First Mystery

A year after her husband's death, young widow and art collector Diana Porteous listlessly roams the beach near her home. Her friend and agent Saul takes action, introducing her to his stylish, anarchic sister, Sarah, to pep her up. They plan that Di should rediscover her talents as a thief, as well as art expert, to recover stolen paintings - and begin with Steven, the neighbour's son, who is amassing works of art in a strange building in London, including work stolen from his mother.

When Harley’s new boyfriend invites her to a weekend at his family's country house, she accepts, game for an adventure. But the estate has a sinister history. Harley knows about the murder suicide that happened in the kitchen; the other stories might just be rumors.

At the start of a new century, a shocking murder transfixes Manhattan, forcing bitter rivals Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr to work together to save a man from the gallows. Just before Christmas 1799, Elma Sands slips out of her Quaker cousin’s boarding house—and doesn’t come home. Has she eloped? Run away? No one knows—until her body appears in the Manhattan Well. Her family insists they know who killed her. Handbills circulate around the city accusing a carpenter named Levi Weeks of seducing and murdering Elma. But privately, quietly, Levi’s wealthy brother calls in a special favor.

Thousands of people have seen UFOs over the years, many of them respected observers, including airline pilots, scientists and police officers. Those UFOs couldn’t all have been the planet Venus or weather balloons, no matter what the government said at the time—and it’s all in this book.

Death hits close to home for Elizabeth “E. M.” Danniher - or, rather, close to Hovel, as she's dubbed her decrepit rental house in rustic Sherman, Wyoming. Her elderly neighbor has killed a man apparently after her Western artifacts. As a former top-flight national TV reporter, Elizabeth knows self-defense can satisfy the legal system, yet leave her neighbor in danger. Doing what she does best - asking questions - Elizabeth sidesteps her boss to inquire into an eccentric billionaire.

Matt Cooper - First Cases consists of three short stories.

Former SEAL Chris Paladin leaves SEAL Team Six to become a pastor, but CIA spook Hannah Andrade pulls him back into Special Operations Group, the ultra-secret unit that SEAL Team Six operators and others served under to eliminate bin Laden. Chris and Hannah are joined by Delta Force’s Sonny Cohen to stop a new terrorist threat from launching a deadly cyber-terror against the United States.

Rinehart's first American mystery published in 1908, reminding Agatha Christie fans of her first country-house English mystery, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published 12 years later. This book has servants, a secret room, multigenerational goings-on, and more like Styles did.

Linda Deir knows all about how to Live a Guided Life. She "crawled her talk" long before she could "walk it". Her flagship best-selling book, Guided, details her true life story and how she made contact with intelligent beings from other realms starting as a baby. These benevolent and loving Spirit Guide Angels buffered her from unimaginable abuse as a child and guided her to uncanny success as a self-taught businesswoman in a man's world by age 19 and beyond.

Found guilty of stealing bread to feed his starving family, Michael McGuire is offered the “Queen’s Hard Bargain”, go to prison or join the army. He chooses the army and, after training in Dublin Castle, his life is changed forever as he is selected to join the Gordon Relief Expedition that is being sent south of Egypt to Khartoum, in the Sudan.

In Trotterdown, Cornwall, a boat, The Enigma, washes in to the harbour. The skipper is dead, and Harriet Taylor is brought in to investigate. But one dead body is not the only crime the team have to deal with. Meanwhile, further up the coast in Whitby, a boat washes up on the rocks just outside the harbour. Everyone on board is dead. Whitby Police are out of their depth, so DS Jason Smith is called in to help. It soon becomes clear the cases are connected and the teams from York and Trotterdown settle down to work with each other.

It is 1946, and Frank O'Brian is a gumshoe in New York, in other words, a private investigator. Having just qualified as a lawyer when the US entered WWII, he quit to work as a field agent for the Office of Strategic Services in Europe. Upon returning to New York, he found the notion of returning to the law too tame and hung up his PI shingle. In his first big case, he is involved in murder, blackmail, and double dealing.

Despatches from the secret world behind the headlines. Former SAS legend Chris Ryan brings you his seventeenth novel, filled with his trademark action, thrills and inside knowledge. Osama Bin Laden is dead. The President of the United States knows it. The world knows it. And SAS hero Joe Mansfield knows it. He was on the ground in Pakistan when it happened. He saw Seal Team 6 go in, and he saw them extract with their grisly cargo.

It has been four years since ex-Navy SEAL Jack Haliday, had an explosive run-in with a biker gang, wounding their leader, Gunner. During those years, Jack had acquired everything he ever wanted: a beautiful wife, daughter, and a lovely home in the suburbs - everything was just about as perfect as it could get, until Gunner returned to twist Jack's world inside-out with a vengeance that he could never have prepared for. Now Jack has a score to settle and he's got some friends to help him do it.

The narrative is a confession to the murder of an unnamed person who, it is alleged, was a total stranger to the perpetrator. The glory-seeking author claims to have committed an undetectable crime, but are they telling the truth? The story-line leaves little doubt that the homicide portrayed could have actually occurred. An intriguing question is put to the listener: “Is a confession a confession if it is impossible to identify its author?” Who is this storyteller, who delights in toying with the listener? The murderer wants fame, but not at any cost.

Criminal defense investigator Cecil Younger spends his days coaching would-be felons on how to avoid incriminating themselves. When Sherrie, a returning client with a good heart but a penchant for bad boys, asks him to track down some evidence that will help with her case, Cecil agrees. Cecil treks out to the shady apartment complex she mentioned, only to find his teenage daughter, Blossom, inside. He manages to get both the box Sherrie wanted and his daughter safely home, and later discovers the "evidence" is a large pile of cash - fifty thousand dollars, to be exact.

Meet Chick Best - a middle-aged, self-absorbed, disaffected, California dot.com millionaire with a trophy wife. Though concerned about his life and family, Chick resigns himself to a miserable state of acceptance, until he experiences unrequited love at first sight - which leads to deadly consequences.

There has been a long-standing belief that a woman slipped into the 1951 Boston Marathon undetected and ran the race. If that could be proven it would make her the first woman to have run a marathon on American soil. She wore “red,” as claimed by a group of Canadian runners who say they tried to bring the matter to the attention of race Director Jock Semple and other race officials. But to no avail, their story was never corroborated, and so today the “Runner in Red” remains a mystery and an urban legend.

Dozens of cities worldwide are destroyed by nuclear bombs. Economies crumble and governments are scrambling. A group calling themselves "The People" demands that all militaries disband and disarm. Cliff Tanner, CIA, is in a race against time to find the group responsible because governments have started to comply. Instead of terrorists, he uncovers a covert plot by aliens to prepare the Earth for invasion. Can the governments of the Earth put aside suspicion, politics, and rivalries in time to unite against a common foe? Can what is left of our military prepare in time?

Just as Dr. Paul Hill’s quantum communication system starts receiving messages from civilizations across the galaxy, his project is abruptly defunded and shut down. Following the discovery of what appears to be unequivocal evidence to the existence of God, hidden in messages coded in the human genome, those in power believe they now hold all the answers.