Crime Mystery Fiction

When Carver finds out that Rich Polaski, a man he served with in the SEALS, is on an NSA watch list, he goes to warn him out of a sense of duty. He arrives in the small town of Bickham, Illinois, a spotless town with almost zero crime, no chain stores, and an aesthetic from a time long past.

Carrie wants a normal life. Carrie Lawrence doesn’t need a happily ever after. She’ll just settle for “after.” After a decade of helping her sister hide her victims. After a lifetime of lies. She just wants to be safe, boring, and not trekking through the woods at night with a dead body wrapped in a carpet. Becca wants to get away with murder. Becca Lawrence doesn’t believe in happily ever after because she’s already happy. She’s gotten away with murder for a decade and has blackmailed her sister into helping her hide the evidence - what more could a girl want?

In a secluded farm house in the Pacific Northwest, a family has been slaughtered - and a teenage son has disappeared. Single mother and cop Emily Kenyon spearheads a dark hunt for a killer. But Emily's teenage daughter, Jenna, is one step ahead of her. Then another family is butchered, and another. As Emily fits the puzzle pieces together, she makes a chilling discovery: The killer is coming after her and her daughter....

From Michael Peterson of TV’s Bones comes another twisted murder mystery that takes place in the small town of Jakob’s Point, where there are more members from the Witness Protection Program than anywhere else in America. When the Federal Marshal, the only person who knows the true identities of the residents of the town, turns up dead, and his records are destroyed, FBI Special Agent Alice Wheaton gets swept up in the investigation. In Jakob’s Point, where everyone is a witness, and everyone is a suspect, Alice must use her secret weapon – forensic listening – to find the killer.

Madison hesitates before hitching her pink tulle prom dress and running as fast as she can into the wilderness. The ripped edge of her skirt snags on a tree root and she falls to the forest floor. As she catches her breath, she hears the unmistakable sound of heavy boots closing in on her. He knows where she is…

The fourth book in this twisty, fast-paced mystery series, The Horror at Murden Cove locks you on a storm-battered island with a killer whose motive is so deranged, you'll have to listen to this audiobook twice to believe it.

Separate incidents with two common threads - a first wife who took her own life, and a secret the victims took to their graves. Stephanie Coburn has barely recovered from her sister's mysterious suicide before her brother-in-law and his new wife are murdered, her face disfigured beyond recognition. Stephanie never met the bride, has never even seen a clear photograph. But she knew her sister, and she knows something is desperately wrong.

In the city where he lost everything, he'll stop at nothing to learn the truth. Former NYPD detective Thomas Austin has spent three long years haunted by his wife Fiona's unsolved murder. Three years searching for answers. Three years finding little. Until one lead changes everything.

London, early 1950s. Marcia Beasley of St John's Wood is discovered dead in her home, naked and covered with a coal scuttle. Detective Sergeant Greenleaf is tasked with solving the crime and bringing meaning to her gruesome death, and it seems her whole social circle have secrets to hide and grudges to bear. Who, for example, is the limping midnight visitor? Is the bibulous priest as ingenious as he seems? And will Mrs Burkiss ever yield her keys to the broom cupboard?

It's a blindingly hot summer. International visitors surge into Sydney's Darling Harbour. Two-year-old Tommy is sailing his toy boat in the park there with his mother Phoebe. Tommy vanishes into thin air. The following winter, taunting notes written as nursery rhymes begin arriving at his parents' home. Little Boy Blue, where did you go? Who led you away? Only I know.

My husband and I are fighting for our lives in hospital after a terrible car accident. But despite my pain, all I can think about is what our families will find behind our front door. The scarf that has been all over the news, belonging to a dead young woman with honey-coloured hair. I have to speak to the police before my husband can. I’m drifting in and out of consciousness, but when I hear my wife talking to the police, accusing me of the murder of an innocent woman, a cold fear grips me. I know I’ve got a temper.

DI Nikki Galena: A police detective with nothing left to lose, she's seen a girl die in her arms, and her daughter will never leave the hospital again. She's gotten tough on the criminals she believes did this to her. Too tough. And now she's been given one final warning: make it work with her new sergeant, DS Joseph Easter, or she's out.

Someone is committing random murders across Chicago—and making sure detectives Billy Harney (Aaron Paul) and Patti Harney (Krysten Ritter) are first on the crime scene. What connects the victims, and why is the killer leaving clues behind with each body? Billy and Patti are scrambling to stop the next killing when their father, Chief of Detectives Dan Harney (Beau Bridges), is kidnapped. But in their race to track him down, they uncover pieces of his past that simply can’t be true. Could their own flesh and blood be covering up a dark secret?

No one would ever accuse famous opera star Dame Serena Levante of lacking a flare for the dramatic. Unfortunately, it's curtains down on the dysfunctional diva when she's found dead at the bottom of a staircase in her elegant home. Solving an opera singer's murder may not be the typical hairdresser's aria of expertise. But Dame Serena was the mother of Daisy's best friend Floria, so Daisy must do-or-dye her best to get to the roots of the case.

To defend her client, she must dig up a town’s darkest secrets. Defense attorney Cass Leary thought she’d escaped her hometown for good. But after leaving her high-paying job in Chicago, she decides to revisit her troubled past. When someone murders the beloved high school basketball coach and Cass steps in to defend the girl accused of the crime, she doesn’t expect the death threats that follow.... Confronting the town that shunned her as a child, she unearths secrets that some would kill to keep buried.

Meet Detective Inspector Dan Hellier, a man who needs to redeem his career and catch a killer. Soon after DI Hellier returns home to Exeter under a cloud, the body of a talented young singer is found in the woods. When her death reveals links to the boss of a recording studio, a predatory gang and a school music teacher, Hellier knows he has his work cut out. Before more innocent people are put in danger, Hellier will need to untangle the web of lies and work out which of many suspects are guilty of murder.

When Matt Ballard was starting out his career, three boys were murdered in the same area, the remote and bleak Gibbet Fen. When the main suspect was killed in a hit-and-run, the killings stopped. But Matt was not satisfied that the real murderer had been caught. Over 25 years later, Matt gets a photo in an unmarked envelope. It's of the Gibbet Fen crime scene. And the picture was taken before the murder took place. More photos arrive, relating to the historic murders, as well as intimate pictures of Matt's very secret private life.

The phone rings. It's your daughter. She's been dead for four months. So begins East Texas police dispatcher Ian Hunt's fight to get his daughter back. The call is cut off by the man who snatched her from her bedroom seven years ago, and a basic description of the kidnapper is all Ian has to go on.

Attorney Nate Shepherd left a big firm to go out on his own. He sees nothing but opportunity when an out-of-town lawyer wants to hire him as local counsel on a high-profile murder case. Though his family worries that the case hits too close to home, Nate joins the defense team. When circumstances force him to take on a bigger role, Nate ignores his family’s fears and throws himself into his client’s defense.

When acclaimed mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers first began compiling anthologies of the best crime stories in the 1920s and ’30s, the genre was in the flush of its first golden age. While it is hard to imagine today - after every possible mystery plot has been told, retold, subverted, and played straight again by hundreds of writers over nearly a century - in Sayers’s day there were still twists that had never been seen, and machinations of crime that would shock even jaded Jazz Age fans.