Short Thrillers

From the No. 1 bestselling author of THE MISSING AND THE DEAD comes the short novel: 22 DEAD LITTLE BODIES, plus two short stories: STRAMASH and DI STEEL'S BAD HEIR DAY, and a novella: THE 45% HANGOVER, all featuring his most popular characters – DS Logan McRae and DCI Roberta Steel. They say ‘small is beautiful’, but as Stuart MacBride demonstrates in these four tales, it can also be dark, violent, disturbing, and sometimes really quite rude.

When the boss of the big local DIY outlet is murdered on a moonlit night, all the evidence points to the store's junior manager. And when police retrieve the murder weapon from the Thames, the manager goes on the run. But Jack and Sarah are not at all sure of his guilt. Can they uncover the real killer before it's too late for the runaway suspect? Cherringham is a serial novel à la Charles Dickens, with a new audio episode released every two weeks. Set in the sleepy English village of Cherringham, the detective series brings together an unlikely sleuthing duo.

Can You Forgive Her? is the first of the six Palliser novels. Here Trollope examines parliamentary election and marriage, politics and privacy. As he dissects the Victorian upper class, issues and people shed their pretenses under his patient, ironic probe.

Josephine Ying longs to overthrow Big Uncle as the best host, and after his roast duck incident, she’s finally getting her chance this Chinese New Year. Even better, her son is bringing a surprise. Unfortunately, the surprise turns out to be a gold-digging fiancée—who dies at the dinner table. Her problems just got a lot bigger than hosting the perfect meal. Certain there’s a killer at the table, Josephine sharpens her questions to find them out.

In this original short story in the Mike Bowditch mystery series from bestselling author Paul Doiron, Mike is drawn into the story of a gruesome case from his mentor Charley Steven’s past. Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch accompanies his old friend and mentor, retired bush pilot Charley Stevens...

The haunting voices of children echo through the darkness. Ancient curses, sinister lullabies, dark nursery rhymes fill your ears - no matter how hard you try to drown it out with your screams. You feel your sanity slipping away as you struggle to escape this hellish prison....

Hunting vampires is her legacy. Detective Rainey Astor walks a dangerous line between the human and supernatural worlds. As a vampire hunter, she's a formidable opponent, having killed hundreds of their kind. Yet, when her latest foray into the supernatural world goes terribly wrong, she finds herself rescued by the very creature she's vowed to kill.

Hitches, Hideouts & Homicide: Mae West finds herself in a dangerous situation when she finds a treasure map that leads to more than just treasure...a dead body! Assailants, Asphalt & Alibis: This year the treasure hunters have descended upon Normal and staying in Happy Trails Campground. Once again, Mae and the Laundry Club ladies, along with Mary Elizabeth, find themselves doing things they never thought they'd never do. Go on a treasure hunt! Valleys, Vehicles & Victims: When a wedding party shows up at Happy Trails Campground, Mae West is thrilled.

This could be the most important mission of Nameless’s life. Because it’s putting him on a collision course with his own past and the nation’s future. The target: a fortified redoubt in the golden hills of California, the hub of a new world order that’s unthinkably close at hand. The time has come for Nameless to face its designer: the nihilist mastermind behind the One Solution. It’s also time for Nameless to discover who he is and was, and what brought him to this fateful endgame. But will the truth be a breaking point? Or a turning point?

The ghost story has long been a staple of world literature, but many of the genre's greatest tales have been forgotten, overshadowed in many cases by their authors' best-selling work in other genres. In this spine-tingling anthology, little known stories from literary titans like Charles Dickens and Edith Wharton are collected alongside overlooked works from masters of horror fiction like Edgar Allan Poe and M. R. James. In bringing these masterful tales back from the dead, Ghost Stories will enlighten and frighten both longtime fans as well as new listeners of the genre.

In this work Horace Rumpole returns to delight us with seven new cases. We find our hero jousting with the Devil, being wooed by a beautiful violin player, and even up before the Disciplinary Tribunal of the Bar Council.

Mystic Caravan is full of monster hunters, moonlighting as entertainers. Led by Poet Parker, the motley group of mayhem seekers is always looking for—and finding—trouble. Despite the death and destruction constantly raining down on them, the show must go on...and Mystic Caravan is always up for the challenge. Join them as they travel from city to city, taking on formidable foe after formidable foe. They’ll never stop, and neither will the enemies coming after them.

Running from a world which wants him dead, ex-detective Sergeant Jake Pettman journeys to the isolated town of Blue Falls, Maine, home of his infamous, murderous ancestors. But Jake struggles to hide from who he is, and when a child disappears, he finds himself drawn into an investigation that shares no parallels to anything he has ever seen before. Held back by a chief of police plagued and tormented by his own secrets, Jake fights for the truth. All the way to the door of Jotham MacLeoid. An insidious megalomaniac who feeds his victims to a killing pit.

Before he was Oldtimer, he was Craig Emilson, a young doctor,sucked into military service at the outbreak of World War III. Enlisting to become a Special Forces suborbital paratrooper, Craig is selected to take part in the most important mission in American military history, a sortie into enemy territory to eliminate the world's first strong artificial intelligence.

When Ed Finnlay - computer programmer and devoted father of two - goes missing, there's not a lot the local police can do. After all, Ed himself told them he would be gone... for quite some time. As the weeks go by with no news, his wife reaches out to Jack and Sarah for help. But they soon learn that there are odd secrets about this missing husband and that he might not only be gone, but also in serious danger. Can Jack and Sarah do what seems impossible.

A fourth floor room, a door locked with the key inside, no way in, no way out. Edgar Allan Poe is the true grandfather of the murder mystery. Decades before Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, Poe gave us C. Auguste Dupin, a man able to solve mysteries through observation and deduction.

Harper Harlow has it all, including an exciting job, a best friend who serves as a constant source of amusement, and a boyfriend who makes her heart pinch...but in a good way. She may hunt ghosts for a living (and help them pass over to the other side), but she often finds it more fun than frightening. Human beings and their penchant for murder and mischief is another story, of course. That doesn’t mean Harper doesn’t find the occasional bout of trouble.

The two strikingly original short novels brought together here - in new translations by award-winning translators - were both literary gambles of a sort for Fyodor Dostoevsky. The first real expression of his genius, The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelgänger. Written 20 years later under the pressure of crushing debt, The Gambler is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction.

From Linda Castillo, the New York Times bestselling author of A Gathering of Secrets, comes a new Kate Burkholder short mystery, In Plain Sight: a story of star-crossed love and murder in Amish country. Seventeen year old Amish boy, Noah Kline, is struck by a car as he walks alongside a dark...

When the Veteran Head of Botanicals at the world-famous Cherringham Gin Company is suddenly found dead at the Distillery, it seems at first a strange accident must have taken place. But some family members aren’t convinced, and Jack and Sarah are asked to investigate by old friend, solicitor Tony Standish. Soon they discover clues that the eccentric genius behind the famous gin may have been murdered - with a rich cocktail of motives in play. Can the bizarre mystery be solved and the killer found before he strikes again?