Even for the sleazy backwater of Cooper, Nebraska, the multiple murder of an entire family, brutally bludgeoned to death in their beds, is big news. Detective Joe Finch, raw with guilt over his partner’s traumatic shooting during a routine traffic stop, hopes the case will at least focus his mind. But then he discovers that the crime scene is the house he grew up in, and the ghosts of his own tragic childhood come rushing back to confront him.

College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same. Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran-and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.

John Hart creates a literary thriller that is as suspenseful as it is poignant, a riveting murder mystery layered beneath the southern drawl of a humble North Carolina lawyer. When Work Pickens finds his father murdered, the investigation pushes a repressed family history to the surface and he sees his own carefully constructed facade begin to crack.

For fans of Louise Penny, C. J. Box, and Nevada Barr comes a haunting crime novel set in Glacier National Park, where one man finds himself on a collision course with the dark heart of the wild and the even darker heart of human nature.

On an icy winter's day in southwest Michigan, Grace Abbot wakes up as the survivor of a car crash. But she's left with a traumatic brain injury and a terrifying reality: she can't remember anything. Left in the care of her sister, Grace returns to the family's secluded old farmhouse to recover - but within an hour of her return, the police arrive. Grace's boyfriend has been murdered. Without any memory, Grace has no alibi.

No one is more familiar with Savannah's dark side than homicide detective and native resident Elise Sandburg. She's been haunted for years by her own mysterious past: She was abandoned as a baby in one of the city's ancient cemeteries, and it’s rumored that she is the illegitimate daughter of an infamous Savannah witch doctor. The local Gullah culture of voodoo and magic is one that few outsiders can understand, least of all Elise’s new partner.

She only stepped outside for a minute… But a minute was all it took to turn Jean Kingsley’s world upside down - a minute she’d regret for the rest of her life. Stepping into her worst nightmare…Because when she returned, she found an open bedroom window and her three-year-old son, Nathan, gone. The boy would never be seen again. A nightmare that only got worse. A tip eventually leads detectives to their killer, a repeat sex offender, and inside his apartment, a gruesome discovery. A slam-dunk trial sends him off to death row, then several years later, to the electric chair.

Investigative journalist Laura Chambers is back in her tiny hometown of Hillsborough, North Carolina, the one place she swore never to return. Fired from The Boston Globe, her career in shambles, she reluctantly takes a job with the local paper. The work is simple, unimportant, and worst of all, boring - at least until a missing girl turns up dead, the body impeccably clean, dressed to be the picture of innocence. Years earlier, 10-year-old Patty Finch left home and never made it back. But for the people of Hillsborough, Patty was just the beginning.

Cameron Dawson’s got a past he can’t seem to shake, but he’s hoping to change that. He’s moved back home to Faith, New Mexico, and taken a job as assistant sheriff. What he doesn’t realize is that his newest nightmare’s about to begin. Strange things are happening. People are disappearing, and for others, it’s far worse...

College students Eric and Lydia are looking for a novel way to spend Halloween. They decide to put together a documentary about the supernatural and take a camcorder into the long-abandoned house on Kenwood Drive. It's said that a vengeful spirit lives there, and Lydia thinks it the perfect location. Eric, though, has his reservations. Having grown up in the area, he's familiar with the stories of the spirit they call the "Upside-Down Man", and as their trip to the house draws near, his fear begins to mount.

Who is NYPD Detective Damien Drake? For starters, he’s an alcoholic with PTSD; a man who doesn’t play well with others and could care less about political correctness. But he’s also the one they call in when the most heinous crimes are committed by the city’s most sadistic murderers. He’s the one they bring in when there are no clues, no evidence, and the killer shows no remorse. He's the one enlisted to keep the streets of New York City safe. Just don’t get on his bad side because he’s also the one detective in New York that you don’t want as an enemy....

Former NYPD detective Charlie "Bird" Parker is on the verge of madness. Tortured by the unsolved slayings of his wife and young daughter, he is a man consumed by guilt, regret, and the desire for revenge. When his former partner asks him to track down a missing girl, Parker finds himself drawn into a world beyond his imagining - one where 30 year old killings remain shrouded in fear and lies, a world where the ghosts of the dead torment the living....

Afton Morrison, 26, is a small-town children’s librarian by day, on a murderous mission to make the world a better place by night. From the hunt for a violent sexual predator to the last stand against her tormentor, The Afton Morrison Series delves into a world of moral ambiguity and is told in four thrilling parts. Packed with suspense, grit, and action, this collection delivers an unlikely heroine in the form of a disturbed vigilante murderess....

What's a girl to do when her imprisoned brother begs her to delve into their father's 16-year-old murder conviction? How about peel back the lies, upend the fairy tales, and roil the populace of Lavitte - a sweet apple of a town with a wormy, festering core? That's what Allison Fennimore chooses. Despite her infamous surname and people's wilted memories, this jaded cynic of a daughter sinks her teeth in and refuses to let go.

Detective Jane Harper can't shake the image of the young woman discovered in a field - eyes closed, a crown of woven vines on her head. She expects macabre murders like this in her native San Francisco, not here. Jane and her partner, Stu, vow to catch the killer, but in this town, that's easier said than done. The police department is in the grips of a wide-reaching scandal that could topple the entire force, and Jane and Stu face a series of dead ends. Until they meet Ida Lane.

Ellery Hathaway knows a thing or two about serial killers, but not through her police training. She's an officer in sleepy Woodbury, Massachusetts, where a bicycle theft still makes the newspapers. No one there knows she was once victim number 17 in the grisly story of serial killer Francis Michael Coben. The only victim who lived. When three people disappear from her town in three years, all around her birthday - the day she was kidnapped so long ago - Ellery fears someone knows her secret. Someone very dangerous.

The village of Saint-Ferdinand has all the trappings of a quiet life. Though if an out-of-towner stopped in, they would notice one unusual thing - a cemetery far too large and much too full for such a small town, lined with the victims of the Saint-Ferdinand Killer, who has eluded police for nearly two decades. It's not until after Inspector Stephen Crowley finally catches the killer that the town discovers even darker forces are at play.

He performs his profane ceremony in a wooded Minneapolis park, anointing his victims, then setting the bodies ablaze. He has already claimed three lives, and he won't stop there. Only this time there is a witness. But she isn't talking. Enter Kate Conlan, former FBI agent turned victim/witness advocate. Not even she can tell if the reluctant witness is a potential victim or something more troubling still.

At first, they struggle to escape. Then a torrent of blows rains down upon their bodies until their eyes cloud over in final agony. The killer shows no remorse - just a twisted need to witness each victim's last terrified moments. Public defender Rachel Wainwright is struggling to reopen a decades-old case, convinced that the wrong man is in prison. Homicide detective Deke Morgan doesn't want to agree. But if Rachel's hunch is correct, whoever fatally bludgeoned young, beautiful Annie Dawson 30 years ago could be the source of a new string of brutal slayings.

All ATF Agent Jack Donovan wants out of life is to do his job and work on his strained relationship with his daughter Jessie after a nasty divorce. But in a ruthless act of revenge by a charismatic madman, Jessie is kidnapped and buried alive, with barely enough oxygen to sustain her. Now the only man who can save her, the only man who knows where to find her, has just been shot dead - and the clock is ticking... So what's a father to do?

On a quiet summer morning, 17-year-old American exchange student Quinn Perkins stumbles out of the woods near the small French town of St. Roch. She is barefoot, bloodied, and unable to say what has happened to her; Quinn's appearance creates quite a stir, especially since the Blavettes - the French family with whom she's been staying - have mysteriously disappeared. Now the media, and everyone in the idyllic village, are wondering if the American girl had anything to do with her host family's disappearance.

When bizarre and cryptic messages are found on a pair of corpses in Mobile, Alabama, junior police detective Carson Ryder and veteran cop Harry Nautilus find themselves in a mysterious public-relations quagmire pitting public safety against office politics. With the body count growing, Ryder must confront his family's terrifying past by seeking advice from his brother, a violent psychopath convicted of similarly heinous crimes.

Dr. Sheila Tao is a professor of psychology, an expert in human behavior with her own hidden past. But she's not the only one keeping secrets. When Sheila began an affair with her sexy graduate assistant Ethan Wolfe, she knew she was playing with fire. Consumed by lust when they were together, she was riddled with guilt when they were apart. Now she's finally engaged to a good man, and it's time to end the dangerous liaison. But Ethan has something different in mind. He intends to make her pay for rejecting him.

Someone is knocking at the door to Grace Adams' house, and he won't stop. Grace thinks she knows who it is, but when she goes to her second floor window for a look she sees a woman she doesn't recognize. The woman isn't alone for long before a man emerges from the dark of the surrounding woods, stabs her, and leaves her for dead. Trying to help, Grace goes to the woman and is shocked to find that it's her mother Leanne - a woman who abandoned her 11 years before.

With novels like Mystic River and Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane has dramatically altered the landscape of the crime thriller—while boldly overstepping the boundaries that have long separated mystery from literature. Now two of his sensational early novels have been combined in a single volume—two gritty and mesmerizing masterworks of suspense featuring the private eye duo of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro.

Former NYPD detective Charlie "Bird" Parker is on the verge of madness. Tortured by the unsolved slayings of his wife and young daughter, he is a man consumed by guilt, regret, and the desire for revenge. When his former partner asks him to track down a missing girl, Parker finds himself drawn into a world beyond his imagining - one where 30 year old killings remain shrouded in fear and lies, a world where the ghosts of the dead torment the living....

Haunted by a series of horrifying and violent episodes in their past, Grace McBride and the oddball crew of her software company, Monkeewrench, create a computer game where the killer is always caught, where the good guys always win. But their game becomes a nightmare when someone starts duplicating the fictional murders in real life, down to the last detail.

No one knows where the Tufa came from or how they ended up in the mountains of east Tennessee. When the first Europeans came to the Smoky Mountains, the Tufa were already there. Dark-haired and enigmatic, they live quietly in the hills and valleys of Cloud County, their origins lost to history. But there are clues in their music, hidden in the songs they have passed down for generations.

Half Inuit and half outsider, Edie Kiglatuk is the best guide in her corner of the Arctic. But as a woman, she gets only grudging respect from the elders who rule her isolated community on Ellesmere Island. When a man is shot and killed while out on an “authentic” Arctic adventure under her watch, the murder attracts the attention of police sergeant Derek Palliser. As Edie sets out to discover what those tourists were really after, she is shocked by the suicide of someone very close to her.

Another freezing winter descends in seeming peace upon the Northern Ontario lake where realtor Belle Palmer lives genteelly with her dog, tropical fishes and classic film collection. But the snow-laden tranquility is tragically disturbed when a good friend is lost in a freak snowmobile accident on an isolated lake. Or so it seems. Belle and others suspect foul play, but a motive and a criminal prove hard to find. Resort owners, anti-environmentalists and the new local drug dealers may all have had reason to want Jim Burian quietly removed, and information isn't forthcoming.