Crime Mystery Fiction

Dan has joined the backpacker trail in far South East Asia. He wants nothing but peace, and to relax. But trouble finds him soon enough. Kimberly Smith is a CIA agent. She is flown into Myanmar to help locate another CIA agent, missing in action. When Dan saves Kim from an ambush, their fates become entwined. Ignoring the instant spark between them, Dan leaves her alone. But when Kim is attacked and abducted before his eyes, he defends her with all his might. They escape, but they are now pawns in a CIA operation that could bring the world's two superpowers to a global conflict.

When retired homicide detective Thomas Prescott learns he’s inherited a 250-acre farm in Tarrin, Missouri (pop. 2,100), he can’t get there fast enough. As he slowly acclimates to small-town living, he hears rumblings about a horrific crime in the town’s past. Four years earlier, a recently fired employee of the local grocery store enacted his revenge, shooting and killing the owner of the store, plus four customers, then turning the gun on himself. The crime appears to have been solved, but Prescott has his doubts.

Internationally best-selling author Tim Dorsey's irreverent and hilarious novels starring evil genius Serge A. Storms, lovable psychiatric hospital escapee, zoom along at breakneck speed, delivering laughs and shocks in droves.

Since his debut novel, the modern classic The Ghosts of Belfast, was published a decade ago, Stuart Neville has published eight other critically acclaimed novels and achieved international recognition as one of crime fictions great living writers. Now for the first time Neville offers listeners a collection of his short fiction - 12 chilling stories that traverse and blend the genres of noir, horror, and speculative fiction and which bring the history and lore of Neville's native Northern Ireland to glittering life.

The legendary writer Patricia Highsmith is best remembered today for her chilling psychological thrillers The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train. A critically acclaimed, best-selling author in Europe, Highsmith has for too long been underappreciated in the United States. Eleven is Highsmith's first collection of short stories, an arresting group of dark masterpieces of obsession and foreboding, violence and instability.

Tim and Susannah have ordinary lives on the surface. He's a mortician for whom death is a serious business, and she's a chef who really knows her way around a knife. And if the neighbors in their small Midwestern town knew of her dark hobby, they'd run for the hills. Raised by an apathetic mother and a cruel father, Susannah was bullied and pushed to her breaking point long before she met mild-mannered Tim, and learned to channel her murderous impulses into a strange form of art, which keeps her clueless husband safe...for now.

First came the floods. Then came the bodies. The victims - strangled, then buried along the shores of the Mississippi - have finally been unearthed years after they disappeared. He remembers every satisfying kill - each woman's terror and agony. But there's only one he truly wanted. And fate has brought her within reach again. Jaci Patterson was 16 when she found the first golden locket on her porch. Inside were a few strands of hair wrapped around a scrap of bloodstained ribbon. Though the "gifts" kept arriving, no one believed her hunch that a serial killer was at work.

“Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the listener. Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.

Trick Baby tells the story of White Folks, a blue-eyed, light-haired con artist whose pale skin allows him to pass in the streets as a white man. Folks is tormented early in life, rejected by other children and branded a "trick baby," a child conceived between a hooker and her trick. Refusing to abandon his life in the ghetto and a chance at revenge, Folks is taken under the wing of an older mentor, Blue. What happens next is unbelievable.

Drake Woolf is the perfect throwaway agent - a deadly, invisible force able to handle the blackest of black-ops missions. No one's better when it comes to search and destroy. But his lethal drive feeds a relentless hunger. It's all his handlers at Task Force Orange can do to point him at the right targets. This time, he's up against a massive, global conspiracy. In his deadly crosshairs are a Venezuelan terrorist, hordes of elite Iranian assassins, and a beautiful and wily FBI counterintelligence agent.

Deadly Edge bids a brutal adieu to the 1960s as Parker robs a rock concert, and the heist goes south. Soon Parker finds himself - and his woman, Claire - menaced by a pair of sadistic, drug-crazed hippies. Parker has a score to settle while Claire’s armed with her first rifle - and they’re both ready to usher in the end of the Age of Aquarius.

It's Christmas and the well-born guests who have gathered at Applecross for a delicious weekend of relaxation are warmed by roaring fires, mistletoe, and gorgeously wrapped gifts. It's scarcely the setting for misfortune, and no one - not even that clever young aristocrat and budding sleuth Vespasia Cumming-Gould - anticipates the tragedy that is to darken this light-hearted holiday house party. But soon one young woman lies dead, a suicide, and Vespasia must uncover the heartbreaking truth behind the tragedy.

Who killed Gray Mitchell? Gray Mitchell’s body is found buried under fresh snowfall in the early hours of the morning outside Stromford Cathedral. DI Jim Neal and DS Ava Merry are called in to investigate. It seems that a number of people had motives to kill him, including Mitchell's partner. Then another shocking act of violence occurs, also connected to the cathedral. Detectives Neal and Merry’s investigation reveals an intricate web of secrets connecting the crimes. But there is something the detectives have missed, the dark secret which can break open the case.

Ever since The Burglar on the Prowl climbed the best seller lists in 2004, fans have been clamoring for a new book featuring the lighthearted and light-fingered Bernie Rhodenbarr. Now everybody's favorite burglar returns in an 11th adventure that finds him and his lesbian sidekick Carolyn Kaiser breaking into houses, apartments, and even a museum, in a madcap adventure replete with American Colonial silver, an F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscript, a priceless portrait, and a remarkable array of buttons. And, wouldn't you know it, there's a dead body, all stretched out on a Trent Barling carpet....

As the Avenger of Blood systematically executes guilty rapists and the lawyers who finagled their freedom, a reporter has visions of this relentless vigilante in action. To her amazement, she soon finds herself in the slammer, accused of being the notorious serial killer. Deep in despair, she retains an attorney who specializes in the insanity plea.

It's been two years since the events of Gangsterland, when legendary Chicago hit man Sal Cupertine disappeared into the guise of Vegas rabbi David Cohen. It's September 2001, and for David everything is coming up gold: temple membership is on the rise, the new private school is raking it in, and the mortuary and cemetery - where Cohen has been laundering bodies for the mob - is minting cash. But Sal wants out.

At the start of another pitiless winter, the wolves have come for the children of Keelut. Three children have been taken from this isolated Alaskan village, including the six-year-old son of Medora and Vernon Slone. Saken with grief and seeking consolation, Medora contacts nature writer and wolf expert Russell Core. Sixty years old, ailing in both body and spirit, and estranged from his daughter and wife, Core arrives in Keelut to investigate the killings.

Fellow orphans, amateur vigilantes, and members of the Santitos, Loup Garron-the fugitive daughter of a genetically engineered "wolf-man"-and Pilar Ecchevarria spent their entire lives under military occupation in a cordoned off Texas no-man's-land that used to be called Santa Olivia, now known as Outpost 12.But now they're free, and they want to help the rest of the Santitos escape.

The victim’s profession might make it hard to find someone to talk. Laura Mallinder left home for work on Sunday, June 12, 2011. She walked to Gentle Touch, a massage parlor in Broadgreen, Swindon. Her boss, Maggie Monk, discovered her body later that evening. Laura, twenty-seven-years-old, sustained fatal stab wounds to her back.

Dr. James Macintosh, the bishop of Greyle, was a mysterious man. For a long time, nobody even knew his last name...until his body is found emaciated and battered having been pushed face-first off the edge of a cliff. Inspector Littlejohn faces an incredibly peculiar case. How to explain the savage murder of a gentle bishop? Did he know too much about the secretive citizens of Cape Marvin? Above all, why was the bishop's body so undernourished that death by violence won out by only a few days over death by starvation?