Crime Town

Mike Hammer steals a ride on a train upstate to Killington. But he is welcomed by a nasty surprise: he is accused by police of raping and murdering a young woman near the freight yards. Roughed up by the cops and facing a murder charge, Hammer's future looks bleak. Only a beautiful blonde, Melba Charles - daughter of powerful Senator Charles - might possibly save him...if he pays the price. From a brittle, brown manuscript, the first Mike Hammer novel - begun by Mickey Spillane in the mid-40s and completed 70 years later by Max Allan Collins - is a gift to mystery fans on the noir master's 100th birthday.

Nine years. That’s how long I spent in a relationship wasted on my ex. When my world crumbles apart in front of me, I make a desperate escape. Only now, I’m stuck in a tiny Mississippi town with a dilapidated farmhouse I don’t know how to fix. Enter Adam, the town’s contractor. Finding solace in his expertise and kindness, he might just be the one to help me rebuild more than just my home. But beneath the town’s quaint facade lies a darkness: an untouchable drug lord whose operation has poisoned the very place I now call home.

Gemma Hayden has returned to her hometown of Alice Springs for a new job as a primary school teacher. It's been six years since her family broke apart following the disappearance of her twin brother. And the scars still run deep. Hard on the heels of her homecoming, Saul Pearce, the man she once loved, is reposted from Parks and Wildlife in Darwin back to Alice. When an old car wreck is uncovered, washed down the river to Ruby Gap, Saul investigates only to find that the wreck belonged to Ethan, Gemma's twin—and there's a coded note for her in the glovebox.

When the local bus company announces it will be stopping its route through their quaint Cotswold village, the people of Wendlebury Barrow are up in arms. Not least Sophie Sayers, whose driving lessons with her boyfriend Hector get off to a bumpy start. But the locals’ peaceful protests against the decision turn deadly when a body is discovered on the Number 27. No one can work out how a passenger met their demise, let alone how the driver didn’t notice. While the police wait for the post mortem results, Sophie immediately suspects foul play, and launches her own investigation.

Three girls disappear into the night. One by one they go missing, never to be seen again. No witnesses, no leads, nothing. The only thing they had in common? An uneasy sense of being watched in the days before they vanished. Noises in the night, and boot prints in the flower beds outside their bedroom windows . . . One of the lost girls was Anna Klein's best friend. With no body, the case went cold. But Anna never stopped looking for Sylvie—or whoever took her.

Here, in Lynne Truss' first novel, we meet Osborne Lonsdale, a down-at-heel journalist, mysteriously attractive to women, who writes a regular celebrity interview for Come into the Garden. This week his "Me and My Shed" column will be based on the charming garden outhouse owned by TV sitcom star Angela Farmer. Unbeknownst to Osborne, driving down to Devon to interview Angela in her country retreat, the sleepy magazine has been taken over by new management.

There was the moment eight-year-old Ruth Corrigan ran away from playing in the woods with her best friend, and then the moment after, when Ceely was gone. Murdered. Now the silence of that day lives within Ruth. Lives in the judgment she sees in the faces of so many in the small town she still calls home. Ruth may be older now, tougher, a cop by trade, but her life has been unraveling ever since that tragic day in the woods. Alcohol, sex, broken marriages—nothing can lighten the truth she knows inside. Until the child-killer returns, free and unencumbered, having already paid for his crime.

Settled into a relationship with an Italian yoga instructor and working in Europe, Dr. Orville Rose's peace is shaken by his mother's death. On his return to Columbia, a Hudson River town of quirky people and “plagued by breakage,” he learns that his mother has willed him a large sum of money, her 1981 Chrysler, and her Victorian house in the center of town.

In The Other Side of the River, his eagerly awaited new book, Kotlowitz takes us to southern Michigan. Here, separated by the St. Joseph River, are two towns, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. Geographically close, they are worlds apart, a living metaphor for America's racial divisions: St. Joseph is a prosperous lakeshore community and 95 percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and 92 percent black. When the body of a black teenaged boy from Benton Harbor is found in the river, unhealed wounds and suspicions between the two towns' populations surface as well.

Emma Frost inherits a house on Fanoe Island when her grandmother dies. She decides to move there with her family, much to her teenage daughter's regret. One morning a wealthy older woman living in her street is found murdered and soon Emma finds herself wrapped in a mystery uncovering the island's dark secrets reaching into her own family.

Newly arrived in the quaint village of Norfolk's Pudding Corner, Daphne Brewster is glad to be leaving London life behind. As time goes by, and she finds herself in great demand as the village's unofficial Vintage Lady, she begins to acclimatise to this more sedate new way of life. But when the village school's headmaster is discovered dead, lying face down in his allotment patch, everything changes. His wife refuses to accept a verdict of natural causes, and the village is suddenly ablaze with scandal about 'the potting shed murder'.

Most folks in Exile, Texas, think Megan Leary got away with murder. Megan was acquitted of her mother's vicious killing after someone else confessed—but suspicion still shadows her fifteen years later. Now a private investigator, she's come back to help a friend look for her missing teenage daughter—and it's not just gossip that's being stirred up. Sheriff's Deputy Dan Fox wasn't sure what to think of Megan or her mysterious past when he pulled her over for speeding. But suddenly, people are dying—and Dan may have to decide whether he can put his trust in Megan to ensure both of them survive.

Already widowed by the age of 40, Ilka Nichols Jensen, a school portrait photographer, leads a modest, regimented, and uneventful life in Copenhagen. Until unexpected news rocks her quiet existence: Her father - who walked out suddenly and inexplicably on the family more than three decades ago - has died. And he's left her something in his will: his funeral home. In Racine, Wisconsin. Clinging to this last shred of communication from the father she hasn't heard from since childhood, Ilka makes an uncharacteristically rash decision and jumps on a plane to Wisconsin.

After years of war, Army Ranger Quinn Colson returns home to the rugged, rough hill country of northeast Mississippi to find his native Tibbehah County overrun with corruption, decay, meth runners, and violence. His uncle, the longtime county sheriff, is dead. A suicide, he’s told, but others - like tomboy Deputy Lillie Virgil - whisper murder. In the days that follow, it’s up to Colson to discover the truth, not only about his uncle, but about his family, his friends, his town, and himself.

On a warm Florida evening, Karen Gregory saw a familiar face at her door. What the beautiful young woman could not know was that she was staring into the eyes of her killer - a savage monster who would rape her, stab her to death, and leave her battered body on the floor outside the bedroom. Detectives frantically sifting through the evidence were tormented by one disturbing question after another....

Miles de Cogan thought that he was set to live out a simple life with a cantankerous old lady for his landlord, but this is all turned on its head with a phone call. Inheriting a prosperous estate called County Wicklow and the title to go along with it, Miles learns of the death of his cousin, a baronet.

Nash Rankin is a disgraced cop trying to escape his past—his career was destroyed when he chose to take justice into his own hands. Now he's living a quiet life in a small town caring for the local wildlife and trying to stay away from trouble. Jesse Redpath has a new job in a new town, Satellite—the stormy weather that greets her first few days on the new beat seems like a sign for what's to come. A local has died in what seems like an accident, but Jessie isn't so sure that ‘accident' wasn't planned. All evidence seems to point to Nash, but Jesse's not sure about that either.

Mount Orange, Florida, is famous for two things: cerulean freshwater springs, ideal for free divers who aren't afraid of lurking gators. And the gruesome cold case murder of best friends, Bailey and Celeste, twenty years ago. Bailey and Celeste's murders cast a permanent darkness over sunny Mount Orange. Tru has always lived in that shadow. Now she's supposed to head to FSU in the fall with her boyfriend, but those unsolved murders—and the death of her own sister—invade her every thought. It’s only in the shadowy deep of Hidden Glen Springs that she can breathe.

After his son is convicted of capital murder, Vietnam War veteran Jeremiah Fitzjurls takes over the care of his granddaughter, Joanna, raising her with as much warmth as can be found in an Ozark junkyard outfitted to be an armory. He teaches her how to shoot and fight, but there is not enough training in the world to protect her when the dreaded Ledfords, notorious meth dealers and fanatical white supremacists, come to collect on Joanna as payment for a long-overdue blood debt.

Liv and Gabe Ahlstrom are estranged siblings who haven’t seen each other in years, but that’s about to change when they receive a rare call from their older brother’s wife. “Mack is dead,” she says. “He died of a seizure.” Five minutes after they hang up, Liv and Gabe each receive a scheduled email from their dead brother, claiming that he was murdered. The siblings return to their family-run resort in the Northwoods of Minnesota to investigate Mack's claims, but Leech Lake has more in store for them than either could imagine.