Book picks similar to
The Lazarus Trap by Davis Bunn


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Dirty Blonde


Lisa Scottoline - 2006
    . . . If a good roller-coaster is what you want, step up and have your ticket punched.”—PeopleA female judge finds her life and her career on the line when the defendant in a high-profile lawsuit is killed in this riveting and stylish novel of greed, murder and justice, from New York Times #1 bestselling author Lisa Scottoline.Attractive, sexy, tough-minded Cate Fante has just been appointed to the federal bench in Philadelphia. Uncomfortable among the elite meritocracy of the federal judiciary, the hard-charging woman with working class roots secretly indulges her taste for bad boys and men who work with their hands, like those she knew growing up in an old northeastern Pennsylvania coal-mining town.Presiding over a high-profile multi-million-dollar lawsuit, Cate quickly learns that being a judge doesn’t always mean she can do justice. While a wronged former Philly ADA has the moral high ground, the sleazy television producer he’s suing has the law on his side. Upset over the trial’s outcome, Cate wants to forget with a few drinks and a night of anonymous sex. But when she realizes she’s made a mistake, the stranger she picked up becomes aggressive, and she barely escapes without getting seriously hurt. For Cate though, the trouble has only begun. Returning home, she learns that the TV producer from her court case has been murdered. Then the body of her failed one-night stand is discovered. Suddenly Cate’s secret private life is splashed across the media and her job is in jeopardy. Her only hope is to find a murderer and clear her name. But can she uncover the truth before the cold-blooded killer silences her?

Hazardous Duty


Christy Barritt - 2006
    Claire dropped out of school and started her own crime scene cleaning business. Now, when a routine cleaning job leads her to a murder weapon the police overlooked, she realizes that the wrong man is in jail. With the help of her new and attractively single neighbor, Riley Thomas, Gabby plays the detective to make sure the right man is put behind bars.

The Current


Tim Johnston - 2019
    One girl’s survival, and the other’s death—murder, actually—stun the citizens of a small Minnesota town, thawing memories of another young woman who lost her life in the same river ten years earlier, and whose killer may yet live among them. One father is forced to relive his agony while another’s greatest desire—to bring a killer to justice—is revitalized . . . and the girl who survived the icy plunge cannot escape the sense that she is connected to that earlier unsolved case by more than a river. Soon enough she’s caught up in an investigation of her own that will unearth long-hidden secrets, and stoke the violence that has long simmered just below the surface of the town. Souls frozen in time, ghosts and demons, the accused and the guilty, all stir to life in this cold northern place where memories, like treachery, run just beneath the ice, and where a young woman can come home but still not be safe.Brilliantly plotted, unrelentingly suspenseful, and beautifully realized, The Current is a gripping page-turner about how the past holds the key to the future as well as an unbreakable grip on the present.

I Am Watching You


Teresa Driscoll - 2017
    But just as she’s decided to call for help, something stops her. The next day, she wakes up to the news that one of the girls—beautiful, green-eyed Anna Ballard—has disappeared.A year later, Anna is still missing. Ella is wracked with guilt over what she failed to do, and she’s not the only one who can’t forget. Someone is sending her threatening letters—letters that make her fear for her life.Then an anniversary appeal reveals that Anna’s friends and family might have something to hide. Anna’s best friend, Sarah, hasn’t been telling the whole truth about what really happened that night—and her parents have been keeping secrets of their own.Someone knows where Anna is—and they’re not telling. But they are watching Ella.Listening Length: 8 hours and 26 minutes

Diamonds and Cole


Micheal Maxwell - 2013
    In the past, Cole a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, worked for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine. Now, he’s returned to the paper where he started his career, The Chicago Sentinel. Instead of writing the big stories, he’s doing the work of a rookie reporter. His “big story of the day” is a cat caught in a tree. During its rescue, the cat’s owner takes her Good Samaritan neighbor hostage. Cole witnesses something so disturbing it reawakens the journalist’s desire to write again.Returning to the paper, Cole finds a desperate message asking for help from Ellie, one that got away. The one that has continually haunted his life. Cole drops everything and flies to California. He must find what would make her so desperate, she would call him after so many years. Cole finds her terminally ill, and abandoned by her husband. He discovers while Ellie was heavily medicated, she mistakenly signed a Power of Attorney. Now her estranged daughter Erin’s inheritance, won’t go to her, but her abusive step-father. Cole vows to find the girl and right the situation.The path to keeping his word is blocked at every turn by the husband who abandoned her, his shady real estate deals, violent con men, street thugs and the lure of a fortune in diamonds that unite them. The anger, sorrow, and crippling guilt of twenty years fires Cole's drive to keep a promise, that in the end, will heal and return the soul to the great journalist.Beaten, bloody but determined, Cole Sage conquers greed and hatred with a strength that only love, and a will as hard as diamond, can achieve.

The Guilty One


Lisa Ballantyne - 2012
    . . and his eleven-year-old neighbor is accused of the crime. Leading the defense is London solicitor Daniel Hunter, a champion of lost causes.A damaged boy from a troubled home, Daniel's young client, Sebastian, reminds Daniel of his own turbulent childhood--and of Minnie, the devoted woman whose love saved him. But one terrible act of betrayal irrevocably shattered their bond.As past and present collide, Daniel is faced with disturbing questions. Will his sympathy for Sebastian and his own memories blind him to the truth? What happened in the park--and who, ultimately, is to blame for a little boy's death? Rethinking everything he's ever believed, Daniel begins to understand what it means to be wrong . . . and to be the guilty one.

Silent Child


Sarah A. Denzil - 2017
    It was the tragic story of the year - a little boy, Aiden, wandered away from school during a terrible flood, fell into the river, and drowned.  His body was never recovered.  Ten years later, Emma has finally rediscovered the joy in life. She's married, pregnant, and in control again...... until Aiden returns. Too traumatized to speak, he raises endless questions and answers none. Only his body tells the story of his decade-long disappearance. The historic broken bones and injuries cast a mere glimpse into the horrors Aiden has experienced. Aiden never drowned. Aiden was taken. As Emma attempts to reconnect with her now teenage son, she must unmask the monster who took him away from her. But who, in their tiny village, could be capable of such a crime?It's Aiden who has the answers, but he cannot tell the unspeakable.This dark and disturbing psychological novel will appeal to fans of The Widow and The Butterfly Garden.

Bad Move


Linwood Barclay - 2004
    and new homeowner Zack Walker isn’t feeling lucky. Whoever said the burbs were boring will think twice after reading Linwood Barclay’s hilarious debut mystery, in which Dad learns the hard way that he doesn’t always know best.Zack wouldn’t blame you for thinking he’s safety-obsessed. True, he masterminded a plot to trade his family’s exciting city lifestyle for one of suburban tranquillity. True, even after this strategic move, Zack still has issues with family members who forget their keys in the front door, leave their cars unlocked, or park their backpacks at the top of the stairs — where you could kill yourself tripping over them. Just ask his wife, Sarah, or his teenage kids, Paul and Angie, who endure their share of lectures. Zack knows that he needs to chill out and assume the best for once — but we know what happens to those who assume.When Zack realizes their two-faced developer sent a petty thief to fix their leaky shower, he starts fighting hard to ignore the fact that Oakwood isn’t the crime-free paradise he was hoping for. But his brief state of denial comes to an abrupt end when, during a walk by the creek, he stumbles across a dead body. Even more shocking, Zack actually knows who the victim is — and who might want him dead. With a killer roaming around their neighborhood and Zack’s overactive imagination in overdrive, he’s sure things can’t get any worse. But then another local is murdered — and Zack’s paranoid tendencies get him implicated in the crime. While his wife is trying to remember why she married him in the first place, and his kids are considering whether it’s time to have him committed, Zack decides there’s only one thing he can do. To protect his family — and avoid being busted for a crime he didn’t commit — he’s going to have to override his safety-first instincts, tap into his delusions of machismo, and track down the killer himself.From the Hardcover edition.

Gold Coast


Nelson DeMille - 1990
    Here two men are destined for an explosive collision: John Sutter, Wall Street lawyer, holding fast to a fading aristocratic legacy; and Frank Bellarosa, the Mafia don who seizes his piece of the staid and unprepared Gold Coast like a latter-day barbarian chief and draws Sutter and his regally beautiful wife, Susan, into his violent world. Told from Sutter's sardonic and often hilarious point of view, and laced with sexual passion and suspense, The Gold Coast is Nelson DeMille's captivating story of friendship and seduction, love and betrayal.

When Night Comes


Dan Walsh - 2014
    Within days, he starts having bizarre experiences at night. Like he's traveling back in time, experiencing the epic events in his lectures firsthand. He has no control over these experiences and can't make them stop.Joe Boyd thought he'd left big city crime back in Pittsburgh when he took a detective job in Culpepper, Georgia, a sleepy southern college town. His peaceful life ends when two students turn up dead in two weeks. The coroner is saying natural causes, but something doesn't add up.Rachel Cook, a teaching assistant at Culpepper, can't believe Jack is back in her life again. She's had a crush on him since she was fourteen, but Jack never knew. He instantly seems attracted to her, but she can tell...something is deeply troubling him.Watching all this from a distance is Nigel Avery. He's certain this experiment's about to unravel. It'll be his job to tie up all the loose ends when it does.Bestselling author Dan Walsh is known for page-turning storylines. Fans of his novels The Discovery and What Follows After will especially love...When Night Comes.

The Savage Garden


Mark Mills - 2007
    Adam Banting, a somewhat aimless young scholar at Cambridge University, is called to his professor's office one afternoon and assigned a special summer project: to write a scholarly monograph about a famous garden built in the 1500s. Dedicated to the memory of Signor Docci's dead wife, the garden is a mysterious world of statues, grottoes, meandering rills, and classical inscriptions. But during his three-week sojourn at the villa, Adam comes to suspect that clues to a murder are buried in the strange iconography of the garden: the long-dead Signor Docci most likely killed his wife and filled her memorial garden with pointers as to both the method and the motive of his crime. As the mystery of the garden unfolds, Adam finds himself drawn into a parallel intrigue. Through his evolving relationship with the lady of the house - the ailing, seventy-something Signora Docci - he finds clues to yet another possible murder, this one much more recent. The signora's eldest son was shot by Nazi officers on the third floor of the villa, and her husband, now dead, insisted that the area be sealed and preserved forever. Like the garden, the third-floor rooms are frozen in time. Delving into his subject, Adam begins to suspect that his summer project might be a setup. Is he really just the naive student, stumbling upon clues, or is Signora Docci using him to discover for herself the true meaning of the villa's murderous past?

The Cry


Helen Fitzgerald - 2013
    And telling the truth won't bring him back...When a baby goes missing on a lonely roadside in Australia, it sets off a police investigation that will become a media sensation and dinner-table talk across the world.Lies, rumours and guilt snowball, causing the parents, Joanna and Alistair, to slowly turn against each other.Finally Joanna starts thinking the unthinkable: could the truth be even more terrible than she suspected? And what will it take to make things right?The Cry is a dark psychological thriller with a gripping moral dilemma at its heart and characters who will keep you guessing on every page.

The House of Secrets


Brad Meltzer - 2016
    He should know. Hazel's father is Jack Nash, the host of America's favorite conspiracy TV show, The House of Secrets.Even as a child, she loved hearing her dad's tall tales, especially the one about a leather book belonging to Benedict Arnold that was hidden in a corpse.Now, years later, Hazel wakes up in the hospital and remembers nothing, not even her own name. She's told she's been in a car accident that killed her father and injured her brother. But she can't remember any of it because of her own traumatic brain injury. Then a man from the FBI shows up, asking questions about her dad - and about his connection to the corpse of a man found with an object stuffed into his chest: a priceless book that belonged to Benedict Arnold.Back at her house, Hazel finds guns that she doesn't remember owning. On her forehead she sees scars from fights she can't recall. Most important, the more Hazel digs, the less she likes the person she seems to have been.Trying to put together the puzzle pieces of her past and present, Hazel Nash needs to figure out who killed this man - and how the book wound up in his chest. The answer will tell her the truth about her father, what he was really doing for the government - and who Hazel really is.Mysteries need to be solved. Especially the ones about yourself.

Gathering Shadows


Nancy Mehl - 2014
    Louis, but even a bright future doesn't take away her pain over the disappearance of her brother nine years ago. So when she stumbles across a photograph of a boy with an eerie resemblance to him, she can't pass up the chance to track him down. With research for work as her cover, she sets out with one of the station's photogs for the place where the picture was taken: the town of Sanctuary.Almost as soon as she arrives, she meets the town's handsome young mayor, Rueben King, and together they begin to uncover long held secrets that could tear the small town apart and change everything Wynter thought she knew about her life. As the truth of her family's past hides in the shadows, it's clear someone will stop at nothing to keep the answers she's searching for hidden forever--even if the cost is Wynter's very life.

All the Missing Girls


Megan Miranda - 2016
    Back again to tie up loose ends and care for her ailing father, Nic is soon plunged into a shocking drama that reawakens Corinne’s case and breaks open old wounds long since stitched.The decade-old investigation focused on Nic, her brother Daniel, boyfriend Tyler, and Corinne’s boyfriend Jackson. Since then, only Nic has left Cooley Ridge. Daniel and his wife, Laura, are expecting a baby; Jackson works at the town bar; and Tyler is dating Annaleise Carter, Nic’s younger neighbor and the group’s alibi the night Corinne disappeared. Then, within days of Nic’s return, Annaleise goes missing.Told backwards—Day 15 to Day 1—from the time Annaleise goes missing, Nic works to unravel the truth about her younger neighbor’s disappearance, revealing shocking truths about her friends, her family, and what really happened to Corinne that night ten years ago.Like nothing you’ve ever read before, All the Missing Girls delivers in all the right ways. With twists and turns that lead down dark alleys and dead ends, you may think you’re walking a familiar path, but then Megan Miranda turns it all upside down and inside out and leaves us wondering just how far we would be willing to go to protect those we love.