After a student choir’s practice session at a Helsinki villa turns deadly, Detective Maria Kallio finds herself in the middle of the action - and her first murder case. Someone in the group wanted playboy Tommi Peltonen dead, but that’s one song these suspects refuse to sing. Behind the choir’s jovial facade lies bitter passion, and the victim’s seemingly perfect life hid a host of sins that made him a target of almost everyone in the villa. As a young female - and a redhead to boot - Maria knows that solving this case will help her overcome her perceived shortcoming in the eyes of her colleagues.

On the day Stockholm police officer Hanna Ahlander’s personal and professional lives crash, she takes refuge at her sister’s lodge in the Swedish ski resort paradise of Åre. But it’s a brief comfort. The entire village is shaken by the sudden vanishing of a local teenage girl. Hanna can’t help but investigate, and while searching for the missing person, she lands a job with the local police department. There she joins forces with Detective Inspector Daniel Lindskog, who has been tasked with finding the girl. Their only lead: a scarf in the snow.

A successful entrepreneur in the mushroom industry, Jaakko Kaunismaa is a man in his prime. At just 37 years of age, he is shocked when his doctor tells him that he's dying. What is more, the cause is discovered to be prolonged exposure to toxins; in other words, someone has slowly but surely been poisoning him. Determined to find out who wants him dead, Jaakko embarks on a suspenseful roller-coaster journey full of unusual characters, bizarre situations and unexpected twists.

When a body of a woman is discovered at a lighthouse in the Icelandic town of Akranes, it soon becomes clear that she’s no stranger to the area. Chief Investigating Officer Elma, who has returned to Akranes following a failed relationship, and her collegues Sævar and Hörður commence an uneasy investigation which uncovers a shocking secret in the dead woman’s past that continues to reverberate in the present day.

Our love story is simple. I met a gorgeous woman. We fell in love. We had kids. We moved to the suburbs. We told each other our biggest dreams and our darkest secrets. And then we got bored. We look like a normal couple. We're your neighbors, the parents of your kid's friend, the acquaintances with whom you keep meaning to get dinner. We all have our secrets to keeping a marriage alive. Ours just happens to be getting away with murder.

Two words: the bullet. That's all it takes to shatter her life. Caroline Cashion is beautiful, intelligent, a professor of French literature. But in a split second, everything she's known is proved to be a lie. A single bullet, gracefully tapered at one end, is found lodged at the base of her skull. Caroline is stunned. It makes no sense: She has never been shot. She has no entry wound, no scar. Then, over the course of one awful evening, she learns the truth.

Ten years ago in California, Daniel Pell, a self-styled Charles Manson, was sentenced to life in prison for murdering an entire family: husband, wife, and two children, plus one of his young male followers. He is brought to Salinas, California, to interview with Kathryn Dance after he is implicated in yet another killing. Things go terribly wrong during an interview break, and Pell escapes, intent on killing again.

They first met as college roommates and soon became inseparable, despite their many differences. Kate was beautiful, wild, wealthy, and damaged. Aubrey came from the wrong side of the tracks, and wanted more than anything to distance herself from her past. Jenny was brilliant, ambitious, and determined to win big at all costs. As an unlikely alliance formed, Kate, Aubrey, and Jenny swore they would always be friends. Twenty years later, the three women - all married, and deemed successful by any measure - are together again. But one of them is standing at the edge of a bridge.

Ollie Chandler is a brilliant and quick-witted homicide detective whose First Law is: "Things are not what they appear." So when a university professor is found murdered and the motive looks like revenge, a stunning discovery leads him to an unimaginable conclusion. Could the murderer be a fellow homicide detective? As Ollie probes deeper, another detective is murdered. What is the root of this jumbled, deceptive mess of lies and secrets?

A pipe bomb explodes at a birth control clinic, then a young client turns up dead in a dumpster. Kera, the clinic nurse, discovers that the girl’s Bible group is sharing more than the Good News. Confidentiality keeps her from telling the police, so she digs for the truth on her own—becoming the bomber’s new target. Meanwhile, Detective Jackson races to find the killer, fearing that his own daughter could be next.

Freshly trained detective Johannes "Hannes" Niehaus is brand new to the Criminal Investigation Department. And his partner, unconventional veteran detective Fritz Janssen, isn't the least bit thrilled to train a rookie. When a woman's body washes up on the nearby shores of the Baltic Sea, Hannes gets his first taste of real crime - and a chance to prove himself. Quickly the investigation pulls him and Fritz into a whirlpool of dangerous, decades-old cover-ups.

Berlin detective Jan Tommen expected to wake up with a hangover - not a murder charge. But a well-known judge has been brutally killed and hard evidence places Jan at the crime scene. When disturbing gaps in Jan’s memory make finding an alibi impossible, the case against him looks open and shut. Faced with life on the inside, Jan flees police custody to take refuge with an old friend deeply enmeshed in the capital’s seedy underworld.

Detective Mike McCabe moved from a top homicide job with the NYPD to Portland, Maine, to leave his failed marriage and suspicions of wrongdoing behind, and to find a more peaceful life for himself and his 13-year-old daughter. But the small New England city is not nearly as safe as he thought. On a warm September night, a missing high school athlete is found dead in a scrap-metal yard, her heart removed from her body with surgical precision. As outrage over the killing spreads, a young businesswoman disappears while out on a morning jog.

A murder in peak tourist season is enough to halt the lifeblood of any beach town: Tourism. So when not one but two grisly murders threaten to wreck Mayor Jim Whitlow’s town, not to mention his political ambitions, he and Police Chief Naomi Robinson enlist the help of local residents and retired FBI agents Chris Gordon and Vic Thompson to help them catch the serial killer. But every clue seems to lead to more questions than answers. Outside help causes tension on the force, and Chris and Vic find themselves once again battling the inter-agency drama they thought they’d left behind.

Nuclear brinksmanship, psychological warfare, spies, double agents, femmes fatales, and dead drops… The Cold War - a terrifying time when nuclear war between the world's two superpowers was an ever-present threat, an all-too-real possibility that could be set off at the touch of a button - provides a chilling backdrop to this collection of all-new short stories from today's most celebrated mystery writers.