When Angela met Jason Powell while catering a dinner party in East Hampton, she assumed their romance would be a short-lived fling, like so many relationships between locals and summer visitors. To her surprise, Jason, a brilliant economics professor at NYU, had other plans, and they married the following summer. For Angela, the marriage turned out to be a chance to reboot her life. She and her son were finally able to move out of her mother's home to Manhattan, where no one knew about her tragic past.

Two days ago, the Wilson family checked into the imposing, glass-fronted Lodge, surrounded by snow and perched perilously on the edge of a cliff looking out to a gray sea. Not everyone was looking forward to the family get-together. But mother-in-law Angela insisted the winter trip would help heal their rifts....

When Alexis and her husband Sam buy a neglected Cape Cod house in an exclusive DC suburb, they are ecstatic. Sam is on the cusp of making partner at his law firm, Alexis is pregnant with their second child, and their glamorous neighbors welcome the couple with open arms. Things are looking up, and Alexis believes she can finally leave her troubled past behind.

Julia Bennett has worked hard to create a stable life for her daughter, Cora, in Southern California. So when Cora leaves for college, the worst thing Julia expects on move-in day is an argument with her ex-husband and his new wife. But a sudden attack leaves the campus stunned—and only Julia’s quick actions save Cora’s life. Shaken in the aftermath, and haunted by a dark secret, Julia starts to wonder: What if the attack wasn’t as random as everyone believes?

Twenty years after a baby is stolen from a stroller, a woman is murdered in a care home. The two crimes are somehow linked, and a good bad girl may be the key to discovering the truth. Edith may have been tricked into a nursing home, but at eighty-years-young, she’s planning her escape. Patience works there, cleaning messes and bonding with Edith, a kindred spirit. But Patience is lying to Edith about almost everything. Edith’s own daughter, Clio, won’t speak to her. And someone new is about to knock on Clio’s door…and their intentions aren’t good.

Welcome to Stanhope. A safe neighborhood. A place for families. William Wooler is a family man, on the surface. But he’s been having an affair, an affair that ended horribly this afternoon at a motel up the road. So when he returns to his house, devastated and angry, to find his difficult nine-year-old daughter, Avery, unexpectedly home from school, William loses his temper. Hours later, Avery’s family declares her missing. Suddenly Stanhope doesn’t feel so safe. And William isn’t the only one on his street who’s hiding a lie.

A kid walks into your bookstore and says to you, Guess what? I'm your son. The one you put up for adoption seventeen years ago. The one you never told anyone about. Surprise! His name is Matthew Walker, and he's come to spend the summer on the Cape with his parents. Why? Well, he wants to meet you before he heads off to college in the fall. Tiny detail—he didn't tell his adoptive parents about his plan. And while you hoped this day would come someday, you're so stunned, you actually faint.

A therapist and self-help writer with all the answers, Sarah has just bought a gorgeous Victorian in the community of her dreams. Turns out you can get a killer deal on a house where someone was murdered. Plus, renovating Black Wood House makes for great blog content and a potent distraction from her failing marriage. Good thing nobody knows that her past is as tainted as the bloodstain on her bedroom floor.

Of course, I’m not going to murder her in the night. I need my laptop back first. That’s the whole point of making friends with Emily Harper, author of the hugely successful novel Diary of an Octopus. So I could get into her apartment and take back what’s mine. Emily doesn’t know who I really am. She thinks I’m her biggest fan, her new best friend who happens to need a place to stay for a few days. She doesn’t realize the laptop she found—and took—from a busy airport almost two years ago was mine. I don’t care about the laptop, just what's on it: my diary.

Catherine Sterling thinks she knows her mother. Ruth Sterling is quiet, hardworking, and lives for her daughter. All her life, it's been just the two of them against the world. But now, Catherine is ready to spread her wings, move from home, and begin a new career. And Ruth Sterling will do anything to prevent that from happening.

Twenty-two-year-old Olivia has been missing for one day…and counting. She was last seen on CCTV, entering a dead-end alley. And not coming back out again. Julia, the detective heading up the search for Olivia, thinks she knows what to expect. A desperate family, a ticking clock, and long hours away from her husband and daughter. But she has no idea just how close to home this case is going to get.

It was meant to be Caitlin's perfect summer, but betrayed by her best friend and her boyfriend, she finds herself hitchhiking home alone, heartbroken, and penniless. When a smiling family pulls up on the roadside to help her on her way, she's relieved at first - they seem friendly, normal. And when they offer her a warm bed in their cottage for the night, she's grateful - it's not safe for young women travelling alone in the dark, and she's in no rush to get home, where she knows a grave secret is due to blow her family apart.

Leonora, known to some as Lee and others as Nora, is a reclusive crime writer, unwilling to leave her nest of an apartment unless it is absolutely necessary. When a friend she hasn't seen or spoken to in years unexpectedly invites Nora ( Lee) to a weekend away in an eerie glass house deep in the English countryside, she reluctantly agrees to make the trip. Forty-eight hours later, she wakes up in a hospital bed injured but alive, with the knowledge that someone is dead.

Grace Holloway keeps to herself. Since narrowly escaping death at the hands of the man who kidnapped her, she’s thrown herself into the small inn she runs in Rock Harbor, Maine. It’s quiet, quaint and, in the off-season, completely isolated—the perfect place for Grace to keep her own secrets. But Grace isn’t the only one with something to hide, and Rock Harbor isn’t just a sleepy vacation town. Someone is taking young women—girls who look an awful lot like Grace did when she was kidnapped so many years ago.

The residents of the exclusive cul-de-sac on Alton Road are entangled in a web of secrets and scandal utterly unknown to the outside world, and even to each other. On the night of the annual summer block party, there has been a murder. But, who did it, and why, takes listeners back one year earlier, as rivalries and betrayals unfold. The real danger lies within their own block and nothing—and no one—is ever as it seems.

Since her husband’s unsolved murder three years ago, Iris Blodgett’s life has unraveled. Awash in grief and buried in debt, she can’t pay her mortgage—and now that she’s lost her job, she has no idea how she’ll provide for her unruly teenage daughter, Ellory. Facing eviction, Iris turns to her new beau, prominent architect Hugh Smoll, for a shoulder to cry on. But the seemingly perfect Hugh offers her something more: an invitation to move in to his mother’s centuries-old mansion while he renovates the property.

Interim sheriff Elizabeth "Bet" Rivers has always had one repeat nightmare: a shadowy figure throwing a suspicious object into her hometown lake in Collier, Washington. For the longest time, she chalked it up to an overactive imagination as a kid. Then the report arrives. In the woods of the Cascade mountain range, right in her jurisdiction, a body floats to the surface of Lake Collier. When the body is extricated and revealed, no one can identify Jane Doe. But someone must know the woman, so why aren't they coming forward?

On a summer's night in 1994, 16-year-old Flora Powell vanished from her sleepy seaside town without a trace. Their hearts shattered, Flora’s mother, her sister Heather, and Heather’s best friend Jess had to somehow carry on not knowing what happened. Twenty-five years later, tragedy strikes again when Heather walks into a stranger's house and allegedly kills two people in cold blood. Why would this loving wife and doting new mother commit such a heinous crime? Jess, now a reporter, returns to the hometown she left behind to cover the case and dig for answers.

It started the night journalist Briar Thorne’s mother died in their rambling old mansion on Chicago’s South Side. The nightmares of a woman in white pleading to come home, music switched on in locked rooms, and the panicked fear of being swallowed by the dark…Bri has almost convinced herself that these stirrings of dread are simply manifestations of grief and not the beyond-world of ghostly impossibilities her mother believed in. And more tangible terrors still lurk outside the decaying Victorian greystone.

When Angela met Jason Powell while catering a dinner party in East Hampton, she assumed their romance would be a short-lived fling, like so many relationships between locals and summer visitors. To her surprise, Jason, a brilliant economics professor at NYU, had other plans, and they married the following summer. For Angela, the marriage turned out to be a chance to reboot her life. She and her son were finally able to move out of her mother's home to Manhattan, where no one knew about her tragic past.

When Cyra Griffin’s younger sister is murdered by a serial killer, Cyra knows better than to expect justice from the hands of the police department. With the investigation already dying its own slow death, Cyra follows the blood trail and finds her own way forward. Using insider information (don’t ask), Cyra infiltrates a support group for serial killers by pretending to be one herself in the hopes of finding the person who ended her sister’s life. Proving herself to them comes at a cost, but it’s one Cyra is willing to pay in the name of revenge.

“Come home.” Vera’s mother called and Vera obeyed. In spite of their long estrangement, in spite of the memories — she's come back to the home of a serial killer. Back to face the love she had for her father and the bodies he buried there, beneath the house he'd built for his family.

Leila Syed receives a call that cleaves her life in two. Her brother-in-law’s voice is filled with panic. His son’s nursery has called to ask where little Max is. Leila was supposed to drop Max off that morning. But she forgot. Racing to the carpark, she grasps the horror of what she has done. What follows is an explosive, high-profile trial that will tear the family apart. But as the case progresses it becomes clear there’s more to this incident than meets the eye.

Camille Gardener is a grieving - and angry - mother who, five years after her daughter’s death, is still obsessed with the privileged young man she believes to be responsible. When her rash actions draw the attention of a secret group of women - the collective - Camille is drawn into a dark web where these mothers share their wildly different stories of loss as well as their desire for justice in a world where privilege denies accountability. Fueled by mutual rage, the collective members devise and act out retribution fantasies via anonymous, highly coordinated revenge killings.

Travis Wren has an unusual talent for locating missing people. Often hired by families as a last resort, he takes on the case of Maggie St. James—a well-known author of dark, macabre children’s books—and is soon led to a place many believed to be only a legend. Called Pastoral, this reclusive community was founded in the 1970s by like-minded people searching for a simpler way of life. By all accounts, the commune shouldn’t exist anymore and soon after Travis stumbles upon it…he disappears. Just like Maggie St. James.

The lives of the Barretts, a normal suburban New England family, are torn apart when 14-year-old Marjorie begins to display signs of acute schizophrenia. To her parents' despair, the doctors are unable to stop Marjorie's descent into madness. As their stable home devolves into a house of horrors, they reluctantly turn to a local Catholic priest for help. Father Wanderly suggests an exorcism; he believes the vulnerable teenager is the victim of demonic possession.

Poe Webb, host of a popular true crime podcast, invites people to anonymously confess crimes they’ve committed to her audience. She can’t guarantee the police won’t come after her “guests,” but her show grants simultaneous anonymity and instant fame—a potent combination that’s proven difficult to resist. After an episode recording, Poe usually erases both criminal and crime from her mind. But when a strange and oddly familiar man appears on her show, Poe is forced to take a second look.

Scarlett Clark is an exceptional English professor. But she’s even better at getting away with murder. Every year, Dr. Clark searches for the worst man at Gorman University - professor, student, or otherwise - and plots his well-deserved demise. Thanks to her meticulous planning, she’s avoided drawing attention to herself…but as she’s preparing for her biggest kill yet, the school starts probing into the growing body count on campus.

Restauranteur Paddy Swann was the life of the party until the day a man pushed him in the path of an oncoming train, leaving his twenty-something daughter Ash and wife Nina devastated. Shortly after Paddy’s funeral, the two women receive a surprise in the mail: a note and package from Nick Radcliffe, an old friend of Paddy’s, and a nondescript lighter that once belonged to him decades ago. This unexpected gift draws Nick and Nina closer together—much to Ash’s dismay.

Meg Russo was behind the wheel when it happened. She and her husband Justin were driving their daughter Lily to Ithaca College, the family celebrating the eighteen-year-old music prodigy’s future. Then a car swerved up beside them, the young men inside it behaving bizarrely—and Meg lost control of her own vehicle. The family road trip turned into a tragedy. Justin didn’t survive the accident.