Criminal Mystery

Around here we say bless her heart and sometimes it's just not in a good way. Take Neva Hudson for instance, bless her heart, she's the town gossip, not to mention someone who likes to toot her own horn. Two toots too many 'cause bless her heart, someone has strangled Neva and left her for dead in of all places . . . the church's Christmas play.

When Hackberry Holland became sheriff of a tiny Texas town near the Mexican border, he'd hoped to leave certain things behind: his checkered reputation, his haunted dreams, and his obsessive memories of the good life with his late wife, Rie. But the discovery of the bodies of nine illegal aliens, machine-gunned to death and buried in a shallow grave behind a church, soon makes it clear that he won't escape so easily.

Newlyweds Emma and Colin are suspicious when prosecutor Tamara McDermott is a no-show at a Boston dinner party. Matt Yankowski, head of HIT, Emma and Colin’s small, elite Boston-based team, is a friend of Tamara’s, and he needs them to find her. In London, a woman who was supposed to meet Emma’s art-detective grandfather to talk about forgeries is discovered near death. Her husband, who stayed behind in Boston, has vanished. The couple’s connection to Tamara adds to the puzzle.

As a youth, Trevor Black unleashed spiritual forces he couldn't comprehend. Years later, Trevor is a high-flying criminal defense lawyer in New York City, with a six-figure Aston Martin and a trophy wife. But he receives a burdensome gift: the ability to perceive the invisible. And the dark forces he now sees are all gunning for him. When one of Trevor's hometown friends is murdered, the MO is eerily similar to a shocking trail of murders that have already crossed the lawyer's path. So Trevor must return home to find the killer....

On a steaming night in 1977, New York City is plunged into darkness and two boys, Joe and Robbie, are abandoned by their mother, Lois. Forty years to the day after this unforgivable moment, Joe is a hard-drinking ADA and Lois has resurfaced: Joe wakes from another alcoholic fog to learn she’s been found murdered on a Coney Island beach.

Barbara Parker is the New York Times best-selling author of Suspicion of Malice. With Criminal Justice, Parker delivers a gripping thriller filled with unexpected twists. Rocker Kelly Dorff is serving as the DEA’s infiltrator in a case against a drug cartel. But the investigation goes wrong when Kelly is found dead in her exboyfriend Dan Galindo’s apartment. Now Dan, a lawyer, must figure out a way to prove his innocence.

Convicted felon Alvin Cooper was eventually granted work furlough from prison. While at a local bank, he sees a picture of the manager's family. He becomes obsessed with the manager's teenage daughter and kidnaps her.

After multiple women go missing, Agent Melina Shepard of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation makes the impulsive decision to go undercover as a prostitute. While working the street, she narrowly avoids becoming a serial killer’s latest victim; as much as it pains her to admit, she needs backup. Enter lone wolf FBI agent Jerrod Ramsey. Stonewalled by a lack of leads, he and Melina investigate a scene where a little girl has been found abandoned in a crashed vehicle.

Charming, wealthy Randle Kennedy has a secret: he's British Columbia’s most prolific producer of boutique marijuana. He’s developed strains of B.C. Bud to please the most sophisticated palates and produce any desired effect, from a light contemplative buzz to the most mind-warping stone. His medical varieties offer relief for conditions ranging from cancer to Alzheimer's disease. Come legalization, he'll be the first on the market with marijuana's answer to single-malt Scotch.

Malcolm Khalaji is missing. And Seong-Jae Yoon is the only one who can find him. But to do so means walking paths he swore he would never tread again. Descending into the blackest hallways of a twisted and sadistic mind. Breaking down every wall he's ever built around himself, to try to predict what Sila will do next. Yet not even Seong-Jae can anticipate the outcome of this deadly game.

When a local criminal defense attorney turns up dead, Sheriff Billie Gray arrives on the scene. At first glance, the lawyer’s death looks like suicide. But Billie knows better: this was murder. To assist with the investigation, Billie calls on her old friend Solomon Shepard, who isn’t so eager to accept. After a traumatic attack left him mentally in shambles, Solomon is on indefinite leave from the county attorney’s office. But Billie needs him. And he can’t say no to Billie.

I'd never even kissed a boy the night I met Stone. The night I saw him kill. The night he spared my life. That was only the beginning. He turns up in my car again and again, dangerous and full of raw power. "Drive," he tells me, and I have no choice. He's a criminal with burning green eyes, invading my life and my dreams. The police say he's dangerously obsessed with me, but I'm the one who can't stop thinking about him.

A glamorous woman is murdered in her ultra-luxurious London mansion and her husband goes missing. But according to public records, neither of them exists. The only leads police have are several objects arranged around the woman’s body, including a set of keys and a book called How to Process a Murder by Laughton Rees—a book that appears to have helped the killer forensically cleanse the crime scene.

The murder of jazz musician and social activist Markus Peña doesn’t come as a surprise to his estranged sisters. Melinda and Emily Peña know their controversial brother had enemies. After all, even they hadn’t spoken to Markus since their mother’s funeral two years ago. Who killed Markus? Was it someone trying to keep his latest protest song from publication? Was it the powerful and secretive uncle of his ex-girlfriend Rebecca? Or was it one of the other women Markus had callously abandoned?

When a 911 call goes wrong and a young man goes missing, it falls to Malcolm and Seong-Jae to investigate the responding officers when Internal Affairs' internal politics leave the case compromised and the officers aren't willing to talk. But with Seong-Jae on the wrong side of the thin blue line, tensions just may turn violent before the detectives find their answers—and only their trust in each other will keep this investigation from hitting a dead end. Will Malcolm and Seong-Jae's savage love survive the test, or will this case end in self-destruction?

Alicia Becker shows up at the screen door of The Milkery beaten, bruised, and claims to be one of Mary Elizabeth Moberly's foster children. Mae West's suspicion of why Alicia is there turns to an investigation after Alicia is found on a nearby hiking trail standing over the lifeless body of Craig Sutton. Who is Craig Sutton?

Texas attorney and former Texas Ranger Billy Bob Holland has many secrets. Among them is Vernon Smother's son, Lucas, a now-teenaged boy about whom few know the truth - Lucas is really Billy Bob's illegitimate son. When Lucas is arrested for murder, Billy Bob must confront the past and serve as the boy's criminal attorney. Billy Bob knows the propensity of the town, Deaf Smith, Texas, to make scapegoats out of the innocent and to exploit and sexually use the powerless.

A serial killer is littering the South Shore beach of Long Island - the bones of his victims stuffed into burlap bags. Nick Mannino, The Good Lawyer, is living off the ill-gotten gains of his deceased mobster uncle, when, without warning, a brutal serial killer turns on him, and worse, his family.

Dig. The Demon Dog gets down with a new book of scenes from America’s capital of kink: Los Angeles. Fourteen pieces, some fiction, some nonfiction, all true enough to be admissible as state’s evidence, and half of it in print for the first time. And every one of them bearing the James Ellroy brand of mayhem, machismo, and hollow-nose prose.

To keep up, Malcolm and Seong-Jae will have to find the bigger picture, the larger plan to intercept their target before that strange message turns into another victim—but it's the small things tripping them up when their relationship and some unsettled business between them leaves them stumbling around each other and falling head-first into mistakes that could cost them more than just the case. It could cost another innocent life, and leave that blood stained on their hands.