Historical Thriller Suspense

When Nicole Rayburn adds a historic bookshop to her list of promotional venues, she meets the owner, Deborah Dolan, who’s desperate to discover what happened to her Victorian ancestor. A well-respected playwright, Edgar Hilliard seemingly had it all: professional success, a thriving business, and a loving family, but according to family lore, Edgar walked out one night, never to return, an unfinished manuscript his only legacy to future generations.

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.

This lush novel, set in 1766 England and America, evokes an era ripe with riot and revolution, from the teeming streets of London to the sprawling grounds of a Virginia plantation. Mack McAsh burns with the desire to escape his life of slavery in Scottish coal mines while Lizzie Hallim is desperate to shed a life of sheltered subjugation to her spineless husband. United in America, their only chance for freedom lies beyond the Western frontier - if they're brave enough to take it.

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.

In this third and final novel in the Lancaster Burning series, author Linda Byler takes us inside the home of Davey Beiler, the leader of this Amish district. He clearly feels the heat in more ways than one. Some of the younger members of his church are ready to testify against the man who has allegedly started at least several of the fires. Davey counsels patience and forgiveness.

Librarian Sylvia Ashe knows nothing about her past, having grown up without a father and a mother who refused to discuss him. When she stumbles upon a diary that suggests she's descended from magicians, she's skeptical. After all, magicians are special, and she's just an ordinary woman who loves books. She seeks answers from a member of the most prominent family of magicians, but she quickly learns that finding the truth won't be easy, especially when he turns out to be as artless as her, and more compelling and dangerous than books.

London: 1968. Liz Houghton is languishing as an obituary writer at a London newspaper when a young girl’s disappearance captivates the city. If Liz can break the story, it’s her way into the newsroom. She already has a scoop: Her best friend Marisa is a police officer who is assigned to the case. Liz follows Marisa to Dorset, where they make another disturbing discovery. Over two decades earlier, three girls disappeared while evacuating from London. One was found murdered in the woods near a train line. The other two were never seen again.

A terrible darkness has fallen upon Jacob Weisz’s beloved Germany. The Nazi regime, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, has surged to power and now hold Germany by the throat. All non-Aryans - especially Jews like Jacob and his family - are treated like dogs. When tragedy strikes during one terrible night of violence, Jacob flees and joins rebel forces working to undermine the regime. But after a raid goes horribly wrong, Jacob finds himself in a living nightmare - trapped in a crowded, stinking car on the train to the Auschwitz death camp.

New York Times bestselling author Alan Furst is widely recognized as master of the historical spy novel. Furst’s works are vivid evocations of long-forgotten heroes and feature plots that unfold to the inexorable cadence of history. Night Soldiers is a simultaneously thrilling and illuminating tale of espionage set in 1934.

Game of Thrones meets Ancient Egypt in this magnificent, action-packed epic. On the gleaming banks of the Nile, the brilliant Taita - slave and advisor to the Pharaoh - finds himself at the center of a vortex of passion, intrigue, and danger. His quest to destroy the Hyksos army and form an alliance with Crete takes him on an epic journey up the Nile, through Arabia and the magical city of Babylon, and across the open seas.

Annette Hunt prefers staying home to going to social events, but her cousin talks her into attending a competition between some of the best minds in Chicago. He needs her to gather information that will help him catch a criminal, and he convinces her by saying, if she does well, it will be a big boost for the cause of women’s rights. With trepidation, she agrees, but is she in over her head?

Rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer’s affinity for books extends beyond the intoxicating scent of old paper, ink, and leather. She can feel the echoes of the books’ previous owners—an emotional fingerprint only she can read. When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound volumes that appear to have never been published, her gift quickly becomes an obsession. Not only is each inscribed with a startling incrimination, but the authors, Hemi and Belle, tell conflicting sides of a tragic romance.

March 1147. Assassination, espionage, betrayal. King Owain has ridden east to confront King Madog of Powys with the attempt on the life of his son. Rhys, now abbot of St. Kentigern’s monastery, hopes for peace and calls both Madog and Owain to the negotiating table. Peace, however, is the last thing on Madog’s mind. Recalcitrant, self-righteous, and angry, he sees King Owain’s recent weakness as his opportunity and knows that Owain’s own barons are circling like wolves, waiting for the chance to overthrow him.

The year is A.D. 922. A refined Arab courtier, representative of the powerful Caliph of Baghdad, encounters a party of Viking warriors who are journeying to the barbaric North. He is appalled by their Viking customs - the wanton sexuality of their pale, angular women, their disregard for cleanliness...their cold-blooded human sacrifices. But it is not until they reach the depths of the Northland that the courtier learns the horrifying and inescapable truth.

London in the 1920s is no place for a woman with a mind of her own. Gang wars, violence, and an unforgiving world have left pickpocket Alice Diamond scrambling to survive in the Mint, the gritty neighborhood her family has run for generations. When her father goes to jail yet again and her scam artist brother finds himself in debt to the dangerous McDonald crime syndicate, Alice takes over. Fighting for power at every turn, she struggles to protect her father’s territory and keep the people she loves safe from some of London’s most dangerous criminals.

Philip Kerr’s intricate novels featuring former Berlin homicide detective Bernie Gunther have earned ahallowed place in the hearts of mystery fans. It’s 1950, and Bernie has arrived in Argentina seeking asylum after being falsely identified as a Nazi war criminal. There he investigates the murder of a wealthy banker’s daughter ina case reminiscent of one he worked in Germany 18 years before.

1940. With the Germans about to enter Paris, Claire Bouchard flees France for England. Two years later she is recruited by the Special Operations Executive and sent back into occupied France to work alongside the Resistance. Working undercover as a teacher in Brittany, Claire accidentally befriends the wife of the German Commandant of Rennes, and the blossoming friendship is about to become a dangerous mission. Claire begins a double life as a Gestapo Commandant’s mistress to retrieve information, but ghosts from her past make the deception more painful than she could have imagined.

When the shah is thrown out of Iran, the nation's turmoil becomes world headlines. Caught in this shifting world of fanaticism, ambition, duplicity, and violent death are the foreign helicopter pilots who have been servicing the oil fields up and down the country. Their one objective is to make a bold, concerted escape to safety across the Gulf.

Breathless and painstakingly researched, this is a stunning debut mystery in which Sherlock Holmes unmasks Jack the Ripper. Lyndsay Faye perfectly captures all the color and syntax of Conan Doyle’s distinctive nineteenth-century London.

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.