Crime Mystery

Fin Finnegan, a San Diego police detective and wannabe actor heading straight for a midlife meltdown, is assigned a routine truck theft that turns into a toxic chemical spill, setting off a bizarre chain reaction of death and murder on both sides of the Mexican border. Fin is forced to team up with Nell Salter, a sexy female investigator, as well as an equally fetching U.S. Navy investigator who wants to learn all that Fin can teach her - and that’s saying a lot

After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, creditors are calling, and after a breakup with his longtime girlfriend, he’s living in his office. Then John Bristow walks through his door with a shocking story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry - known to her friends as the Cuckoo - famously fell to her death a few months earlier.

Three unsolved murders spanning 70 years have befallen the same French family, each taking place two nights before Christmas at their Paris mansion - and blamed on the family ghost. When Jaya realizes the truth hits closer to home than she realized, she must risk everything as she flees San Francisco for France and Cambodia to find a missing sculpture known as the Serpent King and stop a flesh and blood killer.

Doing Time: For the prison writers whose work is included in this anthology, it means more than "serving a sentence"; it means staying alive and sane, preserving dignity, reinventing oneself, and somehow retaining one's humanity. For the last quarter century the prestigious writers' organization PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges. The contest honors the best short stories, plays, essays, and poems among hundreds submitted annually by men and women nationwide.

When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days - as he has done before - and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home. But as Strike investigates, he discovers that Quine's disappearance is no coincidence. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were published, it would ruin lives - meaning that almost everyone in his life would have motives to silence him.

Vitus Adamson has a second chance at life now that he's no longer a zombie. But after killing his brother, Jamie, Vitus lands in prison on murder charges. Jamie's death exposes secret government projects so deep in the black they cannot be seen - without Vitus, that is. Sprung from jail, the government hires Vitus to clean up Jamie's messes, but tracking down his brother's homemade monsters gone rogue is easier said than done. The first of them is a convicted killer assumed to be safely behind bars.

Duchess Day Radley is a 13-year-old self-proclaimed outlaw. Rules are for other people. She is the fierce protector of her five-year-old brother, Robin, and the parent to her mother, Star, a single mom incapable of taking care of herself, let alone her two kids. Walk has never left the coastal California town where he and Star grew up. He may have become the chief of police, but he’s still trying to heal the old wound of having given the testimony that sent his best friend, Vincent King, to prison decades before. And he's in overdrive protecting Duchess and her brother.

Cotton Malone is on the hunt for a forgotten 16th century Pledge of Christ—a sworn promise made by Pope Julius II that evidences a monetary debt owed by the Vatican, still valid after five centuries, now worth in the trillions of dollars. But collecting that debt centers around what happened to the famed Medici of Florence—a family that history says died out, without heirs, centuries ago. Two more things also hang in the balance. Who will become the next prime minister of Italy, and who will be the next pope.

It's AD 123, and the sun is shining on southern Gaul. Ex-military medic Ruso and his British wife, Tilla, are back after a long absence - but it's not the reunion anyone had hoped for. Ruso's brother has left him in charge of a farm he has no idea how to manage, a chronic debt problem, and a gaggle of accident-prone small children. Meanwhile his sister Flora has run away to rescue her boyfriend, who's accused of murdering a wealthy guest at a party.

Success has come quickly to Holmes, Marple & Poe Investigations. The New York City agency led by three detectives—Brendan Holmes, “the brain,” Margaret Marple, “the eyes,” and Auguste Poe, the “muscle”—with famous names and mysterious pasts is one major case away from cementing its professional reputation. But as a series of child abductions tests the PIs’ legendary skills, the cerebral Holmes’s absence leaves a gaping hole in the agency roster. Only by closing ranks and solving the mystery within can they recover all that’s been lost.

Sixteen-year-old Diamond "Ray-Ray" Jenkins has it made in the shade, until one wrong move by her parents turns their lives upside down. Their secret of taking from the wrong street King in the Trap, Damien Orlando, has now put her in peril. The death of her parents signals an end to Diamond's semi-perfect life, putting her in the hands of evil. Her only salvation is to learn the game, and to put her trust in a kid wearing a hoodie.

The Byzantine Fire is much more than a flawless ninety-carat ruby. As a stone it's worth over a million dollars, a value vastly increased by its pure gold band - but its history is what makes it priceless. A ring that has been fought for with sword and pen and passed from nation to nation by all manner of theft and trickery, has finally made its way to the United States. The US agrees to return it to Turkey, but it's about to be stolen twice more.

At every death scene, Bennett says a prayer over the victim. But recently, too many of the departed have been fellow cops. “I want you to look at these deaths on special assignment,” NYPD Inspector Celeste Cantor says. “Report only to me.” Bennett excels as a solo investigator. But he's chasing a killer who feeds on isolation... and paranoia.

During a vicious heat wave, a county maintenance worker stumbles upon two suspicious suitcases abandoned by the side of the road. Sheriff Bree Taggert responds to find two bodies stuffed inside the luggage. The press demands action. The community is on edge. Suddenly, Bree is at the center of a media firestorm. In Oregon, a senator’s daughter goes missing. FBI Special Agent Mercy Kilpatrick agrees to keep the politically sensitive case on the down-low.

Young Michael, an illegal immigrant escaping the troubles in Northern Ireland is strong and fearless and clever, just the fellow to be tapped by Darkey, a crime boss, to join a gang of Irish thugs struggling against the rising Dominican powers in Harlem and the Bronx. The time is pre-Giuliani New York, when crack rules the city, squatters live furtively in ruined buildings, and hundreds are murdered each month.

Former Army brat Morgan Albright has finally planted roots in a friendly neighborhood near Baltimore. Her friend and roommate Nina helps her make the mortgage payments, as does Morgan's job as a bartender. But after she and Nina host their first dinner party—attended by Luke, the flirtatious IT guy who'd been chatting her up at the bar—her carefully built world is shattered. The back door glass is broken, cash and jewelry are missing, her car is gone, and Nina lies dead on the floor.

Keshav has set up an investigation agency with his best friend, Saurabh. Can the two amateur detectives successfully solve another murder case that affects them personally? And where will it leave their friendship?

In 1914 collisions between motor cars and horse-drawn carriages are an everyday occurrence on the streets of Paterson, New Jersey. But when an out-of-control driver smashes into a buggy driven by Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp, their lives change forever. Constance, the oldest, demands payment for the damages but quickly realizes that she is dealing with a madman.

When college professor Ellie McKay walks into the Maverick Bar in Farmington, New Mexico, late one evening, she plans to get drunk, not engaged. But within 30 minutes, she’s met cowboy Al Robison, he’s proposed to her, and she’s accepted. Al only knows that Ellie is attractive, vulnerable, and single; he doesn’t know that she has been on the run for weeks from a sociopath who killed her surgeon boyfriend in Pennsylvania and raped and tortured her.

A girl with a secret. Longbill Beach, 1982. Emily Vaughn gets ready for the prom. For an athlete, who is smart, pretty and well-liked, this night that should be the highlight of her high school career. But Emily has a secret. And by the end of the evening, that secret will be silenced forever. Forty years later, Emily’s murder remains a mystery. Her tight-knit group of friends closed ranks; her respected, wealthy family retreated inwards; the small town moved on from her grisly attack. But all that’s about to change.