Book picks similar to
The Manor Hauntings by J.S. Donovan
thriller
fiction
horror
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The Dark Lake (Free Preview - Prologue & First 5 Chapters)
Sarah Bailey - 2017
Even back then, she was a mystery that I wanted to solve. The lead homicide investigator in a rural town, Detective Sergeant Gemma Woodstock is deeply unnerved when a high school classmate is found strangled, her body floating in a lake. And not just any classmate, but Rosalind Ryan, whose beauty and inscrutability exerted a magnetic pull on Smithson High School, first during Rosalind's student years and then again when she returned to teach drama. As much as Rosalind's life was a mystery to Gemma when they were students together, her death presents even more of a puzzle. What made Rosalind quit her teaching job in Sydney and return to her hometown? Why did she live in a small, run-down apartment when her father was one of the town's richest men? And despite her many admirers, did anyone in the town truly know her? Rosalind's enigmas frustrate and obsess Gemma, who has her own dangerous secrets--an affair with her colleague and past tragedies that may not stay in the past. Brilliantly rendered, THE DARK LAKE has characters as compelling and mysteries as layered as the best thrillers from Gillian Flynn and Sophie Hannah.
Girl at the Window
Declan Conner - 2017
Only this family’s past is darker than most18-year-old Clara is trapped in an abusive life by her Pa who is hiding a dark secret. Home schooled and with no outside social contact – constantly on the move – she wishes him dead.After they move to a small town, local youths vie for her attention against his wishes. When her Pa is found murdered by the town sheriff, the circumstances point firmly to Clara as the guilty party. Assigned to the case, a personal conflict causes Detective Alana Bossé to dig deeper. As her suspect list grows, it looks as though there is a slim chance that Clara could be innocent.But is everything as it seems? Or should they lock Clara up and throw away the key?
Smokescreen
Tom Meitner - 2016
Now, he's out of prison and back to work... as a homicide detective. But while he tries to make the transition from convict to cop again, he can't stop thinking about how he wound up in jail in the first place - because he thinks it was no accident. He has no idea how deep it goes. In this new vigilante series from debut author Tom Meitner, watch Charlie solve murders while he unlocks the gripping mystery of who set him up... and why. This pilot episode is a free murder mystery and suspense story that introduces you to the main players and lays the groundwork for the conspiracy that follows Charlie in his new, "normal" life.
Possess
J.A. Howell - 2013
The catch? The last tenant, Brody Walsh, killed himself.Or did he?As disturbing dreams and hauntings start to occur, Harley realizes there may be much more behind the previous tenant’s death than a simple suicide. She finds her life further entangled with his when she learns that her new boss, Nolan, was also his best friend. Could this handsome but evasive pub owner have something to do with Brody’s death?Trying to piece together the events surrounding Brody’s death proves to be a daunting task, but Harley can’t give up. Brody won’t let her. He is still in the apartment with her, trapped in limbo until she finds his killer.But he’s not waiting for revenge.Harley’s next.
A Mighty Fortress (Milo Porter Mystery Series Book 1)
S.D. Thames - 2016
The Iraq war veteran runs routine private investigations by day and coaches powerlifting at night. When Chad Scalzo, the grandson of a rumored mob boss, goes missing, Milo takes the seemingly easy case. After Chad turns up dead, Milo goes from investigator to suspect. As he seeks to clear his own name, Milo finds himself at the crossroads of two crooked investigations -- one by the mob and the other by the police. With the body count climbing, Milo discovers the key to the case in the last known person to see Chad alive. But can Milo get to her before someone else does?A Mighty Fortress is the first book in the Milo Porter mystery series, a set of gritty crime thrillers that will remind you of the characters from Robert B. Parker and Robert Crais. If you like gripping suspense, hardboiled crime-solvers, and heart-stopping action, then you’ll love the powerful series starter from S.D. Thames.
Buy A Mighty Fortress to get caught up in the mystery today!
Rack and Ruin: Part One
Solomon Carter - 2016
Private detectives Eva Roberts and Dan Bradley are hired to investigate cult activity at an ancient ruin.Blood is spilled. Lives are ruined. And for one young girl, it's a matter of life or death. But the darkness hides the awful truth.The investigators must discover who they can trust stop the cult from harming all those it touches. First they must survive the night - and one of its darkest sons...
Blast
David Hodges - 2017
But her dreams are cruelly shattered by a bomb blast that leaves her badly scarred. Suddenly her career’s in ruins and her long-term boyfriend is gone. Plagued by the paparazzi, she flees to Cornwall where she meets and falls in love with her handsome neighbour, blind crime novelist, Alan Murray. As a new life starts to fall into place, her former boss threatens to tell Alan about her past indiscretions unless Lynn agrees to become one of his porn stars. She refuses and is miraculously saved from exposure when her boss ends up taking a dive off a cliff. Relief doesn’t last long though as a series of unsettling incidents, leads Lynn to suspect that her novelist lover may not be all he claims to be … David Hodges’ latest crime thriller, Blast, again delivers the gritty realism that only an experienced ex-copper can provide. Praise for David Hodges… 'Extremely well-written and passionately described crime-scenes' - Mid Somerset Series 'Hodges uses the experience of 30-plus years in the job as an anvil of solid fact to beat out pacey tales of "canteen culture" cops' - Cheddar About the author: David Hodges is a former superintendent with Thames Valley Police, and is a prolific writer and the author of eight other crime novels, plus an autobiography on his life in the police service. He lives with his wife, Elizabeth, on the edge of the Somerset Levels where he can fully indulge his passion for thriller writing. He is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association, The Crime Readers’ Association, The Society of Authors and International Thriller Writers Inc.
The Ghost of Tobacco Road
Dale J. Young - 2015
Like most small towns in America, Starlight has seen better days. Once known for its tobacco fields and rural Southern charm, the stores on Main Street are now boarded up, and many of the residents have left town for good.Logan Shaw, a down and out used-car salesman living in Wilmington is convinced that the letter he has received from a small law firm in Starlight has to be a mistake. The letter states that Logan has been named the sole beneficiary in the last will and testament of one of Starlight’s residents, a reclusive old woman recently found dead in her home on the outskirts of town.After arriving in town, Logan meets an attractive young woman named Colby who has lived in Starlight all of her life. No one knows better than Colby about the stories passed down through the years of a vengeful ghost that can return from the dead when the harvest moon rises over the tobacco fields outside of town – a ghost that kills in such a fit of rage that the bodies of the victims are left unrecognizable. For nearly a hundred years, no one in Starlight has ever seen the ghost and lived to tell about it.With Colby by his side, Logan struggles to comprehend the unspeakable evil that has entered his life, and to understand how he is strangely connected to it. Under the light of the harvest moon he will learn of the dark secret that Starlight holds, and of the legend the locals refer to as “the ghost of tobacco road”.
Truth Lies Waiting
Emma Salisbury - 2014
And you're now being framed for it. Only the person framing you is a cop... Davy Johnson is a young man from the wrong side of the tracks with a target on his back. After a spell in prison he is trying to make a life for himself but one cop won’t leave him alone, following him around and carting him off to the station just for the fun of it. The harassment turns sinister when Davy witnesses his nemesis overstep the mark with a local junkie – and makes the mistake of telling him he’s been seen. What happens next sees Davy framed for a string of murders with no one to help him but the gang leader he turned his back on when he got out of jail – but what will he want in return? With the help of an ex con and a local cabbie Davy goes on the run to prove his innocence but as the body count rises he discovers a connection between what’s happening now and a tragedy involving his father many years before. Will he be able to work out the truth from the lie in time to save the killer’s next victim? Scottish crime fiction with a sting in the tail...
Falling Suns
J.A. Corrigan - 2016
Then his body is discovered. Her cousin Michael is found guilty of his murder and incarcerated in a secure psychiatric unit.Four years later, now divorced and back in the police force, Rachel discovers that Michael is being released to a less secure step-down unit, with his freedom a likely eventuality. Unable to cope with this, she decides upon revenge, assuming a new identity to hunt him down and kill him. However, as she closes in on her target, her friend Jonathan, a journalist, uncovers some unnerving information about her mother and others in her family and begins to suspect that Rachel’s perception of the truth might not be as accurate as she thinks – that she might be about to murder the wrong man…
Deadly Sleep
Valerie Keogh - 2014
She is also a serial killer. She kills neatly, three victims every six months, moving around the UK, hiding in plain sight. Everything goes according to plan until she moves to Bath. Because in Bath the police are hunting a serial killer who kills and tortures his victims. A psychic connection develops between the two killers, Nicola sees him and what he does to his victims in her nightmares.She is starting to lose control and she really can't afford to do that. In an attempt to break the link, to have the other killer caught, Nicola goes to the police with what she knows. But can she help them without exposing herself? A serial killer and a burnt out policeman - can they really work together to stop him? And at what cost?
Bad People: Four terrifying short novels of suspense
Jeremy Bates - 2018
After a night out with his girlfriend in one of the country's remote provinces, he wakes to find himself in a pitch-black coffin—and quickly running out of oxygen. With only his cell phone and his own wits to rely on, it's a race against time to escape the claustrophobic death trap. SIX BULLETS The end of civilization arrived in the form of a giant asteroid thirteen months ago. For Burt James, a survivalist, it was not a complete surprise. He'd spent much of his adult life prepping for such a catastrophe. Consequently, while the majority of the population scoured the post-apocalyptic landscape for water and food, regressing into primitive killers, he bunkered down in his fortified hilltop home in a small town in the middle of the Australian Outback. But now he's out of food and down to his last six bullets, and he will have to make the most difficult choice of his life. THE MAILMAN Los Angeles, 1985. Never was the motto sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll more apt than the scene on the legendary Sunset Strip with the arrival of the underground Hollywood glam bands. While Mick Freeman, a record executive with a major label, works tirelessly to sign five toxic rockers whom he believes might flip the entire music world on its head, his wife, Jade, spends her days bored and alone at home, struggling with a midlife crisis that threatens to topple their twenty-year marriage. And then she meets the new mailman. Young and handsome, he sweeps her off her feet—straight into a nightmare the likes of which she could never have imagined. RE-ROLL In the near future, breathtakingly humanoid robots called Mechs are for sale, and they're designed to fulfill whatever role you want: husband, wife, best friend, slave. Manufacturers allow new owners one free "roll" to randomly determine their Mech's three leading characteristics. But as everybody knows, scoring your ideal traits is a crapshoot, though you can always re-roll—at a price.
Darkness Stirring
J.R. Erickson - 2021
It’s a mystery that haunts her small town and embeds itself in Lorraine's life.Fifteen years later, Lori is a grown woman, doing her best to move on from her troubled childhood. She reluctantly agrees to a night of camping, despite her secret terror of the woods. As she sits by a roaring bonfire, a man stands and tells the story of two fourteen-year-old friends who walked into the Manistee National Forest-only one of them walked back out.The story is hauntingly similar to Lori’s own, and she embarks on a quest to discover if the two disappearances are linked.As she unravels the truth behind the vanishings, she unearths a malevolence that forces her to question if evil truly exists.Don’t miss this chilling paranormal murder mystery.
Terminal House
Sean Costello - 2017
Now imagine being intimately aware of the process, but helpless to arrest it. Would you be afraid? For retired physician Ben Hunter, that malign force is Alzheimer’s disease—and he is terrified.Now a resident in a major geriatric center, Ben straddles an ever-widening gulf between a muddled present and an idealized past, never quite certain which will support his weight. Against this backdrop, he meets Roxanne Austen, an 18-year-old student who both enriches his life and accelerates his descent into bewilderment.With equal measures of frankness and humor, Terminal House illuminates the many challenges of aging, including dementia, death and dying, voluntary euthanasia, and romantic love.Here's a sample of what advance readers are saying about Terminal House:"As a retired editor who doesn't watch television I probably read 300 novels a year (about one a day).Unequivocally,Terminal House is the best of the year, actually the best for a long while. How someone who is not that old could capture the feelings, desires, memories and fears of an older person is astounding. He emotionally touched the true feelings of both elderly people and the younger persons around them. No one will be able to put this book down once they start reading.
The Haunted Dollhouse (The Ghost Store)
E.R. Rose - 2016
She can see ghosts and she helps them with any unfinished business. In this first story, Lottie’s dad brings a dollhouse into the family store. A ghost is attached to it. It doesn’t take Lottie long to connect with the ghost, but when she does, her heart fills with sadness. This is going to be a difficult case for Lottie, but she is determined to help the ghost.