Crime Town

With veterinarian Sydney Jones being targeted, K-9 Officer Gavin Walker and his furry partner must stand between her and certain death in Lenora Worth’s Hidden Christmas Danger. And the clock is ticking in Silent Night Explosion by Katy Lee—but can Jodie Chen trust the newest K-9 officer, Victor Abrams, and his dog to find a bomb and keep her alive…despite Victor’s shadowed past?

As Sheriff Clayton Burroughs tries to juggle fatherhood, his job, and his recovery from being shot in the confrontation that killed his two criminally inclined brothers last year, he’s doing all he can just to survive. Yet after years of carefully toeing the line between his life in law enforcement and his family, he finally has to make a choice. When a rival organization makes a first foray into Burroughs' territory, leaving a trail of bodies and a whiff of fear in its wake, Clayton is pulled back into the life he so desperately wants to leave behind.

Karen Slocombe isn’t sure why she visited SuperFare that day - as a committed member of the Food Chain group and a regular stallholder at local farmers’ markets, it’s a place she would normally avoid. Luckily for Karen, she leaves moments before a bomb explodes. Only a few days later, Karen finds herself in the midst of another horrific crime. When friends from the Food Chain group start warning Karen not to tell the police certain details, her suspicions are instantly aroused. Could the two events be linked?

When young Daniel Whitman is killed at a high-school party, the community is ripped apart. The death of Sanctuary's star quarterback seems to be a tragic accident, but everyone knows his ex-girlfriend Harper Fenn is the daughter of a witch - and she was there when he died. Was Daniel's death an accident, revenge, or something more sinister? As accusations fly, paranoia grips the town, culminating in a witch-hunt...and the town becomes no sanctuary at all.

In the summer of ’84, fourteen-year-old Frankie Jubilee is shuttled off to Litani, Minnesota, to live with her estranged mother, a county prosecutor she barely knows. From the start, Frankie senses something uneasy going on in the small town. The locals whisper about The Game, and her mother warns her to stay out of the woods and away from adults. When a bullying gang of girls invites Frankie to The Game, she accepts, determined to find out what’s really going on in Litani. She’s not the only one becoming paranoid. Hysteria burns through the community. Dark secrets emerge.

Nine years. That’s how long I spent in a relationship wasted on my ex. When my world crumbles apart in front of me, I make a desperate escape. Only now, I’m stuck in a tiny Mississippi town with a dilapidated farmhouse I don’t know how to fix. Enter Adam, the town’s contractor. Finding solace in his expertise and kindness, he might just be the one to help me rebuild more than just my home. But beneath the town’s quaint facade lies a darkness: an untouchable drug lord whose operation has poisoned the very place I now call home.

Settled into a relationship with an Italian yoga instructor and working in Europe, Dr. Orville Rose's peace is shaken by his mother's death. On his return to Columbia, a Hudson River town of quirky people and “plagued by breakage,” he learns that his mother has willed him a large sum of money, her 1981 Chrysler, and her Victorian house in the center of town.

A brutal murder in a town called Treachery? It's a story most journos would kill for, but for Stuart Dryden, it's a major inconvenience. He didn't take the gig at the local rag for its bustling crime beat. He'd sacrifice a career-making story for happy hour at the pub, but not even he can let a grisly murder through to the keeper. Especially when he keeps getting scooped by a persistent kid with a disposable Kodak.

Swan is a tattoo artist new to a community in the California desert when a mourning desert dweller named Kurt requests a tribute tattoo to his dead wife. Swan agrees, but the locals warn her: don’t indulge Kurt in his tragic memories. No wonder. As Kurt returns for more tattoos, the truth about his wife’s death begins to emerge in the ink. And it isn’t pretty.

Private Investigator Tony Caruso lives out of his rolling office, an old Ford pickup truck, with his German-trained bomb-sniffing dog, Panzer, a Giant Schnauzer. Tony retired after twenty years in the Navy as an aviation ordnanceman, but this training might not be enough when he is hired by an old friend to look into a murder suicide in Bend, Oregon, a resort Boom Town in the high desert east of the Cascades. Was it a murder suicide as the local sheriff thinks?

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.

Eighteen-year-old Evelyn Jones lands a job in small-town Alaska, working for a man in his isolated mountain home. But her bright hopes for the future are shattered when Donald White disappears, leaving her to face charges of theft, embezzlement - and a brutal double murder. Her protestations of innocence count for nothing. Convicted, she faces life in prison...until fate sends her on the run.

The deliciously twisty twenty-fifth novel in the much-loved Libby Sarjeant audiobook series by Lesley Cookman.

The Townhouse Massacre is a chilling and gripping account of one of the most brutal and gruesome true crime stories in American history. Ryan Green’s riveting narrative draws the listener into the real-life horror experienced by the victims and has all the elements of a classic thriller.

After elementary school teacher Nichole Miller discovers the woman's body, she makes two phone calls: first to the police, who call Beverly's death a slip and fall, and second to her best friend, journalist Jenny Martin. Jenny is attempting to revive her flailing marriage and her all-but-DOA career, and she knows foul play when she sees it. The two women enlist the help of Beverly’s daughter-in-law, Robin, who’s eager to expose the truth.

Before David Wilson became the UK's pre-eminent criminologist, he was just a young boy growing up in the Scottish town of Carluke. As a child, the brutal murder of a young woman rocked this small community, but very quickly a man was arrested for the crime, convicted and put behind bars. For most, life slowly carried on - case closed.

Former Posadas County Sheriff Bill Gastner, now a New Mexico Livestock Inspector, is enjoying a day on Herb Torrances. But Bill soon finds himself ferrying a broken cowpuncher in the back of his SUV, headed out to meet an ambulance.

In May 1997, eighteen-year-old Laura McPherson left her house for a run and didn’t return. Twenty years later, a reporter arrives in the small town of Griffiths to write an article about the unsolved murder of Laura McPherson. He is the most recent in a long line of journalists, podcasters, and amateur sleuths seeking new insights into what really happened to Laura. Laura’s younger brother, David, a repressed and stuck thirty-something, is dealing with the recent death of his mother when the reporter comes knocking.

Oxford historian Daniel Kind and his partner Miranda both want to escape to a new life. On impulse they buy a cottage in Brackdale, an idyllic valley in the Lake District. But though they hope to live the dream, the past soon catches up with them. Tarn Cottage was once home to Barrie Gilpin, suspected of a savage murder. A young woman's body was found on the Sacrifice Stone, an ancient pagan site up on the fell, but Barrie died before he could be arrested. Daniel has personal reasons for becoming fascinated by the case and for believing in Barrie's innocence.

In the vein of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone and the works of Ron Rash, a novel set in a tough-and-tumble Mississippi town where drugs, whiskey, guns, and the desire for revenge violently intersect.