Showing results by publisher "Beacon Audiobooks" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

It's February 2023. An Alluring and determined CIA Case Officer, June Cohen, must flawlessly execute an unsanctioned plan of action or the U.S. will invade Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction. She coerces Robaire Assaly, a Los Angeles based DEA Confidential Informant, to take part in her elaborate scheme. Robaire agrees, however, in doing so, he must betray his long-time DEA Agent handler, Gary Lowery, to get what she needs. Robaire soon realizes June has tricked him into taking the blame for stealing a Stinger missile, which she pulled off right under the nose of the hapless FBI.

After a fire destroys her home, Abby Bennett emerges from the hospital horribly scarred. Her husband has abandoned her, and her two little boys are gone. Determined to reclaim her life and get her boys back, Abby returns to her hometown in Iowa. With the help of a reclusive neighbor, Jack, she begins renovating her sister's rental property. But the old cottage has a tragic pasta grisly unsolved murder.

Undetected by the FBI for three decades until the turn of the twenty-first century, a handful of elusive, transient long-haul trucker serial killers had been murdering hundreds of sex workers and hitchhikers along major US highways. This was not the first time innocent victims were attacked along major US interstate thoroughfares. Nearly lost to history was a similar pattern of carnage that occurred in the late nineteenth century.

Murder has come once more to the seaside town of Crab Cove, testing the mettle of “almost handsome” Detective Simon Grave and his “nearly invisible” partner, Sergeant Barry Blunt, who investigate a locked-room mystery with a significant twist: the prime suspects are in the locked room, not the victim, a logic-defying situation that challenges the team at every turn. As if murder weren’t enough, they must also investigate the simultaneous disappearance of The MacGuffin Trophy from that same locked room, the studio of artist Whitney Waters, famous for her stylized paintings of red herrings.

Armed-encounters expert and police trainer Brian McKenna shares his expertise in a series of gripping stories involving real-life police shootouts. Step into the shoes of police officers who have run toward the sound of gunfire, who have faced attacks by deadly assailants, and who have lived to share the tale. But this book is more than just stories about courageous cops. Each story is followed by McKenna’s expert analysis of its important learning points, especially concerning how and why the officers use force and the legal aspects of self-defense and the defense of others. 

Two years ago, Matt lost his wife to an asleep-at-the-wheel truck driver for the corrupt Clawson Chicken Corporation, and most of his savings to a court battle with the aforementioned fowl magnate. Trusting that the ocean will heal his battered psyche, Matt heads out from Corpus Christi Bay in a vintage sloop, trying to out sail bad memories and find a path forward. As he winds his way east beyond the Gulf, he has adventures (and misadventures), meets a quirky cast of characters, and is dogged at every turn by reminders of the reach of the greedy chicken king, Colonel Clyde Clawson. 

Everyone knows the story of Jerry Sandusky, the serial pedophile, the Monster. But what if that story is wrong? What if the former Penn State football coach and founder of the Second Mile is an innocent man convicted in the midst of a moral panic fed by the sensationalistic media, police trawling, and memory-warping psychotherapy? The Most Hated Man in America unfolds like a true-crime psychological thriller and is required listening for everyone, from criminologists to sports fans.

Dusty Sampson's parents split up when he was four years old. Dusty's mother tries to provide as much love and guidance as she can, but at the same time, she has to work long hours just to pay the bills and put a roof over their heads. Left to his own devices, Dusty eventually gets into drugs and alcohol. When his mother has had enough, he finds himself kicked out of her house, and forced to float from couch to couch. Consistently unemployed and out of money, Dusty decides to rob a restaurant for some quick cash but shoots two people in cold blood on the way out.

Graham Richards was shopping with his family at an outlet mall when an active shooter began indiscriminately murdering people with a rifle. Graham was shot in the face and when he woke up in the hospital, his family was dead. And now, all he wants is to be left alone. Living out in the woods, growing his own food, and using solar power for his energy needs, he hopes to live the rest of his life in obscurity.

“I wish he was dead!” Have you ever had that wicked thought? If not, then you’ve never met the contemptible Mike DiMarco, a man that gets his solitary pleasure from wrecking lives. Hypothetically, if DiMarco ruined your life and left you penniless, beaten, and broken, could you kill him? Well, you’re off the hook because Sturgis will do it for you - or try. Your mission now becomes that of a cheering supporter as you hear about the efforts of a lovable, clumsy man as he humorously, yet doggedly, discovers the ins and outs of getting even as an entry-level assassin.

A small town in Vermont broadcasts prophecies of its residents' deaths. Rey, a cutlery salesman, seems to flicker at the center of every murder on screen. He thinks the town is rigged with cameras, or the locals are trying to set him up. But as the broadcasts grow increasingly surreal, and maniacs start showing up in town to remove his sensory organs, Rey starts to realize that the images pulsing beneath the static-riddled airwaves have woven him into a battle between people who believe that analog is the frequency of the gods.

On the day the villagers were forced to flee Hensu, not everyone got out alive. Jackson Stone is touring the abandoned Chinese city when he slips away from the group to spend the night, determined to publish an account of his ghostly experiences there. Then he meets Yuèhai, a strange, soft-spoken woman who can tell him the city’s secrets - secrets the Chinese government would kill to keep hidden. As Jackson uncovers the truth about Yuèhai and the ghost city, he’s drawn into a web of conspiracy, betrayal, and murder.

When an unknown young African American woman is found murdered on the railroad tracks outside town, most of Burr, Oklahoma, would rather look the other way. The town’s police chief, troubled local hero and ex-Marine Emmett Hardy, doesn’t have that luxury. In his search for the killer, he’s forced to slice through layers of hate and hypocrisy to confront the ethical rot at the town’s core while being haunted by the vision of a life and love that might have been.

It's 2004 in Minneapolis, and Hazel Ford is an English teacher at a diverse urban high school, where she loves discussing The Great Gatsby with her Advanced Placement students. Plus, she's crazy about her fiancé/fellow high school teacher, Vance. But when the two of them are involved in a horrific car accident, everything comes crashing down, leaving Hazel with a traumatic brain injury and no memory of the accident - or of her supposed breakup with Vance.

Fourteen-year-old Daniel and his friends enjoyed the best that childhood could offer during the summer of 1975 in a northern mining town until someone started brutally killing family pets. Daniel, who wants nothing more than be the hero from his books, convinces his friends to help search for the "sicko", but this only brings him to the attention of the killer. When evidence surfaces that points at Daniel as the killer and his two friends turn against him, he soon realizes that there is much more to being a hero than what he has read.

As a former special operations soldier, Deckard freelanced as a mercenary and got more than he bargained for. Now, as the commander of a private military company called Samruk International, Deckard finds work as Mexico begins its final descent into chaos. Hitting the ground with a small recon element, he will first have to rescue a newly minted police chief named Samantha from the clutches of a drug cartel before blitzing across Southern Mexico. However, he can't do it alone.

Isolated and sheltered by her lonely mother, Maura's never been able to make friends. She seems to drive her classmates away - except for the odd times they pay enough attention to torture her - but she doesn't understand why. Maura considers herself to be a freak of nature, with her unusually pale skin and an aversion to the sun that renders her violently nauseous. Her belief is only worsened by the fact that almost everyone around her keeps their distance.

Nash Baxter is a liar. He's the famous skeptic who rides his motorcycle across the country debunking hauntings everywhere he goes. Yet he knows ghosts are real - suffering remnants of the departed, held fast to this world, and tormented by demons. Hell, it seems, exists all across the land, side-by-side with the living world. Nash has the power to see into that Hell and destroy the demons by a force of will. But sometimes demons fight back...When they do, they possess Nash and force him to commit murder.

A fascinating look into dimensions of murder that are often overlooked and undeveloped. Spree killing, in particular, is a crime that researchers have vacillated over in the past two decades or so, most notably when the FBI's 2005 consortium on Serial Homicide seemed to walk back from the concept because of the implications of the term "cooling off period."

Jackson Cooper, MD, will never forget that first day, its stunning conclusion forever etched in his mind. His year as a surgical intern is a story of medical suspense, tragedy, and occasional terror, as a young physician deals with the world of surgery. The surgeon’s knot is a surgical tie used in the operating room that the intern practices ceaselessly. The knot refers, as well, to the tangled world of the protagonist. Jackson’s life soon becomes burned-out, resulting from events beyond his control as well as destructive behavior.