Book picks similar to
Death of a Serpent by Susan Russo Anderson


mystery
historical-fiction
fiction
historical

River Bodies


Karen Katchur - 2018
    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.

Hushabye


Celina Grace - 2013
    A murdered girl. A case where everyone has something to hide...Hushabye (A Kate Redman mystery) is the new novel from crime writer Celina Grace, author of Lost Girls and The House on Fever Street.On the first day of her new job in the West Country, Detective Sergeant Kate Redman finds herself investigating the kidnapping of Charlie Fullman, the newborn son of a wealthy entrepreneur and his trophy wife. It seems a straightforward case... but as Kate and her fellow officer Mark Olbeck delve deeper, they uncover murky secrets and multiple motives for the crime.Kate finds the case bringing up painful memories of her own past secrets. As she confronts the truth about herself, her increasing emotional instability threatens both her hard-won career success and the possibility that they will ever find Charlie Fullman alive...

Moriarty Meets His Match


Anna Castle - 2016
    Then he meets amber-eyed Angelina Gould and his world turns upside down. At an exhibition of new inventions, an exploding steam engine kills a man. When Moriarty tries to figure out what happened, he comes up against Sherlock Holmes, sent to investigate by Moriarty’s old enemy. Holmes collects evidence that points at Moriarty, who realizes he must either solve the crime or swing it for it himself. He soon uncovers trouble among the board members of the engine company and its unscrupulous promoter. Moriarty tries to untangle those relationships, but everywhere he turns, he meets the alluring Angelina. She’s playing some game, but what’s her goal? And whose side is she on? Between them, Holmes and Angelina push Moriarty to his limits -- and beyond. He’ll have to lose himself to save his life and win the woman he loves.

The Deep End


Julie Mulhern - 2015
    It’s 1974 and Ellison Russell’s life revolves around her daughter and her art. She’s long since stopped caring about her cheating husband, Henry, and the women with whom he entertains himself. That is, until she becomes a suspect in Madeline Harper’s death. The murder forces Ellison to confront her husband’s proclivities and his crimes—kinky sex, petty cruelties and blackmail. As the body count approaches par on the seventh hole, Ellison knows she has to catch a killer. But with an interfering mother, an adoring father, a teenage daughter, and a cadre of well-meaning friends demanding her attention, can Ellison find the killer before he finds her?

Love Me If You Must


Nicole Young - 2007
    For a start she discovers something unsettling in the basement that interests the police officer next door.

Heresy


S.J. Parris - 2010
    This alone could have got him burned at the stake, but he was also a student of occult philosophies and magic. In S.J. Parris's gripping novel, Bruno's pursuit of this rare knowledge brings him to London, where he is unexpectedly recruited by Queen Elizabeth I and is sent undercover to Oxford University on the pretext of a royal visitation. Officially Bruno is to take part in a debate on the Copernican theory of the universe; unofficially, he is to find out whatever he can about a Catholic plot to overthrow the queen. His mission is dramatically thrown off course by a series of grisly murders and a spirited and beautiful young woman. As Bruno begins to discover a pattern in these killings, he realizes that no one at Oxford is who he seems to be. Bruno must attempt to outwit a killer who appears obsessed with the boundary between truth and heresy. Like The Dante Club and The Alienist, this clever, sophisticated, exceptionally enjoyable novel is written with the unstoppable narrative propulsion and stylistic flair of the very best historical thrillers.

Murder as a Fine Art


David Morrell - 2013
    Fogbound streets become a battleground between a literary star and a brilliant murderer, whose lives are linked by secrets long buried but never forgotten.

Death By Honeymoon


Jaden Skye - 2011
    Cindy finds her newly beloved taken away from her, drowned in a freak accident in the ocean. The local police are quick to declare it an accident, to insist that he was caught in a sudden riptide. But Cindy, left all alone, is not convinced.Cindy must return to her and Clint’s now-empty home in New York and face her in-laws, who never wanted Clint to marry her, and who did everything to make her engagement and wedding hell. She must deal with all of these women’s backbiting, gossiping and unspoken accusations, while she tries to get a handle on her own grief and to get clear on what really happened to Clint.Cindy is mailed an anonymous photo of a woman she had never met, addressed to Clint. As she tries to unravel the mysterious package, as she begins to dig deeper into Clint’s emails and files, she realizes how many secrets Clint had been hiding from his past. She realizes that she didn’t really know the man she loved. And she also realizes that Clint was murdered.She digs deeper, into the depths of Clint’s massive corporation, DGB oil, and as she starts to unearth information she shouldn’t, she goes too far. Soon her own life is in peril. On the run, she realizes that the only way to get answers, and to save her own life, is to return to where it all began: Barbados. As she heads into the dark underside of the island, into the heart of the local villages, she is shocked to discover what really happened to her husband on their honeymoon.But by then, it may already be too late.Books #2--#7 in the Caribbean Murder series (DEATH BY DIVORCE) are now also available!

New Orleans Mourning


Julie Smith - 1992
    Amant has been crowned Rex, King of Carnival. But his day of glory comes to an abrupt and bloody end when a parade-goer dressed as Dolly Parton guns him down. Is the killer his aimless, promiscuous daughter Marcelle? Homosexual, mistreated son Henry? Helpless, alcoholic wife Bitty? Or some unknown player? Turns out the king had enemies...Enter resourceful heroine Skip Langdon, a rookie police officer and former debutante turned cynic of the Uptown crowd. Scouring the streets for clues, interviewing revelers and street people with names like Jo Jo, Hinky, and Cookie, and using her white glove contacts, the post-deb rebel cop encounters a tangled web of brooding clues and ancient secrets that could mean danger for her—and doom for the St. Amants.

The Fabric of Murder


William Savage - 2015
    So when a leading cloth-manufacturer is found murdered and his business totters on the brink of collapse, everyone fears his fall will ruin hundreds of working families and cause the economy of the whole county to collapse. In near panic, the mayor and aldermen turn to an unlikely person to solve the riddle: Mr. Ashmole Foxe, a man who claims to be a mere bookseller, yet lives in grand style, dresses like a dandy and associates as easily with the demi-monde as the gentry. With few firm clues to go on and every sign the dead man himself had been hiding many secrets, Mr Foxe sets out to do as the City Fathers want. Who benefited from the death? Why had the murdered man been stockpiling cloth for months? Who is the stranger now trying to buy up all this surplus stock and what will he do with it? Follow Mr Foxe through Norwich’s teeming 18th-century streets as he seeks out the answers and tracks down a killer with more than profit on his mind.

Dead Certain


Adam Mitzner - 2017
    By night, she pursues her passion for singing in the darkest clubs of Manhattan.No one knows her secret, not even Charlotte, the younger sister she practically raised. But it seems she’s not the only one in the family with something to hide. When Charlotte announces she’s sold her first novel, Ella couldn’t be more thrilled…until she gets a call that her sister’s gone missing.Ella starts investigating with the help of Detective Gabriel Velasquez, an old flame in the NYPD, and what she finds is shocking. If art imitates life, then her sister’s novel may contain details of her real-life affairs. And any one of her lovers could be involved in her disappearance.Desperate to bring Charlotte home, Ella works through her list of suspects, matching fictitious characters with flesh-and-blood men. But will it be too late to save the sister she only thought she knew?

The Psalter


Galen Watson - 2012
    This time, it leads to a medieval manuscript and murder. Was it an ordinary theft gone wrong or something more? The Carabinieri in Rome would like to know.Michael Romano is an American priest working in the Vatican's Secret Archives with a penchant for stepping over the line. Church Inquisitors have noticed -- and they aren’t happy. Nevertheless, Romano is also the Church’s senior paleographer, an expert in ancient manuscripts, and his expertise is needed to examine a ninth-century codex known as a Psalter.Father Romano’s examination leads him into the past as he uncovers an historical narrative of medieval forgeries, Saracen invasions and a legendary fight for the richest kingdom on earth. Yet he has unwittingly become a target for those who will stop at nothing to possess the secret of the Psalter.*Untraditional Christianity Warning

Back to Lazarus


Judy K. Walker - 2014
    He beat and choked her to death. I'm told that he was found hanging from a homemade noose in his cell. I want to know why he waited so long to do it." Sydney Brennan isn't sure how to answer her client's question, short of holding a séance, and the Tallahassee detective has some questions of her own. Why does Noel Thomas remember so little about her childhood? Why is she delving into her father's suicide now? And, most importantly, why isn't Noel telling her the truth?Sydney crisscrosses the Florida Panhandle, reconstructing the tragic Thomas family history. The violence that destroyed the Thomas family connects to a present-day web of deceit and corruption through a desperate man willing to do anything to keep his secrets safe. To discover his identity, Sydney must go Back to Lazarus, back to the town where Noel's beautiful but troubled mother began her inevitable descent over twenty years ago. But by following in the footsteps of the murdered woman, does Sydney risk sharing her fate?Rooted in bars and back roads and Panhandle prisons, forgotten towns and forgotten people, at its heart Back to Lazarus is about stories: the stories people tell us, the stories we tell ourselves, and what happens when we realize it's all a lie.

From the Ashes


Sabrina Flynn - 2014
    Three years later, Riot returns to San Francisco to put his ghosts to rest, but the abduction of an heiress snags his attention. Two ransom demands are delivered, and the husband of the abducted Isobel Kingston is hiding the truth.The clock is ticking. Can Riot find Mrs Kingston in time, or will she become one more regret among many?A thrilling historical mystery for fans of Laurie R. King, Louise Penny, and Jacqueline Windspear.

Invisible


Lorena McCourtney - 2004
    So when vandals romp through the local cemetery, she takes advantage of her newfound anonymity and its unforeseen advantages as she launches her own unofficial investigation.Despite her oddball humor and unconventional snooping, Ivy soon becomes discouraged by her failure to turn up any solid clues. And after Ivy witnesses something ominous and unexplained, she can't resist putting her investigative powers to work again. Even the authorities' attempts to keep Ivy out of danger and her nosy neighbor's match-making schemes can't slow her down. But will the determination that fuels this persistent, quirky sleuth threaten her very safety?