Dark Mystery

Although it is autumn in the small English town of Bishop’s Lacey, the chapel is decked with exotic flowers. Yes, Flavia de Luce’s sister, Ophelia, is at last getting hitched, like a mule to a wagon. “A church is a wonderful place for a wedding”, muses Flavia, “surrounded as it is by the legions of the dead, whose listening bones bear silent witness to every promise made at the altar.”

In the wilds of Siberia, a top-secret Russian fighter goes missing on a test flight. The Russian Air Force begins a search, oblivious to their error: they are looking in the wrong spot. The pilot, Colonel Maxim Primakov, has crash landed during an attempted defection. The new chief of CIA clandestine operations, David Slaton, wants desperately to find him, but only one man is in a position to reach Primakov—Tru Miller, a rookie operator. Slaton plots a rescue deep inside Russia, not realizing that he will have to outfox the one other man who knows the truth.

Like most families, they had their secrets...and they hid them under a genteelly respectable veneer. No onlooker would guess that prim Vera Hillyard and her beautiful, adored younger sister, Eden, were locked in a dark and bitter combat over one of those secrets. England in the '50s was not kind to women who erred, so they had to use every means necessary to keep the truth hidden behind closed doors - even murder.

US Marshal Regan Merritt never bought the FBI’s theory that her ten-year-old son’s murder was tied to her job. Yet as leads went cold, she’d had to walk away from the marshals, the case and her now ex-husband, Grant, who blamed her for Chase’s death.

FBI Agent Ella Dark, 29, is given her big chance to achieve her life’s dream: to join the Behavioral Crimes Unit. Ella has a hidden obsession: She has studied serial killers from the time she could read, devastated by the murder of her own sister. With her photographic memory, she has obtained an encyclopedic knowledge of every serial killer, every victim, and every case. Singled out for her brilliant mind, Ella is invited to join the big leagues.

When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn’t pan out.

As a child, Henry Cadmus lived on Catalina Island, a scenic vacationland off the Southern California coast. But Henry's experiences were far from idyllic. Today, even though Henry has seen firsthand the horrors of war, the ghastly images that haunt his dreams are ones he associates with his childhood... and the island: a snarling pig-man holding a cleaver; a jackal-headed woman on a high balcony, dripping blood; strange occult rituals... and worse. If it was up to Henry, he would avoid the island entirely.

While there are many books about writing, none deal firsthand with the intersection of songwriting, storytelling, and vocation, along with nuts-and-bolts exploration of the great mystery of creativity. In Adorning the Dark, Andrew describes six principles for the writing life: serving the work, serving the audience, selectivity, discernment, discipline, and community. Through stories from his own journey, Andrew shows how these principles are not merely helpful for writers and artists but for anyone interested in imitating the way the Creator interacts with his creation.

The scourge of the Savage Lands, an ancient dragon allied to a gathering storm of dark forces threatening the world of Ruin, becomes the next target of the most fearsome shock troops ever conceived, prepared, and trained for total war: US Army Rangers. Deep beneath a once-fantastic ruined empire, a creature more terrible, diabolical, and malevolent than any myth ever told lies atop a vast horde of wondrous treasure and deadly magic, dreaming dreams of greed and terror.

Every year in the United States there are fifteen thousand murders, give or take a few hundred. Of those, nearly forty percent go unsolved. In this six-part audio series, Christina Walsh is determined to change that. After struggling with the loss of her father, she sets out on a journey to bring the justice that has eluded her to the families of other victims. And she starts with a particularly strange case. The murder of world-renowned violinist Leona McPherson who mysteriously disappeared years ago after a concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

In a quiet suburban neighborhood in upstate New York, single mom Kelly Gibson is slain in her home—the victim of a rage killing. Right away, Sheriff Bree Taggert has three persons of interest: an angry soon-to-be ex-husband, a furtive rebound boyfriend, and an obsessive neighbor. But as Bree and investigator Matt Flynn work together to narrow the field, there’s a shocking twist in the case: a second woman is murdered in the same brutal fashion.

FBI Agent Ella Dark has studied serial killers from the time she could read, devastated by the murder of her own father, and has gained an encyclopedic knowledge of murderers. A victim of a new killer is found dead, an ancient water clock mysteriously dripping on her body—and Ella knows she has precious little time to decode this killer’s riddle, and stop him before he finds his next target…

Following in the footsteps of notorious serial murderer Jack the Ripper, a killer is stalking the streets of London. The self-dubbed Ripper King strikes at night, leaving a trail of eviscerated bodies in his wake. Fresh off a case with potential ties to the recent rash of killings, FBI agents Della Hamilton and Mason Carter are all too familiar with a slayer set to rule with a lethal fist. And they’ll stop at nothing to end his reign.

DI Nathaniel Caslin’s life is a mess. He works the minimum, abuses substances to survive the day and drinks his nights away. A once-promising career is in freefall. Investigating the death of an ex-serviceman in police custody reveals the disappearance of a young family. No-one noticed. No-one seems to care.

Beth and Tom Hardcastle are the envy of their neighbourhood—they have the perfect marriage, the perfect house, the perfect family. When the police knock on their door one evening, Beth panics. Tom should be back from work by now—what if he’s crashed his car? She fears the worst. But the worst is beyond imagining. As the interrogation begins, Beth will find herself questioning everything she believed about her husband.

Tami Hoag, author of Dust to Dust, returns with "a definite winner," says Booklist. In a trailer in a Florida swamp, time is running out for Erin Seabright. A pawn in a kidnapper's terrifying game for a ransom no one can pay, her last hope is a washed-up ex-cop who has already lost it all - not once, but twice.

Something bad happened last night. My best friend Posey is dead. The police think it was a tragic accident. I know she was murdered. But I can’t remember a thing. I’ve woken up with the hangover from hell, a stranger in my bed, and I’ve gone viral for the worst reasons. There’s only thing stopping me from dying of shame. I need to find a killer.

Under a promising morning sky, police captain Walter Alaka'i makes a tragic discovery: the body of a teenage surfer bobbing among the lava rocks of Maui's southeastern shore. It appears to be an ill-fated accident, but closer inspection reveals something far more sinister than the results of a savage wave gone wrong. Now that Alaka'i is looking at a homicide, he solicits the help of his niece, Detective Kali Mahoe.

Beneath the surface lie deadly secrets... DI Shona Oliver agreed to move to Dumfries with her ex-banker husband when their teenage daughter got in with a bad crowd in London. As a Glasgow native, she's back on home turf. Living on the shores of the Solway Firth allows Shona to continue as an RNLI volunteer, and a call out to recover a woman's body indicates foul play. Police in Cumbria take the case but links back to Scotland keep Shona's team involved. As they investigate, reports of people trafficking and a spate of thefts from local shops compete for attention with a large scale drug bust.

Welcome to the Misfit Mob... It's where Police Scotland dumps the officers it can't get rid of but wants to: the outcasts, the troublemakers, the compromised. Officers like DC Callum MacGregor, lumbered with all the boring go-nowhere cases. So when an ancient mummy turns up at the Oldcastle tip, it's his job to find out which museum it's been stolen from. But then Callum uncovers links between his ancient corpse and three missing young men, and life starts to get a lot more interesting.