New Mystery Thrillers

The stories in this collection reflect a fundamental truth about Santa Fe: history depends on who's telling it. Too often the story of this city has been told only by the conquerors and the tourism PR firms. Hear the stories that never make the glossy tour brochures: the working class and the underground, the decolonized and the ever-haunted; the Santa Fe only we know.... Conquered and reconquered, colonized and commodified, Santa Fe understands - from historical genocide to the murders of family members - the intimacy of violence.

Flavia Albia's day-old marriage is in trouble - her new husband may be permanently disabled, and they have no funds. So when Palace officials ask her to help expose a plotter in their midst, she is obliged to accept their commission. The plot could not be bigger. Ever since he died in AD 68, apparently by his own hand, Rome has been haunted by reports that Emperor Nero is in fact very much alive and about to return to claim his throne.

Becky and Jamie are an ordinary hard-working couple trapped in the daily grind, dreaming of an easier life. On one of their rare vacations, they meet Phil and Mel, a wealthy couple who seem to have it all—they're fun, well-traveled, and very generous with their money. But they are also very, very dangerous. Phil and Mel are not who they say they are, and this is no random vacation friendship.

Inside a luxury housing complex, two misfit teenagers sneak around and get drunk. Franco Andrade, lonely, overweight, and addicted to porn, obsessively fantasizes about seducing his neighbor - an attractive married woman and mother - while Polo dreams about quitting his grueling job as a gardener within the gated community and fleeing his overbearing mother and their narco-controlled village. Each facing the impossibility of getting what he thinks he deserves, Franco and Polo hatch a mindless and macabre scheme.

Ed Eagle, the six-feet-six, take-no-prisoners Santa Fe attorney, has recovered from his encounters with Mexican organized crime and - more treacherously - his ex-wife, Barbara. Now a mysterious new client has come his way, one who may shed light into some dark corners of Ed's past...and put him in danger once more.

Deputy Sheriff Nick Rogers found out small-town life meant adjusting to two things - gossips and Laney Cavanaugh. And neither was much help in solving a bridal shower murder. Some days it appeared like everyone in Whitehorse had a secret - including their new lawman. And falling for Laney wasn’t a good way to maintain a low profile. Nick might have been new to Whitehorse, but he wasn’t above getting his hands dirty.

In each life the wheel of karma turns. Asian scholar and martial artist Connor Burke, who continues to labor under the stern tutelage of the master warrior Yamashita Sensei, is drawn once again into a murder investigation when the police discover a link between the victim and a mysterious martial arts sensei named Kita Takanobu. Kita has created a powerful New Age synthesis of Tibetan mysticism and the lethal heritage of the samurai.

There are few people Nero Wolfe respects, and Lon Cohen of the New York Gazette is one of them. So when Cohen asks for a favor, Wolfe is inclined to listen. According to Cohen, someone wants to kill the Gazette's gossip columnist, Cameron Clay. Death threats are a regular hazard for Clay, who's hurled insults and accusations at every bold-faced name in the five boroughs. But the latest threats have carried a more sinister tone. The columnist has narrowed his potential killers down to five people.

Ryan Sharma is a Cherub agent. Working undercover, he can slip under adult radar and get information that sends criminals and terrorists to jail. Now he's investigating a double kidnapping, working with mission controller James Adams. In the mission to end all missions, Ryan and James must assemble a team of legendary Cherub agents to find the hostages and bring them home....

Ike Hamilton is a part of the Haven Harbor community just like anyone else, though he's fallen on hard times and has to make do on disability checks and deposit bottles. Most of the locals do what they can to help him out, and needlepointing partners Angie and Sarah are happy to see him at the annual Blessing of the Fleet, honoring all those lost at sea over the centuries. But when harmless Ike is stabbed, suspicion quickly falls on a troubled teenage boy who's new in town. Angie's convinced that young Leo is innocent - but if he didn't do it, who did?

Cassidy Livingston's new identity has begun to feel as comfortable as her favorite sweater. She's been tucked away on Lantern Beach for weeks, waiting to testify against a deadly gang, and is settling in to a new life she wants to last forever. When she thinks she spots someone malevolent from her past, panic swells inside her. If an enemy has found her, Cassidy won't be the only one who's a target. Everyone she's come to love will also be at risk.

New Year’s Eve, 1932. Hercule Poirot and Inspector Edward Catchpool arrive on the tiny Greek island of Lamperos to celebrate the holiday with what turns out to be a rather odd community of locals living in a dilapidated house. A dark sense of foreboding overshadows the beautiful island getaway when the guests play a New Year’s Resolutions game after dinner and one written resolution gleefully threatens to perform “the last and first death of the year.”

Beneath the glitter of Mardi Gras lies the sleaze of Bourbon Street; under the celestial sounds of JazzFest, the nightmare screams of a city once at war within its neighborhoods, but after Hurricane Katrina, seemingly at war with nature and the rest of the country as well. New Orleans is a third world country in itself, a Latin, African, European (and often amoral) culture trapped in a Puritan nation.

Sherlock Holmes and his faithful friend, Dr John Watson, have been hired by actor George Reynolds. George wants them to find out why the audience who comes to see him perform every night are the same people, only wearing disguises. Is something sinister going on and, if so, what? Meanwhile, Holmes’ archenemy, Professor James Moriarty, is having problems of his own. Implicated in the murder of a gang leader, Moriarty and his second, Moran, must go on the run from the police in order to find out who is behind the set-up.

Sherlock Holmes’s discovery of a mysterious musical score initiates a devious Christmas challenge set by Irene Adler, with clues that are all variations on the theme of “theft without theft”, such as a statue missing from a museum found hidden in the room it was taken from. In the snowy London lead-up to Christmas, Holmes’s preoccupation with the “Adler Variations” risks him neglecting the case of his new client, Norwegian arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who has received a series of threats in the form of animal carcasses left on his doorstep.

Homicide detective Hoke Moseley is called to a posh Miami neighborhood to investigate a lethal overdose. There he meets the alluring stepmother of the decedent and begins to wonder about dating a witness. Meanwhile, he has been threatened with suspension by his ambitious new chief unless he leaves his beloved, if squalid, suite at the Eldorado Hotel and moves downtown. With free housing hard to come by, Hoke is desperate to find a new place to live.

Flavia Albia is a private investigator, always drawn to an intriguing puzzle - even if it is put to her by her new husband's hostile ex-wife. On the Quirinal Hill, Clodia Volumnia, a very young girl with stars in her eyes, has died, amid suggestions that she was poisoned by a love potion. It will have been supplied by a local witch, who goes by the name of Pandora, though Albia learns that Pandora carries on a trade in herbal beauty products while hiding much more dangerous connections.

Is this the end of America? The US has finally fought the Russians to a standstill in Europe and stopped the Chinese and Russians from breaking out of Alaska, but now they have a new threat to handle in California. Will the bloody street fight be too much for the American military to handle? Just as it seems that the United States is going to collapse, DARPA unleashes a new torrent of technologically advanced weapons. Will the new ark angel fighters turn the tide of air superiority back to America, or is it too late?

When Dave Robicheaux, learns that an old friend, Father Jimmie Dolan has been the victim of a particularly brutal assault, he returns to New Orleans to investigate, if only unofficially.

Driven into hiding in the French Pyrenees by the advancing forces of a new one world government, Cardinal Leopold Amodeo receives a mysterious radio message from an unknown source in Northern Europe inviting him to a secret meeting. Fearful of a trap, and with time running out as a web of evil spreads across the globe, he must decide if he should leave the safety of his friends in an ancient Cathar sanctuary to travel alone into the far reaches of the north to meet with a man who may hold the key to their salvation.