surface - memories long buried, secrets best kept hidden. Becca starts questioning all her past relationships, including one with a man who's watched over her for years. For the first time, she wonders if he's more predator than protector.In a small town where darkness hides in plain sight, the truth could change Becca's life - or end it.

    However, a week later, Adam vanishes, leaving their baby daughter on the doorstep. The following year, Grace returns to the tiny village of Roseby. She is desperate for answers, but it seems the slumbering village is unwilling to give up its secrets. As Grace learns more about the locals and the area’s superstitions and folklore, strange dreams begin to trouble her. Are the villagers hiding something, or is she becoming increasingly paranoid? Only as snowfall threatens to cut them off from the rest of the world does Grace begin to understand how close the threat lies, and that she and her daughter may be in terrible danger if she cannot get them away in time. Praise for Beneath the Shadows 'Something for everyone: mystery, romance and mortal danger' Kirkus Reviews 'Sara Foster overtly appropriates the tone, atmosphere and themes of classics from Wuthering Heights to Rebecca, delivering a modern gothic that has the charm and suspense of Susan Hill's ghost stories.'―Saturday Age 'Sara Foster slowly unravels the mystery in this highly engaging thriller… Secrets Grace uncovers in the cellar, not to mention the ghostly antics of the grandfather clock, further enhance this very readable novel's Gothic flavour' ―Canberra Times 'Loss, grief, abandonment, and search for truth are dark themes woven through Beneath the Shadows. Combining elements of mystery, psychological thriller, romance, and ghost story, the novel leaves readers guessing until the very end.―West Australian 'As winter snows start to cut them off from the world, Grace finds the answers lie in unsuspected places. Heart-stopping moments are ahead for her… and us.” ―Women's Day “If you’ve ever fantasised about leaving all the chaos of the city behind and opting for a more peaceful existence in a small town, you might think again after reading Beneath the Shadows… Full of intrigue and wonderfully dark descriptions of ghosts that haunt the moors.―Good Reading Magazine

    But five years in, she and Pete Conley have a perfectly blended family of her children and his. To celebrate their anniversary, they grab some precious moments of alone time and leave Pete’s son Kip, a high school senior, in charge of Leigh’s fourteen-year-old daughter Chrissy at their home.Driving back on a rainy Friday night, their cell phones start ringing. After a raucous party celebrating his college acceptance to Duke and his upcoming birthday, Kip was arrested for drunk driving after his truck crashed into a tree. And he wasn’t alone—Chrissy was with him.Twelve hours later, Chrissy is dead and Kip is charged with manslaughter.Kip has always been a notorious troublemaker, but he’s also a star student with a dazzling future ahead of him. At first, Leigh does her best to rally behind Pete and help Kip through his ordeal. Until he changes his story, and claims that he wasn’t driving after all—Chrissy was, and he swears there is a witness.Leigh is stunned that he would lie about such a thing, while Pete clutches onto the story as the last, best hope to save his son, throwing his energy and money into finding this elusive witness. As they hurtle toward Kip’s trial date, husband and wife are torn between loyalty to their children and to each other, while the mystery of what really happened that night intensifies.This richly conceived and tightly plotted psychological exploration of family and tragedy will have you racing toward its shocking and thought-provoking conclusion.

    In what a Quebec detective calls a crime of passion, startling evidence surfaces to implicate Michael Elliott, a young investigative reporter who'd rather rub elbows with scumbags than live the posh lifestyle he inherited.Clutched out of her comfort zone, Megan is flung into Michael's dark world of criminal investigation. As they make a last-ditch attempt to prove their innocence, an elusive enemy closes in and threatens their lives. Who wants them out of the way and why?

    All of the women were beautiful, and were either famous at the time of their deaths, or became famous for being the victims of the charismatic, disturbed, men who ended their lives.Being dead doesn’t end a woman’s feelings, or her anger. There is Natalie, the international and revered movie star who died the death she had most feared all of her life. There is the beautiful, life-loving Nicole, who might just have gone back to the stunning athlete she loved, if only he hadn’t killed her first. Then there is Sunny, heiress to one of America's greatest fortunes, sent into an irreversible coma for paying too much for all the wrong things. And finally, there is Colette, the high school sweetheart who married the golden boy and endured a marriage of increasing lies and disappointment, culminating in her death and that of her little girls shortly after Valentine’s Day.These four amazing women’s lives were cut short, but each has a story to tell … and now they have.