Literature Fiction Mystery

It all started with a simple, yet sneakily difficult challenge from global best-selling author Harlan Coben: Pick a bird of prey, then use it as the inspiration for a brand-new story. The response from some of the best writers on the planet: Game on! The result: Eleven stories that are twisty, scary, surprising and bursting with imagination. An egg worth more than its weight in gold. A mysterious operative known only as Owl. An eagle-watcher who sees more than she should. Even a story that somehow places the Maltese Falcon in a nursing home.

A complete crime fiction box set! Homicide detective Thomas Prescott may be retired—but a serial killer, a high-profile murder, an ill-fated cruise, and a chilling small-town crime add more than enough excitement to his hard-earned rest. This collection includes the first four books: Unforeseen, Gray Matter, The Afrikaans, and Show Me.

On a warm spring evening, guests gather in a perfectly manicured garden to celebrate Maggie and Len’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Maggie leans against the apple tree, watching her fun-loving husband and darling children as her heart swells with pride. As the joyful party atmosphere disappears into the night, close by, the lifeless body of a young woman is pulled from a river. Slipping upstairs to find the special gift for her adoring husband, Maggie stumbles across something else hidden amongst the dusty boxes of family keepsakes.

Growing up in one of Florida's age-55-plus communities, Charlotte never expected life to be wild. Golf cart racing with her surrogate mothers Mariska and Darla was about as nutty as life got... until she found the hot pawnbroker's mom buried in her backyard.

Late-night radio show psychologist Rain Sommers is used to the crazies calling in to rage from the shadows, but one caller’s chilling obsession with her and her long-ago murdered mother - an iconic singer beloved by the Goth community - has even Rain running scared as a serial killer known as the Vampire prowls New Orleans. FBI agent Trevor Rivette is convinced the caller and the killer are one and the same.

January 1151. For most of the past year, Gareth and Gwen have been trapped between armies. Although once allies, King Owain of Gwynedd and King Cadell of Deheubarth are now at odds, to the point that Cadell has invaded Ceredigion, seeking to recapture lands he claims Owain stole in a past war. In so doing, he has set his half-brothers against their own cousin. Although Gareth and Gwen are holding out hope that more bloodshed can be averted, by January of 1151, Cadell has laid siege to Prince Hywel's castle at Aberystwyth.

A man must survive the zombie apocalypse armed with only a shotgun, a Samurai bat, and the will to live among the unliving in this horror series debut. It’s been two years since civilization ended in an unstoppable wave of chaos and blood. Now, former house painter Augustus “Gus” Berry lives a day-to-day existence of waking up, getting drunk, and preparing for the inevitable moment when “they” will come up the side of his mountain and penetrate his fortress.

The New York Times best selling cartoonist behind the nationally acclaimed comic strip Pearls Before Swine, Stephan Pastis has won raves for Timmy Failure, the hilarious first book in a new series for young listeners. With the help of a polar bear named Total, Timmy Failure hopes to strike it rich by running the best detective agency around. The only problem is that our supremely confident hero is often more bumbling than brainy.

Morgan Murphy has always longed for a romance for the ages. And she’s found it with husband Kyle Murphy—until their spicy marriage suddenly starts to cool off. Is Kyle preoccupied and distant because of a problem with his development project? Or is it something worse? Could Kyle Murphy be...cheating? He’s hiding something, that’s for sure. And Morgan’s determined to find out what it is.

Northern Ireland, spring 1981. Hunger strikes, riots, power cuts, a homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera, and a young woman’s suicide that may yet turn out to be murder: on the surface, the events are unconnected, but then things—and people—aren’t always what they seem. Detective Sergeant Duffy is the man tasked with trying to get to the bottom of it all. It’s no easy job—especially when it turns out that one of the victims was involved in the IRA but was last seen discussing business with someone from the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force.

An entire family is murdered and, by a quirk, a young girl is left unharmed. For 15 years, she believed the killer had been caught, and he's now on death row, awaiting execution. While trying to be content with her adoptive family, she's living in relentless uncertainty and the fear of remembering what really happened that night when she was five years old. She's The Watson Girl.

Astrid Knightstorm handles the cases other private investigators can't. When your clients have fangs, claws, or magical abilities, you need someone who understands their world. Being a tough-as-nails Texan doesn't hurt, either. But when the Vatican hires her for a job that leads to a three-headed dragon, she realizes she's facing her deadliest challenge yet.

It was supposed to be fun. A relaxing trip to a remote mountain retreat where there’s no phone reception. Three couples, friends since high school, are looking forward to a weekend of drinking, reminiscing and flirting. When someone suggests swapping partners, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. The lights will be switched off, for privacy. It’s not really cheating if you don’t know who you were with, right? But when the lights come back on, one of the men is dead. No-one can agree who was in which bedroom with whom.

Clara was only ten years old at the time, and the fog had come in thick and nasty, engulfing the hamlet like a wet blanket. Her parents had gone to the southern woods late one night to find out what was going on with a scream and never came back. The village's discomfort became full-blown panic when they went missing, and no one spoke about them right away. There was no search party in the fog. There was never a search party. Clara, who was twenty and had grown tough from living in the city and being an orphan, had come back not because she wanted to, but because she had to.

When Vivian Leroux invites her closest university friends on an extravagant sailing trip through Australia's Whitsunday Islands, it seems like the perfect graduation celebration. But beneath the glittering surface of sun, sea and champagne, dark secrets and bitter rivalries are simmering. Then Vivian mysteriously vanishes in the middle of the night. With no trace of their friend and evidence of foul play mounting, the remaining four must decide how far they'll go to protect themselves.

An edge-of-your-seat crime thriller starts with a vicious stabbing of a pretty teenage girl and her boyfriend on a local bus. She happens to be the mayor's niece. It's the final straw for the community. The police are desperate to get results and decide on a risky course of action involving undercover infiltration of the notorious Effingell Estate. Detective George Elms knows this hellish place extremely well, and his sharp investigative mind is put to work to solve the crime. The police are under immense media pressure and conveniently a local lowlife confesses to the attack.

Kieran Murphy is an Irish mob boss and one of the most powerful men in Boston. When he walks me home, people step aside out of respect for him. He could have any woman he wants. So why does he have eyes only for me? Is it how he has to lift my chin with his fingers to keep my eyes level with his when he scolds me and how I cover my bottom instinctively when he tells me that I've earned a spanking? Or is it how I quiver at the thought of everything I'm too ashamed to beg him to do to me? Maybe it's all of those, but I'm pretty sure there's something else too.

An elite team of SAS special operators battle across the multiverse after a plague of land-hungry sentient robots invade today’s Earth. But, when an aircraft carrier-based counterattack goes horribly wrong, it traps the team in an alien universe with a top-secret group who’ve already saved the world twice. After discovering a dark plot that threatens humanity’s very existence, the two groups jump into action, fighting both on the surface and in orbit in a last-ditch effort to stop the enemy before time runs 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?

When Pleakley learns of a mosquito sanctuary in West Virginia, he convinces his ‘ohana to embark on a road trip so he can continue his audio-journal study into Earth’s most important species—and prove to Jumba that he is a real scientist. But they quickly realize that everything is not as it seems. Confronted with suspicious scientists, rumors of a mosquito cryptid terrorizing their campsite, and a new friend in need, it will take all of their investigative skills—and a little hypnotism—to get to the bottom of this Mansquito mystery.