Historical Fiction Thriller

On the evening of March 9, 1566, David Rizzio, the private secretary of Mary, Queen of Scots, was brutally murdered. Dragged from the chamber of the heavily pregnant Mary, Rizzio was stabbed 56 times by a party of assassins. This breathtakingly tense novella dramatizes the events that led up to that night, telling the infamous story as it has never been told before.

There's nothing like family. At least that's what people say. But when Bo and Scratch come home to Bear Creek for a long-overdue visit, Bo's family kindly invites him to turn around and leave. His old friends and neighbors turn tail and run when they see him. Next thing he knows, he's in jail for the brutal murder of two saloon girls in neighboring Cottonwood. Unfortunately, the real killer looks astonishingly like Bo. Now, with his buddy in jail, Scratch needs to ride to the rescue, if he can escape the clutches of the beautiful assistant to a traveling snake oil salesman.

Sometimes, it’s bad to be good. That’s what happens when Scratch Morton and Bo Creel are rewarded with a gold mine for saving a rich man’s bacon. The catch: This mine is a magnet for marauding Mexican banditos. Budding capitalists, Scratch and Bo fight back. That’s when they discover that the thieves aren’t who they thought they were, some really bad guys are on the way, and a beautiful woman might just be the most dangerous bandit of all — the kind that can steal your heart.

Sometimes when a man’s luck turns, it turns hard. Bo Creel and Scratch Morton are experienced drifters, but now the two trail pards are down to their last dime. So they accept the best job they can get, serving as deputies in a boomtown called Mankiller. Their boss is a drunken sheriff named Biscuits O'Brien, who would rather drink than work. Their tin stars are mighty pretty, but the job starts to get serious quickly, and soon the newly-minted lawmen are standing between a cunning clan of killers and the town's desperate citizens.

Something is troubling Inspector Henry Cutter. Sergeant Gideon Bliss is accustomed to his ill-tempered outbursts, but lately the inspector has grown silent and withdrawn. Then, the murders begin. The first to die is the elderly Sir Aneurin Considine, a decorated but obscure civil servant who long ago retired to tend his orchids. If the motive for his killing is a mystery, the manner of his death is more bewildering still. The victims that follow suffer similar fates, their deaths gruesome but immaculately orchestrated.

Katie Price is baffled when a man claiming to be her grandfather leaves her his entire estate in the Scottish Highlands. The bulk of the estate consists of a thriving whisky distillery and a moldering castle. The will stipulates that Katie must travel to Scotland and claim her inheritance in person. There, she uncovers the secret that led to her mother’s birth, and begins to unravel a 250-year-old mystery surrounding the beautiful young wife of the last laird of Clan McBride. As Katie begins to unearth the clues to Isobel’s fate, she embarks on a romantic journey of her own.

Cornwall, 1901: Lucy and Jack, in the guise of a tranquil honeymoon, track a spy who threatens England's vital global telegraph lines. Enter Holmes and Watson, with young Irregulars Becky and Flynn in tow, diving into a whirlpool of sunken treasure and spectral sirens. As cryptic messages, hidden loot, and the song of a Cornwall siren entwine, the serene coast becomes a stormy battleground. The stakes? Nothing less than the Empire's safety during wartime. "The Cornwall Mermaid" is a symphony of past and present, where classic mystery meets the adrenaline of a thriller.

From electrifying horror author Nick Cutter comes a haunting new novel, reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and Stephen King's It, in which a trio of mismatched mercenaries is hired by a young woman for a deceptively simple task: check in on her nephew, who may have been taken against his will to a remote New Mexico backwoods settlement called Little Heaven. Shortly after they arrive, things begin to turn ominous.

After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She’s not sure what she will find—her cousin’s husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.

Hannah Miles navigates the etiquette of monster hunting through the parlours of a magical Regency England. This collection contains: Manners and Monsters, Galvanism and Ghouls, and Gossip and Gorgons.

Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected, also, that someone had been blackmailing her. Then, tragically, came the news that she had taken her own life with a drug overdose. But the evening post brought Roger one last fatal scrap of information. Unfortunately, before he could finish reading the letter, he was stabbed to death.

In the small hours of the morning one fall day in 1866, a frantic widow visits detective Charles Lenox. Lady Annabelle's problem is simple: her beloved son, George, has vanished from his room at Oxford. When Lenox visits his alma mater to investigate he discovers a series of bizarre clues, including a murdered cat and a card cryptically referring to "The September Society". Then, just as Lenox realizes that the case may be deeper than it appears, a student dies, the victim of foul play.

On Memorial Day in Jewel, Minnesota, the body of wealthy landowner Jimmy Quinn is found floating in the Alabaster River, dead from a shotgun blast. The investigation falls to Sheriff Brody Dern, a highly decorated war hero who still carries the physical and emotional scars from his military service. Even before Dern has the results of the autopsy, vicious rumors begin to circulate that the killer must be Noah Bluestone, a Native American WWII veteran who has recently returned to Jewel with a Japanese wife.

Philippa Watson, a good-natured yet troubled 17-year-old, has just moved to Washington, DC. She’s lonely until she meets Judy Peabody, a brilliant and tempestuous classmate. The girls become unlikely friends and fashion themselves as intellectuals, drawing the notice of Christine Martins, their dazzling English teacher, who enthralls them with her passion for literature and her love of noirish detective fiction. When Philippa returns a novel Miss Martins has lent her, she interrupts a man grappling with her in the shadows.

1899, South Africa: As the Boer War rages, Captain Ingo Finch of the Royal Army Medical Corps pieces together casualties at the front. Later, recovering in Cape Town, he is woken by local police. A British officer has been murdered, and an RAMC signature is required for the post-mortem. Shocked by the identity of the victim, the bizarre nature of the crime and what appears a too-convenient resolution, Finch turns detective. He is soon thrust into a perilous maze of espionage and murder.

Life may have been hard on Addie French, but when she meets friendless Emma Roby on a train, all her protective instincts emerge. Emma's brother is seeing her off to Nalgitas to marry a man she has never met. And Emma seems like a lost soul to Addie-someone who needs Addie's savvy and wary eye. It isn't often that Addie is drawn to anyone as a friend, but Emma seems different somehow.

Thinking that she has been summoned by German immigrant Agnes Otto to usher a new life into the world, midwife Sarah Brandt is greeted by the news of an untimely death instead. It seems that Agnes' beautiful younger sister, Gerda, had fallen into the life of a "charity girl". Caught up in the false glamour of the city's nightlife, she would trade her company and her favors for lavish gifts. And now she was dead - victim, no doubt, of one of her "gentlemen friends".

Hercule Poirot's quiet supper in a London coffeehouse is interrupted when a young woman confides to him that she is about to be murdered. She is terrified - but begs Poirot not to find and punish her killer. Once she is dead, she insists, justice will have been done. Later that night, Poirot learns that three guests at a fashionable London Hotel have been murdered, and a cufflink has been placed in each one’s mouth. Could there be a connection with the frightened woman?

Edinburgh, 1869: Modern-day homicide detective Mallory Atkinson is adjusting to her new life in Victorian Scotland. Her employers know she’s not housemaid Catriona Mitchell—even though Mallory is in Catriona’s body—and Mallory is now officially an undertaker’s assistant. Dr. Duncan Gray moonlights as a medical examiner, and their latest case hits close to home. Men are dropping dead from a powerful poison, and all signs point to the grieving widows… the latest of which is Gray’s oldest sister. Poison is said to be a woman’s weapon, though Mallory has to wonder if it’s as simple as that.

1973. A final, top-secret mission to the Moon. Three astronauts in a tiny module, a quarter of a million miles from home. A quarter of a million miles from help. As Russian and American crews sprint for a secret bounty hidden away on the lunar surface, old rivalries blossom and the political stakes are stretched to breaking point back on Earth. Houston flight controller Kazimieras "Kaz" Zemeckis must do all he can to keep the NASA crew together, while staying one step ahead of his Soviet rivals. But not everyone on board Apollo 18 is quite who they appear to be.