Family Suspense Thrillers

Wade and Thelma Owens run a halfway house on the small island of Cape Refuge that caters to wayward souls just out of prison. So when Wade and Thelma turn up brutally murdered, the town goes into shock, concerned that one of the Hanover House residents is a murderer who could strike again. Shattered by her parents’ deaths, Morgan Cleary struggles to keep Hanover House running while her husband, Jonathan, has been arrested for the murder. As the killer runs free, a lethal race against time ensues, with far more than the halfway house at stake.

After surviving an infamous family tragedy, 16-year-old Kennedy Jones has made it her mission to keep her brother's search through the cosmos alive. But then something disturbs the frequency on his radio telescope - a pattern registering where no signal should transmit. In a neighboring county, 17-year-old Nolan Chandler is determined to find out what really happened to his brother, who disappeared the day after Nolan had an eerie premonition. There hasn't been a single lead for two years, until Nolan picks up an odd signal - a pattern coming from his brother's bedroom.

It’s summer, and there’s a big surfing competition coming to the OBX. Competitors—like Kie and Rafe—will participate in paddle-in and tow-in surfing events. Athletes from around the world flood into the Outer Banks, filling the island’s hotels.

In the eighth installment of Alexander McCall Smith’s best-selling Isabel Dalhousie series, the inquisitive heroine helps a new friend discover the identity of her father. Jane, a visiting Australian philosopher on sabbatical in Edinburgh, has more questions than answers. Adopted at the age of six, she knows little about her father, other than he was a student in Edinburgh years ago. Always up for a challenge, Isabel is more than happy to help.

New York Times bestselling author Peter Swanson pens a spectacularly spine-chilling novella in which an American art student in London is invited to join a classmate for the holidays at Starvewood Hall, her family’s Cotswold manor house. But behind the holly and pine boughs, secrets are about to unravel, revealing this seemingly charming English village’s grim history.

When her best friend Meg drinks a bottle of industrial-strength cleaner alone in a motel room, Cody is understandably shocked and devastated. She and Meg shared everything - so how was there no warning? But when Cody travels to Meg's college town to pack up the belongings left behind, she discovers that there's a lot that Meg never told her. About her old roommates, the sort of people Cody never would have met in her dead-end small town in Washington.

November is usually quiet in Holcomb, Kansas, but in 1959, the town is shattered by the quadruple murder of the Clutter family. Suspicion falls on Nancy Clutter's boyfriend, Bobby Rupp, the last one to see them alive. New Yorker Carly Fleming, new to the small Midwestern town, is an outsider. She tutored Nancy, and (in private, at least) they were close. Carly and Bobby were the only ones who saw that Nancy was always performing, and that she was cracking under the pressure of being Holcomb's golden girl.

One night Kylie Galen finds herself at the wrong party, with the wrong people, and it changes her life forever. Her mother ships her off to Shadow Falls - a camp for troubled teens, and within hours of arriving, it becomes painfully clear that her fellow campers aren’t just "troubled". Here at Shadow Falls, vampires, werewolves, shapshifters, witches and fairies train side by side - learning to harness their powers, control their magic, and live in the normal world. Kylie’s never felt normal, but surely she doesn’t belong here with a bunch of paranormal freaks either. Or does she?

Ruby Jane never thought she'd meet the man of her dreams while running from the police in Russia. That he'd steal her heart on a train to Siberia. But loving a former CIA officer comes with a price...a life of danger. A life of high stakes. A life where he simply disappears....

Most people’s births aren’t immortalized in a police report—but Olivia was born during the infamous Camp Lost Lake murders. Seventeen years later, Olivia’s life looks pretty perfect . . . until she discovers the man she calls dad is not her biological father. Now she wants answers about her bloodline, and the only place she knows to look is Camp Lost Lake. Most people don’t spend their formative years on the run with an alleged murderer—but Reagan did. In the court of public opinion, her mom was found guilty of the deaths at Camp Lost Lake, and both of them have been in hiding ever since.

Joan Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.

Aiden and Meg Falconer's parents were framed and sent to prison, and they're traveling cross country, looking for the man who did it. Now they've found him and need to find a way to catch him before he escapes yet again. But "Hairless Joe" is professional killer who is not likely to let two kids stop him. It's time for a showdown. Who will win?

Momma drama takes over the Duncan clan, as there is still uncertainty about who has fathered the Duncan sisters' new babies. Meanwhile, Orlando Duncan, the family's new CEO and a man with his own baby momma problems, has just developed a new product that may make the millionaire Duncans into billionaires. Orlando only has one obstacle in front of him, and it's not law enforcement or one of his family's many rivals. It's his mother, because she's making the family take sides. Can a civil war within the Duncan family be averted before it tears them apart?

Sally Proulx and her young boy have mysteriously disappeared in the stormy town of High River. Clare is hired to track them down, hoping against all odds to find them alive. But High River isn’t your typical town. It’s a place where women run to—women who want to escape their past. They run to Helen Haines, a matriarch who offers them safe haven and anonymity. Pretending to be Sally’s long-lost friend, Clare turns up and starts asking questions, but nothing prepares her for the swirl of deception and the depth of the lies.

One year after her mother’s death, a woman prepares to celebrate her fortieth birthday. Digging through a trunk in the attic, looking for keepsakes for the occasion, she discovers photographs that call into question everything she believed about her life. The truth is a different story—one of a little girl in danger, a lie, and a mother’s love so fierce it led her to do the unimaginable.

Attorney Jason Rich has made a fortune off other people’s bad luck. His billboard slogan—“In an accident? Get Rich!”—accosts motorists on highways from Alabama to Florida. As ambulance chasers go, he’s exceptional. But after a recent divorce and a stint in rehab, Jason has hit a rough patch. And things only get worse when his sister, Jana, is accused of her husband’s murder. Even though Jason has no experience trying criminal cases, Jana begs him to represent her.

This holiday season, join two of today’s most popular paranormal authors for a special look into their worlds, where creatures are always stirring and no one sleeps through the night. The Bite Before Christmas: Teddy Brunswick knows about the immortals among us. He’s worked with them, called them friend - but he never counted on being snowed in with one over Christmas. Home for the Holidays by Jeaniene Frost: Cat and Bones are looking forward to a normal holiday - at least as “normal” as it gets for the combustible vampire couple....

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged for a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims’ families, but its impact travels even further: into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes. Highway Thirteen, Fiona McFarlane’s newest collection, takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more.

When Liv Dugan ducks out of work for lunch, it's just an ordinary day. When she returns, she stumbles onto a massacre. All her colleagues at Zuma Software have been shot. Only luck has left Liv unscathed, and that might be running out....

Molly Murphy - now Molly Sullivan - is a year into her marriage, expecting her first child, and confined to the life of a housewife. She’s restless and irritable in the enforced idleness of pregnancy and the heat of a New York summer in 1905. So when a trip to the post office brings a letter addressed to her old detective agency asking her to locate a missing Irish serving maid, Molly figures it couldn’t hurt to at least ask around, despite her promise to Daniel to give up her old career as a detective. On the same day, Molly learns that five babies have been kidnapped in the past month.