Book picks similar to
The 7th Victim by Alan Jacobson
mystery
thriller
fiction
suspense
The Pawn
Steven James - 2007
Until now. When he's called to North Carolina to consult on the case of an area serial killer, he finds himself in a deadly game.Cunning and lethal, the killer is always one step ahead of the law, and he's about to strike again. It will take all of Bowers's instincts and training to stop this man who calls himself the Illusionist. And just when the pieces start to come together, Bowers realizes they're not quite adding up. Can he unravel the pattern and save the next victim? Or will the Illusionist win the game by taking one of his opponent's pieces? Thrilling, chilling, and impossible to put down, The Pawn will hold suspense lovers in its iron grip until the very last page.
The Dead Room
Robert Ellis - 2002
The atrocity kicks off an investigation into a bizarre string of increasingly disturbing murders, all believed to be perpetrated by someone of unprecedented savagery and cunning.As the city's panic rises, civil attorney Teddy Mack is thrown headlong into the grisly homicide case—and into a world of dirty politics and corrupt justice, where deceptions are as deadly as a killer's twisted secrets. Now, another woman is about to meet the same horrific fate as the others. To end a madman's reign, Teddy must enter his maze—a place of unimaginable terror…and shocking revelations.With his second thriller, and more than 375 FIVE STAR Amazon reviews, L.A. Times bestselling author Robert Ellis delivers an explosive read with full-blown characters, a world stacked with twists and turns, and an emotional intensity that burns white hot.
Pretty Girls Dancing
Kylie Brant - 2018
The tragedy left her family with a fractured life—a mother out to numb the pain, a father losing a battle with his own private demons, and a sister desperate for closure. But now another teenage girl has gone missing. It’s ripping open old wounds for the Willards, dragging them back into a painful past, and leaving them unprepared for where it will take them next.Bureau of Criminal Investigation agent Mark Foster has stumbled on uncanny parallels in the lives of the two missing girls that could unlock clues to a serial killer’s identity. That means breaking down the walls of the Willards’ long-guarded secrets and getting to a truth that is darker than he bargained for. Now, to rescue one missing girl, he must first solve the riddles that disappeared with another: Kelsey Willard herself. Dead or alive, she is his last hope.
The Intercept
Dick Wolf - 2012
So when a passenger from the same plane disappears into the crowds of Manhattan, it’s up to Fisk and his partner Krina Gersten to find him before the celebrations begin... And time is running out.
The Forgotten Girls
Alexa Steele - 2014
That doesn’t happen in Greenvale, with its immaculate lawns, exclusive yacht clubs and multi-million dollar mansions. But behind its perfect façade, its trimmed hedges and luxury cars, a darkness lies. Girls, dependent on Adderall, outmaneuver each other to get into top colleges, while the mothers’ need to live vicariously only makes it worse. Bella DeFranco is one of the Bronx’s top SVU detectives. At only 37, she disarms everyone with her stunning good looks, yet she is as tough as most men—and a lot smarter, too. Yet when is summoned to Greenvale, she finds herself getting lost in a case that even she can’t comprehend. She stumbles into a land of secrets, a place where husbands hide their pasts from their wives, where friends are not what they seem, and where no one wants to know too much. As she digs deeper into layers of suburban dysfunction, she comes to learn that, behind all the fake smiles, there is a subtle violence--rivaling even her crime-ridden streets of the Bronx. With a killer on the loose, time running out, and a new partner who never recovered from his washed-up alcoholic days, the odds are stacked against Bella. She is determined, though, to save these girls, whatever the cost. Yet as she gets close, the depth of psychosis she discovers shocks even her….
Into the Water
Paula Hawkins - 2017
Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged. Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother's sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she'd never return. With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present. Beware a calm surface—you never know what lies beneath.
The Tenant
Katrine Engberg - 2016
In short order, they establish a link between the victim, Julie Stender, and her landlady, Esther de Laurenti, who’s a bit too fond of drink and the host of raucous dinner parties with her artist friends. Esther also turns out to be a budding novelist—and when Julie turns up as a murder victim in the still-unfinished mystery she’s writing, the link between fiction and real life grows both more urgent and more dangerous. But Esther’s role in this twisted scenario is not quite as clear as it first seems. Is she the culprit—or just another victim, trapped in a twisted game of vengeance? Anette and Jeppe must dig more deeply into the two women’s pasts to discover the identity of the brutal puppet-master pulling the strings in this electrifying literary thriller.
When the Bough Breaks
Jonathan Kellerman - 1985
It's a good one!We meet Dr. Morton Handler who practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion, and sexual manipulation. Handler paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have one possible witness: seven-year-old Melody Quinn.Psychologist Dr. Alex Delaware's job is to unlock the terrible secret buried in Melody's memory. As the sinister shadows in the girl's mind begin to take shape, Alex discovers that the mystery touches a shocking incident in his own past. This connection is only the beginning, a single link in a forty-year-old conspiracy. And behind it lies an unspeakable evil that Alex Delaware must expose before it claims another innocent victim: Melody Quinn.
Bone Music
Christopher Rice - 2018
If only the nightmare had ended when she was rescued. Instead, her real father exploited her tabloid-ready story for fame and profit—until Charlotte finally broke free from her ghoulish past and fled. Just when she thinks she has buried her personal hell forever, Charlotte is swept into a frightening new ordeal. Secretly dosed with an experimental drug, she’s endowed with a shocking new power—but pursued by a treacherous corporation desperate to control her.Except from now on, if anybody is going to control Charlotte, it’s going to be Charlotte herself. She’s determined to use the extraordinary ability she now possesses to fight the kind of evil that shattered her life—by drawing a serial killer out from the shadows to face the righteous fury of a victim turned avenger.
The Various Haunts of Men
Susan Hill - 2004
Simon Serrailler, her enigmatic superior. Though she fits well within the local police force, she finds herself unable to let go what seems like a routine missing persons report on a middle-aged spinster. When yet more townspeople turn up missing, her hunch is verified and a serious police search begins, bringing her into closer proximity with Serrailler at the same time it exposes her to danger.
Rage Against the Dying
Becky Masterman - 2012
Small and blond, from a distance she looked vulnerable and slight. . . the perfect bait to catch a killer. But as Quinn got older, she realised she needed to find a protegee, a younger field agent to take her place. So Quinn trains a twenty-two year old and lets her loose in the field. The plan works. Until the Route 66 killer not only takes the bait, but kills the bait too.Years on, Quinn is trying to move past the fact that she has a young woman's death on her conscience. She's now the perfect Stepford Wife - until she gets a knock on her door. The girl's body has finally been discovered. Quinn is pulled back into the case and the more she learns about the killer the more she comes to believe, despite the overwhelming forensic evidence to hand, that they have the wrong man.
Creep
Jennifer Hillier - 2011
. .Dr. Sheila Tao is a professor of psychology. An expert in human behavior. And when she began an affair with sexy, charming graduate student Ethan Wolfe, she knew she was playing with fire. Consumed by lust when they were together, riddled with guilt when they weren’t, she knows the three-month fling with her teaching assistant has to end. After all, she’s finally engaged to a kind and loving investment banker who adores her, and she’s taking control of her life. But when she attempts to end the affair, Ethan Wolfe won’t let her walk away.. . . no one else can.Ethan has plans for Sheila, plans that involve posting a sex video that would surely get her fired and destroy her prestigious career. Plans to make her pay for rejecting him. And as she attempts to counter his every threatening move without her colleagues or her fiancé discovering her most intimate secrets, a shattering crime rocks Puget Sound State University: a female student, a star athlete, is found stabbed to death. Someone is raising the stakes of violence, sex, and blackmail . . . and before she knows it, Sheila is caught in a terrifying cat-and-mouse game with the lover she couldn’t resist—who is now the monster who won’t let her go.
Damaged
Pamela Callow - 2010
But then the teen is brutally murdered. And it isn't only Kate who wonders if her legal advice led to the girl's death.How far are you willing to go to redeem yourself?Put on notice by Randall Barrett, the firm's charismatic managing partner, Kate must fight for her career, for her reputation - and for redemption.Unwilling to live with the damage she may have caused, Kate pursues the case on her own and unearths some chilling facts.Facts that lead straight to the heart of a legal conspiracy.Facts that lead Kate directly into the surgically skilled hands of the Body Butcher. The first book in the Kate Lange legal thriller series. A Levy "Need to Read" pick with Top Ten Bestseller display. Now under option for television development.
The Liar's Girl
Catherine Ryan Howard - 2018
John's College-and Ireland's most prolific serial killer. Having stalked his four young victims, he drowned them in the muddy waters of the Grand Canal. Sentenced to life imprisonment when he was just nineteen, Will is locked away in the city's Central Psychiatric Hospital. Freshman Alison Smith moved to the Big Smoke to enrol in St. John's and soon fell hard for Will Hurley. Her world bloomed ... and then imploded when Liz, her best friend, became the latest victim of the Canal Killer-and the Canal Killer turned out to be the boy who'd been sleeping in her bed. Alison fled to the Netherlands and, in ten years, has never once looked back. When a young woman's body is found in the Grand Canal, Garda detectives visit Will to see if he can assist them in solving what looks like a copycat killing. Instead, Will tells them he has something new to confess-but there's only one person he's prepared to confess it to. The last thing Alison wants is to be pulled back into the past she's worked so hard to leave behind. Reluctantly, she returns to the city she hasn't set foot in for more than a decade to face the man who murdered the woman she was supposed to become. Only to discover that, until now, Will has left out the worst part of all ...
Two Girls Down
Louisa Luna - 2018
Immediately shut out by a local police department already stretched thin by budget cuts and the growing OxyContin and meth epidemic, Vega enlists the help of a disgraced former cop, Max Caplan. Cap is a man trying to put the scandal of his past behind him and move on, but Vega needs his help to find the girls, and she will not be denied. With little to go on, Vega and Cap will go to extraordinary lengths to untangle a dangerous web of lies, false leads, and complex relationships to find the girls before time runs out, and they are gone forever.