Mystery Thriller Genre

A car tumbles through darkness down a snowy ravine. A woman without a name walks out of a dust storm in sub-Saharan Africa. And in the seething heat of Lagos City, a criminal cartel scours the Internet, looking for victims. Lives intersect. Worlds collide. And it all begins with a single email: "Dear Sir, I am the daughter of a Nigerian diplomat, and I need your help".

In nine short stories, seven of which have never previously been available in print, and one brand-new, never-before-seen Sherlock Holmes mystery - available together for the first time - Laurie R. King blends her long-running brand of crime fiction with historical treats and narrative sleight of hand.

Across America, citizens of this once proud nation sit in the dark, slowly starving to death. Most are dirty and sick. They've been abandoned by politicians and bureaucrats who continued to grow fatter and richer during the collapse. Foreign governments court the nation's leaders, putting them up on cruise ships and in foreign hotels, while the average American lives in squalor, ignored and abandoned. A reluctant savior rises from an unlikely direction. He doesn't need the politicians nor the American government. They represent everything he despises.

In a desperate bid to take back the continental United States - where hordes of undead now dominate the ravaged human population - a Navy commander leads a global mission to the heart of the pandemic. Task Force Hourglass is humanity’s final hope, and his team’s agonizing decisions could mean living one day more - or surrendering to the eternal hell that exists between life and death.

On Halloween 1963, 11-year-old Chuck Coolidge and his brother, Danny, are lost in a toxic smog covering the steel town of Slippery Elm, Pennsylvania. When the smog lifts, half the town is sick, and 20 people are dead. And Danny is missing. Now, more than 20 years later, Chuck's teenage daughter, Frank, plots her escape from this "busted and disgusted" town. When a murdered child is found in the river, investigators link the crime to the disappearance of Danny in '63, and Frank's life is turned upside down. In the face of her worst fears, she must uncover her family's dark past.

A rogue Russian nuke sails toward the harbors of Los Angeles in the hull of a ramshackle sailboat. Without destroying a single building, the bomb shatters the latticework of the American dream, toppling one piece of the economy after another. A group of Special Forces veterans and their prepper friends scramble for survival in a worldwide catastrophe so psychologically disruptive they are left questioning everything they ever believed to be true.

Suzette knows her clever and manipulative seven-year-old daughter doesn’t love her. She can see the hatred and jealousy in her eyes. And as Hanna’s subtle acts of cruelty threaten to tear her and her husband apart, Suzette fears her very life may be in grave danger....

Grace Isabel MacKenna has a hundred things to do today. Killing someone isn't one of them. It is supposed to be a quick visit to Boston for the Buchanan anniversary party, then on to Scotland to collect an inheritance. She checks into her hotel and then decides to go for a brisk walk. But after getting lost, she ends up with a wounded man stumbling into her arms—and his shooter coming after them both. When she fires back in self-defense, she doesn’t expect him to drop dead.

This is the book that dares to show us the military hardware, global upheavals, and raw combat a second Korean War would unleash. How F-16s would blast across the 38th Parallel. How ultra-modern submarines would vie for the seas. And how two armies would turn the snowfields of Asia red with blood. A thundering geopolitical thriller of vast scope, this is Red Phoenix - and a new standard for military/political suspense fiction.

Some places are too good to be true. Under a pink moon, there is a perfect little town not found on any map. In that town, there are quiet streets lined with pretty houses, houses that conceal the strangest things. After a couple years of hard traveling, ex-cop Mona Bright inherits her long-dead mother's home in Wink, New Mexico. And the closer Mona gets to her mother's past, the more she understands that the people of Wink are very, very different....

Megan waits at the school gates for her six-year-old son, Daniel. As the playground empties, panic bubbles inside her. Daniel is nowhere to be found. According to his teacher, Daniel’s father picked up his son. Except he and Megan are no longer together. After years of being controlled by her cruel husband, Megan finally found the courage to divorce him. Hands trembling, she dials his number, but the line is dead. Six years later, Megan gets the call she has dreamt about for years. Daniel has walked into a police station in a remote town just a few miles away....

When Blair McGowan, the mail person with the longest postal route in the country of over three hundred mile a day, goes missing the question becomes—where do you look for her? The Postal Inspector for the State of Wyoming elicits Sheriff Longmire to mount an investigation into her disappearance and Walt does everything but mail it in; posing as a letter-carrier himself, the good sheriff follows her trail and finds himself enveloped in the intrigue of an otherworldly cult.

Powerful, prosperous, and expanding ever farther into the untamed world, the Roman Empire has reached its zenith under the rule of the beloved Emperor Trajan. But neither Trajan nor his reign can last forever...

Matt has a terrible life. Seriously—it's awful. It is so bad that Dan the Demon is shocked when Matt turns down his infernal offer: 10 years of a blissful life in exchange for his soul. But Dan is a salesman behind on his quota and his demonic managers are running out of patience. He forges Matt's signature on the dotted line, stealing his soul and thrusting him into a supernatural world he never knew existed. Matt must learn to navigate the hidden society of demons, faeries, demigods, and worse.

After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. She throws herself into her work from dusk to dawn, until her solitary routine is disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin barefoot and covered in bruises. The girl calls herself Ursa, and she claims to have been sent from the stars to witness five miracles.

Au cours de l’été 2006, Emma Price assiste, impuissante, au repêchage du manteau rouge de son fils de six ans dans l’Ouse. C’est le drame de l’année : son petit garçon, Aiden, s’est éloigné de l’école pendant une terrible inondation et s’est noyé dans la rivière.

When veteran operator Pike Logan and partner Jennifer Cahill receive a letter from Blaisdell Consulting - the umbrella cover company for their real employer, a top secret counterterrorist unit called the Taskforce - they expect orders for their next mission-impossible tasking. Instead, they learn that their latest actions have gotten them fired, despite having saved thousands of innocent lives. Pike's shock and fury is redirected when their commander Colonel Kurt Hale asks him and Jennifer for help with a personal matter.

A country house murder, artistic insight and the postwar reunion of Alleyn and Troy combine in Ngaio Marsh’s wittiest and most readable novel. Agatha Troy, world-famous portrait painter, is inveigled into accepting a commission to paint the 70-year-old Sir Henry Ancred, Bart., the Grand Old Man of the stage. But just as she has completed her portrait, the old actor dies.

When Squadron Leader Adam Haylock, RAF, receives an unexpected posting and secondment to the UN Antarctic Interceptor Force at Teniente, Rodolfo Marsh Martin airbase on King George Island—latitude 62° south, he is totally unprepared for all the events that will subsequently unfold and change his life forever. Arriving at his new base, he is also surprised to find himself reunited with an old adversary, Wing Commander Mike Prendergast as well as a former chum and comrade in arms, Flight Lieutenant Sam (Dobbo) Dobson whom he hasn’t seen in several years.

Charlotte Graham is at the center of the most famous kidnapping in Chicago history. The FBI and local cops found her two abductors, killed them, and rescued her, but it took four long years. The fact that she was found just three miles from her home, had been there the entire time, haunts them. She’s since changed her identity, found a profession she loves, and rebuilt her life. She’s never said a word — to the cops, to her doctors, to her family — about those four years.