Mystery Thriller Suspense Southern

Valerie Cooper has inherited a majority partnership in the family’s company, New Orleans Fine Antiques. Valerie knows nothing about antiques, but she decides to learn the business and become an active partner. She’s also got her hands full fending off Collette, a woman who wants to sell the huge old house in the Irish Channel neighborhood that Valerie and her husband painstakingly renovated. Valerie isn’t interested in selling—but when her best friend drags her to a costume party, she stumbles over Collette’s body, a jeweled dagger sticking out of her chest.

What do you get when you have a southern town, a corrupt sheriff, the Mob, a rogue FBI agent and a burgeoning drug trade?? A thrilling novel written by a former sheriff loosely based on his experiences as an ex-New York prosecutor who found himself elected as the chief law enforcement officer of a Florida coastal county. The story centers around a fictional Florida County where the local FBI is seeking assistance from the Department of Justice to stem the growing international drug trade in their district. Thrust into this toxic brew of corruption is Jack Bondera, an undercover agent for a secret municipal corruption unit of DOJ known as the MCIU. Jack, an eighteen year veteran of the FBI and MCIU, will have all of his talents and courage tested as he goes undercover as a newly hired deputy sheriff in Bosley County. The battle tested staff of the unit provide him with support and intelligence, but it is an unexpected source that becomes the pivotal piece of the investigation. The story culminates in a standoff that threatens Jack’s life and in a surprise he is confronted by the forces of corruption in the county. With some local southern assistance, Jack prepares for the pivotal battle between good and evil.

When a tree topples over onto Lillian’s prized 1948 Tucker Torpedo, these over-50 amateur sleuths are once again scrambling for money. Lucky for them, they have their choice of two cases, but which to take - a suspected art forgery or mysterious trash theft from the county landfill?

Bopped on the head from a falling plastic Santa, local undertaker Emma Lee Raines is told she's suffering from "funeral trauma." It's trauma all right, because the not-so-dearly departed keep talking to her. Take Ruthie Sue Payne - innkeeper, gossip queen, and arch-nemesis of Emma Lee's granny - she's adamant that she didn't just fall down those stairs. She was pushed. Ruthie has no idea who wanted her pushing up daisies, but she can't cross over until the matter is laid to eternal rest. Emma Lee's high-school crush, Sheriff Jack Henry Ross, isn't ready to rule out foul play.

Attorney Avery Andrews has returned to her humdrum hometown of Dacus, South Carolina, leaving her job at a powerful law firm in the rearview mirror. But with her Donna Karan suits she's struggling to fit back in. Is it still a place she's able to call home now that she's swapped her prestigious clients for high school bullies and formidable aunts? She finds sanctuary in her grandfather's cabin on Luna Lake until police arrive to investigate a mysterious rumor. But more than secrets lie beneath the dark surface of Luna Lake.

Los Angeles TV journalist Beatrice Middleton has lost her job. With a possible employment offer in Atlanta, she heads home to Savannah, Georgia, to reconnect with her contentious African-American family, arriving to find that her 15-year-old nephew has been murdered. This begins the unraveling of a cloak of family secrets surrounding another devastating crime, one that shattered Bea's world when she was a teen. The traumatic memory has been buried so deep it almost feels like it never happened - almost.

After a decade of exile precipitated by the tragic death of his mother, Will Seems returns home from Richmond to rural Southside Virginia, taking a job as deputy sheriff in a landscape given way to crime and defeat. Impoverished and abandoned, this remote land of tobacco plantations, razed forests, and boarded up homes seems stuck in the past in a state that is trying to forget its complex history and move on.

Graham Greene's first published novel tells the story of Andrews, a young man who has betrayed his fellow smugglers and fears their vengeance. Fleeing from them, with no hope of pity or salvation, he takes refuge in the house of a young woman, also alone in the world. Elizabeth persuades him to give evidence against his accomplices in court, but neither she nor Andrews is aware that to both criminals and authority, treachery is as great a crime as smuggling.

Fifteen-year-old Mattie Lee Watson dreams of men, not boys. So when James T. Cullowee, the Kudzu King, arrives in Cooper County, North Carolina, in 1941 to spread the gospel of kudzu—claiming that it will improve the soil, feed cattle at almost no cost, even cure headaches—Mattie is ready. Mr. Cullowee is determined to sell the entire county on the future of kudzu, and organizes a kudzu festival, complete with a beauty pageant. Mattie is determined to be crowned Kudzu Queen and capture the attentions of the Kudzu King.

Orphaned at age ten by a violent home invasion, Susannah Faulkner grew up wild, her stubbornness the only thing harder than her heart. Since then, she’s used her skills to put a boot in the faces of those who deserve it. Then she gets word her brother Ethan needs her help, so she returns home to Atlanta. But in the airport, she finds her Uncle Gavin suffering a heart attack. Before he is rushed to the hospital, Gavin whispers a single word to Suzie: peaches. She’s determined to uncover the meaning behind the cryptic message, but Ethan is also deep in trouble.

Ingrid often said that one could find anything and everything they needed at yard sales. Perhaps she was right. In retirement, she laid her hands on the biggest yard sale find of all. The love of her life, Jerome Prioleau. Now, there was a wedding to plan. Meanwhile, strange things were happening in Juniper. A woman was murdered, her body found deep beneath Lake Murray by one of Ingrid’s former students. Later, the woman’s husband, none other than Juniper’s mayor, was found dead. A victim of his own poisoning.

When amateur baker, and now amateur sleuth, Rosie Hart finds herself embroiled in another mystery in rural Airlie Falls, Texas, she can’t believe her bad luck. Soon the town is reeling from a murder, an unidentified body, a late mayoral challenge, missing town money, and a strange group of socialites gathered at a mansion out of town. With so many of her new friends suspected of wrongdoing, Rosie can’t sit on the sidelines any longer. She’s convinced these strange occurrences are connected, but she’s running out of time to prove how.

A novel of psychological suspense about an idyllic community rocked by a serial killer—and a dark secret. “A stellar achievement, a book that unspools like a dark-toned movie in the reader’s mind.”—The Wall Street Journal (One of the Best Mysteries of the Year) Detective Ben Wade has...

Melissa Ginsburg's The House Uptown is an emotional coming-of-age novel about a young girl who goes to live with her eccentric grandmother in New Orleans after the death of her mother. Ava, fourteen years old and totally on her own, has still not fully processed her mother’s death when she...

The fact that Katrina Pomeroy had been murdered was in and of itself a newsworthy event. The fact that she had been murdered on Friday, October 13th, exactly 11 years after she’d been one of five teenagers to survive the Friday the 13th Massacre, made her passing worthy of notice by the national news agencies Jillian Hanford used to work for.

One hot, sticky summer in Bledsoe, Georgia, twelve-year-old Kay Whitaker stumbles across a stilt house in a neighboring marsh and upon Andy Webber, a boy about her age. He and his father have recently moved back to Georgia from California, and rumors of the suspicious drowning death of Andy’s mother years earlier have chased them there and back. Kay is fascinated and enamored with Andy, and she doesn’t listen when her father tells her to stay away from the Webbers.

For nearly a decade, twenty-nine-year-old Hudson Miller has made his living in the boxing ring, but a post-fight brawl threatens to derail his career. Desperate for money, Hudson takes a gig as a bouncer at a dive bar. That’s when life delivers him another hook to the jaw: his estranged father, Leland, has been murdered in what appears to be a robbery-gone-bad at his salvage yard, Miller’s Pull-a-Part.

Once again, the Sophia Island Shrimp Festival is over. Thousands attended to eat shrimp, shop, and watch the pirates come ashore as usual, but this year’s temperatures were warmer than ever. Everyone is happy that the busy hot weekend is over, and everyone came through unscathed. Or so it seems. Jewel and Craig Mantelle also made it through their kids and families’ first visit to their new island home.

For as long as she could remember, Susannah Faulkner knew that even though she lived a dangerous and violent life, she would try her best to do some good in the world. She’s hunted down evil men before, but the one man that puts fear into her heart, the one man who could destroy everything she loves, is the one man she cannot track down. And worst of all, she doesn’t know what will happen when she finds him...or if he finds her first.

Mail carrier Bernadette (Bernie) Butler, along with the Front Porch Ladies, are curious about their new neighbor, Courtney Gaines, who is the niece of Florence Gaines, the wealthiest widow in Sugar Creek Gap. Florence lets it be known that she is seeing Zeke Grey, which doesn't set well with the Front Porch Ladies. They were all in competition for Zeke's attention. While delivering the mail, Bernie overhears what could be the couple's first marital spat. When Florence turns up dead in mulch, Bernie can't help but want to get involved.