A decade ago, fourteen-year-old Suzanne Lombard, the daughter of Benjamin Lombard - then a senator, now a powerful vice president running for the presidency - disappeared in the most sensational missing-person case in the nation's history. Still unsolved, the mystery remains a national obsession. For legendary hacker and marine Gibson Vaughn, the case is personal - Suzanne Lombard had been like a sister to him.

When Marshall McEwan left his hometown at age 18, he vowed never to return. The trauma that drove him away ultimately spurred him to become one of the most successful journalists in Washington DC. But just as the political chaos in the nation’s capital lifts him to new heights, Marshall is forced to return home in spite of his boyhood vow. His father is dying, his mother is struggling to keep the family newspaper from failing, and the town is in the midst of an economic rebirth that might be built upon crimes that reach into the state capitol - and perhaps even to Washington.

When former prosecutor Penn Cage returns to his hometown of Natchez, Mississippi, he doesn't find the peace he desperately craves. He finds that his own father is being blackmailed by a corrupt ex-cop. And when Penn investigates, he uncovers a murderous secret - and the small town's violent past.

In her career as an Army intelligence officer, Amy Cornwall has seen haunting sights half a world away. None compare to the chilling scene at her Virginia home. It is empty. A phone rings with a terrifying ultimatum: locate and liberate an unnamed captive in 48 hours, or her kidnapped husband and 10-year-old daughter are dead. Now, and in open defiance of Army Command, Amy must employ every lethal tactic she has to save them. To succeed, she must discover not only who dispatched her on this mission, but why. Without her family, she's dead anyway.

Michael Fiske broke the law when he took Rufus Harms's prison letter from the Supreme Court. But he also sealed his own fate. Now Michael's brother, a cop turned attorney, is coming to Washington to find out why his brother was murdered - and what it had to do with a crime that Rufus Harms committed 25 years before.

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.

Not every crime is committed with intent, but each has one thing in common: The guilty party was asking for trouble. In "Making Ends Meet", Richard can’t stand the idea of supporting his deadbeat in-laws anymore, so he decides to remove them from his life - permanently. Matt is ready to reform his brawling ways, but the group he joins doesn’t turn out to be a typical 12-step program, in "The Taskmasters". "Protecting the Innocent" features Nick, who fails to heed the warnings of his girlfriend’s possessive brother....

Fans of mysteries, thrillers, and suspense will enjoy these fast-moving stories of murder, greed, and treason, the cast of colorful characters, and their setting in and around historic St. Paul, Minnesota. This bundle includes First Case, The St. Paul Conspiracy, and Deadly Stillwater.

Detective Morgan Reynolds thought her nightmare was over when serial killer Gerald "The Slasher" Tate was sent to prison for her husband's murder. But she was wrong. The Slasher has escaped and he's making it even more personal this time. Tate has kidnapped her son and is giving her 72 hours to find the answers he wants, or Jared dies.

There are run-of-the-mill eccentric Californians, and then there's former detective Charlie Waldo. Waldo, a onetime LAPD superstar, now lives in solitude deep in the woods. He has left behind his career and his girlfriend, Lorena, to pay self-imposed penance for an awful misstep on an old murder case. But the old ghosts are about to come roaring back. Waldo agrees to look into the death of Alastair Pinch's wife. But after such a long time away from both civilization and sleuthing, Waldo must navigate complicated webs of ego and deceit to clear Alastair's name... or confirm his guilt.

Diverse, provocative, eerie, and twisted, this collection of Jeffery Deaver's best crime stories exhibits amazing range and the signature plot twists that have made him a perennial best seller. With nods to O. Henry and Edgar Allen Poe, these beautifully crafted pieces are suspenseful spoonfuls of Deaver at his best. Listeners will be surprised by the subtlety of some of these stories and, as always, by the plot surprises.

An army vet and former bodyguard for the rich and famous, Jessie Mercado has faced all kinds of danger and always emerged victorious. But one thing this motorcycle-riding private investigator has never encountered before is an incarceration consultant. Preparing wealthy people to go to prison is big business. When Owen Blake of Mamertine Consulting hires Mercado to find his missing partner, her suspect list is filled with recently released white-collar criminals, a few drug kingpins, and a couple of murderers to keep things interesting.

The FBI doesn't believe it. The governor wants the problem to disappear. But Agent Judy Maddox knows the threat is real: an extreme group of ecoterrorists has the means and the know-how to set off a massive earthquake of epic proportions. For California, time is running out. Now Maddox is scrambling to hunt down a petty criminal turned cult leader turned homicidal mastermind. Because she knows that the dying has already begun.

When Phil Kramer is shot dead on a deserted suburban street in the middle of the night, his wife, Emily, is left with an emptied bank account and a lot of questions. How could Phil leave her penniless? What was he going to do with the money? And, most of all, who was he if he wasn't the man she thought she married?

Jerry Hobart has some questions of his own. It's none of his business why he was hired to kill Phil Kramer. But now that he's been ordered to take out Kramer's widow, he figures there's a bigger secret at work - and maybe a bigger payoff.

It was inescapably chilling, as if the murderer was methodically working his way down a page torn from the phone book. The three victims brutally killed in their own homes had one thing in common: They were all listed as M. Douglas. The fact that Mara Douglas is next on the list has her jumping at shadows, until FBI agent Aidan Shields shows up to make sure she doesn't become the fourth victim.

In the year 2038, an act of bioengineered terrorism decimated humanity. Those who survived were either completely unaffected or developed horrible mutations. Across the globe, nations are now divided between areas populated by “norms” and lands run by "mutants" - Detective Cassandra Lee of Los Angeles's Special Investigative Section has built a fierce reputation taking down some of the city's most notorious criminals.

It was inescapably chilling, as if the murderer was methodically working his way down a page torn from the phone book. The three victims brutally killed in their own homes had one thing in common: They were all listed as M. Douglas. The fact that Mara Douglas is next on the list has her jumping at shadows, until FBI agent Aidan Shields shows up to make sure she doesn't become the fourth victim.

At last, the enigmatic partner of Elvis Cole (The Two Minute Rule) takes center stage in this pulse-racing thriller. When Joe Pike is charged with safeguarding a wealthy heiress, he discovers protecting the sole witness to a crime is nothing compared to protecting an LA party girl from her own self-destruction.... Larkin Conner Barkley lives like the City of Angels is hers for the taking. Then suddenly she sees another car’s metal-on-metal explosion of a terrible accident and, dazed, finds herself the single witness in a secret federal investigation.

Alan Gregory is a clinical psychologist with a thriving practice in Boulder, Colorado. His life begins to unravel when one of his female patients is found in an apparent suicide and the local paper begins printing accusations from an unnamed source of sexual impropriety between the woman and Dr. Gregory. He launches a psychological and personal quest for the truth that rapidly intensifies when more of his patients die untimely deaths, and Gregory suspects not only that the deaths are related but that another one of his patients may be somehow involved. Lacking facts but roused by suspicion and troubled by seemingly random acts of terror around him, Gregory starts to fear for the safety of the people he loves. The question of the inviolability of confidential disclosures made to Gregory by his patients - privileged information - becomes crucial as the psychologist pursues an unsettling romance with Lauren Crowder, a lovely deputy district attorney investigating one of the deaths. Bound to silence, Gregory follows the psychological tracks of someone he fears may be a cunning and disturbed killer, while turning to his enigmatic but supportive partner, Diane Estevez, for counsel, and to his tart-tongued female urologist neighbor for support. The sinister, surprising drama unfolds against Boulder's Rocky Mountain backdrop, in the arresting natural beauty of Aspen, and in the midst of a baroque Halloween costume party in downtown Boulder. Finally, in a lonely mountain lodge enshrouded in menace, the story comes to its breathtaking climax.

Lt. Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont, police force has a serious problem: in a community where a decade could pass without a single murder, the body count is suddenly mounting. Innocent citizens are being killed - and others set up - seemingly orchestrated by a mysterious ski-masked man. Signs suggest that a three-year-old murder trial might lie at the heart of things, but it's a case that many in the department would prefer remained closed. A man of quiet integrity, Lt. Gunther knows that he must pursue the case to its conclusion, wherever it leads.

Four bodies, each with a single bullet wound in the back of the head, stacked like cordwood in a weed-choked vacant lot: That's the front-page news facing Carter Ross, investigative reporter with the Newark Eagle-Examiner. Immediately dispatched to the scene, Carter learns that the four victims - an exotic dancer, a drug dealer, a hustler, and a mama's boy - came from different parts of the city and didn't seem to know one another.

Corporate auditor Sam Keller, careful to a fault, has decided to live it up for a change. And what better spot for business-class hedonism than the boomtown of Dubai, where resort islands materialize from open ocean, fortunes are made overnight, and skiers crisscross the snowy slopes of a shopping mall. But when a colleague is murdered during a night on the town, Sam soon finds himself waist-deep in a bewildering, lethal mix of mobsters, prostitutes, and crooked cops.

Sometimes a man can be redeemed. But not in the way he expects. Jason Stafford is a former Wall Street hotshot who made some bad moves, paid the price with two years in prison, and is now trying to put his life back together. He’s unemployable, until an investment firm asks him to look into possible problems left by a junior trader who died recently in an accident. What he discovers is big - there are problems, all right, the kind that get you killed. But it’s not his only concern. Stafford has another quest as well: to reclaim his five-year-old son, "the Kid", from his unstable ex-wife, and then learn just what it means to make a life with him.

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.

Police Sergeant Lou Boldt heads a special task force within Seattle’s Homicide bureau. His job: find and stop the Cross Killer, a twisted, perverse serial murderer who has eluded police for six months and paralyzed the city. But when a body washes up on the shore of Puget Sound, Boldt thinks the killer has finally made a mistake. This body shows some of the work of the Cross Killer - but a job badly botched. Did this woman die while trying to escape? Did she knowingly jump in the water to preserve a clue? And is she now desperately trying to tell Boldt something?

It looked for all the world like a terrible, tragic accident. Susanna Morgan had gotten up in the middle of the night, tripped, fallen, and broken her neck. Yet when detective Justin Westwood inspects the victim's apartment, he can't help noticing that the details don't quite add up. The glass on the bedside table is knocked over but there are no cuts on her body. The scrape on her knee looks suspiciously fresh. And then a terrified witness comes forward, confirming his worst fear.

Chemistry grad student Kevin Hamilton is sure his advisor Michael Ward's death in a suspicious fire was no accident. The young PhD candidate received a cryptic message from Ward just before the fatal blaze - a warning that their recent collaboration on a supposedly failed experiment had actually brought about one of the most important discoveries of the century: Adamas, a chemical process worth billions, and one with the potential to topple entire industries.

Compelling Evidence Paul Madriani was once a promising associate with the prestigious Potter, Skarpellos law firm, co-founded by his mentor, Ben Potter. But after a scandalous affair with Ben's wife, Talia, Paul left the firm to begin a brilliant career as a criminal defense attorney. Ben's impeccable reputation has made him a leading candidate for the Supreme Court, until he is found dead on the eve of the nomination, and Talia becomes the prime suspect.

FBI agent Jessica Blackwood believes she's left her complicated life as a gifted magician behind her - until a killer with seemingly supernatural powers puts her talents to the ultimate test. A hacker who identifies himself only as "Warlock" brings down the FBI's website and posts a code in its place that leads to a Michigan cemetery, where a dead girl is discovered rising from the ground - as if she tried to crawl out of her own grave.

L.A. police detective Shane Scully comes under investigation by Internal Affairs (derisively known as "the tin collectors") after he kills his ex-partner who was one of the mayor's bodyguards. Temporarily reassigned, so that he can remain under the department's watchful eye, Scully finds that more than his badge is at stake when he is set up to take the rap in a deadly plot of corruption and conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of the LAPD.