Child Crimes

It’s a freezing winter’s night in 1954. A baby boy, a few hours old, is left by his mother, wrapped in nothing but two sheets of newspaper and hidden amongst the undergrowth by a canal bank. An hour later, a late-shift postman is walking wearily home when he hears a faint cry. He finds the newspaper parcel and discovers the newborn, white-cold and whimpering, inside. After being rushed to hospital and against all odds, the baby survives. He’s baptised by the hospital chaplain as Richard.

When a fancy car pulls up outside six-year-old Marie's home in 1959, her dad tells her she is going on holiday. But little does she know she will not see her home again for four long years. Her family cannot afford to keep her at home. Marie tells the story of how she was taken away from a poor but happy and loving home life to live in a convent - away from everyone and everything she holds dear. Her hair is bluntly chopped, her clothes are taken away and her name is changed. Then a horrific ritual of physical, sexual and mental abuse begins.

In 1975, when Oberleutnant Karin Muller is called to investigate a teenage girl's body at the foot of the Berlin Wall, she imagines she's seen it all before. But she soon realizes that this is a death like no other before it - the girl was evidently trying to escape from West Berlin.

Abused from the age of eight by her older brother and then her step-father, Maureen Wood quickly became numb to the constant suffering. But Maureen’s world crumbled when her own mother started to abuse her too. A Family Secret is the harrowing true story of how one little girl survived sickening abuse by the people who should have loved her most and how an innocent baby finally saved her.

A bus crashes in a savage snowstorm and lands Jack Reacher in the middle of a deadly confrontation. In nearby Bolton, South Dakota, one brave woman is standing up for justice in a small town threatened by sinister forces. If she’s going to live long enough to testify, she’ll need help. Because a killer is coming to Bolton, a coldly proficient assassin who never misses. Reacher’s original plan was to keep on moving. But the next 61 hours will change everything.

The tragic story of Susan Powell and her murdered boys, Charlie and Braden, is the only case that rivals the Jon Benet Ramsey saga in the annals of true crime. When the pretty, blonde Utah mother went missing in December of 2009 the media was swept up in the story - with lenses and microphones trained on Susan's husband, Josh. He said he had no idea what happened to his young wife, and that he and the boys had been camping in the middle of a snowstorm.

It’s 1996, and Reacher is still in the army. In the morning they give him a medal, and in the afternoon they send him back to school. That night he’s off the grid. Out of sight, out of mind. Two other men are in the classroom—an FBI agent and a CIA analyst. Each is a first-rate operator, each is fresh off a big win, and each is wondering what the hell they are doing there. Then they find out: A Jihadist sleeper cell in Hamburg, Germany, has received an unexpected visitor—a Saudi courier, seeking safe haven while waiting to rendezvous with persons unknown.

From the bestselling author of the Blackthorn Key series, this magic-infused fantasy brings together a ragtag group of kids to pull off a crime so difficult, countless adults have already tried and failed. Lured by the promise of more money than they've ever dreamed of, five young criminals are hired to steal a heavily guarded treasure from the most powerful sorcerer in the city.

Two lonely towns in Colorado: Hope and Despair. Between them, 12 miles of empty road. Jack Reacher never turns back. It's not in his nature. All he wants is a cup of coffee. What he gets is big trouble. So in Lee Child’s electrifying new novel, Reacher - a man with no fear, no illusions, and nothing to lose - goes to war against a town that not only wants him gone, it wants him dead. It wasn’t the welcome Reacher expected. He was just passing through, minding his own business. But within minutes of his arrival a deputy is in the hospital and Reacher is back in Hope.

Middle school is hard. Solving cases for the FBI is even harder. Doing both at the same time - well, that's just crazy. But that doesn't stop Florian Bates! Get to know the only kid on the FBI director's speed dial - and several international criminals' most wanted lists - in this adventurous series that School Library Journal says combines "elements of Alex Rider, James Bond, and Sherlock Holmes".

“Why is this town called Mother’s Rest?” That’s all Reacher wants to know. But no one will tell him. It’s a tiny place hidden in a thousand square miles of wheat fields, with a railroad stop, and sullen and watchful people, and a worried woman named Michelle Chang, who mistakes him for someone else: her missing partner in a private investigation she thinks must have started small and then turned lethal.

There’s deadly trouble in the corn country of Nebraska...and Jack Reacher walks right into it. First he falls foul of the Duncans, a local clan that has terrified an entire county into submission. But it’s the unsolved case of a missing child, already decades old, that Reacher can’t let go. The Duncans want Reacher gone - and it’s not just past secrets they’re trying to hide. They’re awaiting a secret shipment that’s already late - and they have the kind of customers no one can afford to annoy.

Everything starts somewhere. For elite military cop Jack Reacher, that somewhere was Carter Crossing, Mississippi, way back in 1997. A young woman is dead, and solid evidence points to a soldier at a nearby military base. But that soldier has powerful friends in Washington. Reacher is ordered undercover - to find out everything he can, to control the local police, and then to vanish. Reacher is a good soldier. But when he gets to Carter Crossing, he finds layers no one saw coming, and the investigation spins out of control.

Now that Maeve Merrit has surrendered Mermeros, the djinni she found in a sardine can, she expects her life in London will be dull as dirt. Mermeros, however, has other plans. Maeve’s friend Tommy, a former orphan, has been adopted by Mermeros’s newest owner. When Tommy’s new father tries to use one of his wishes, he and Mermeros go missing - and without a guardian, Tommy will be forced back to the orphanage.

When Agent Mercedes Ramirez finds an abused young boy on her porch, covered in blood and clutching a teddy bear, she has no idea that this is just the beginning. He tells her a chilling tale: an angel killed his parents and then brought him here so Mercedes could keep him safe. His parents weren’t just murdered. It was a slaughter - a rage kill like no one on the Crimes Against Children team had seen before. But they’re going to see it again. An avenging angel is meting out savage justice, and she’s far from through.

On January 14, 2018, a 17-year-old girl climbed out of the window of her Perris, California home and dialed 911 with shaking fingers. Struggling to stay calm, she told the operator that she and her 12 siblings - ranging in age from two to 29 - were being abused by their parents. When the dispatcher asked for her address, the girl hesitated. "I've never been out," she stammered.

What possesses a mum to kidnap her own child? That's what Maggie asks herself when she's asked to foster 13-year-old Saskia, the subject of a bitter custody battle between her parents. When Saskia's mum Rosa fears the courts are going to favour her ex-husband, James, she takes matters into her own hands. With Rosa facing criminal charges, and Saskia refusing to live with her dad, her future looks uncertain. Will Maggie be able to step in and discover the bombshell that will tear this family apart?

Lee Child once again demonstrates his mastery of the thriller genre with an unbeatable collection of three Jack Reacher novellas and six short stories, together for the first time in one pulse-pounding collection from the New York Times best-selling author.

« Comment une mère peut-elle ne pas savoir ? » C’est une question que l’on pose souvent à propos des familles touchées par l’inceste, et les captivants mémoires d’Eleanor Cowan, Histoire d’une épouse de pédophile, apportent des réponses à la fois courageuses et bouleversantes. L’autrice a grandi au Québec dans les années 1950, au sein d’une famille nombreuse catholique où se mêlaient violences, addictions et méthodes éducatives toxiques.

With street crime at an all-time low, Matilda and her team finally find the time to dig into their backlog of cold cases. DI Brady has been tracing victims of systemic abuse at a local children’s home after a high-profile accusation pitched it into the spotlight—a case that couldn’t be more personal. Nothing could have prepared them for what they uncover next. As they piece together the disturbing picture of the history of the home, it soon becomes clear that this is much bigger than either of them ever suspected.