Gripping Thriller

"Schoolgirl missing", the ticker reads, and the camera cuts to a girl’s face. Blonde hair waterfalling over her shoulders, serious eyes, lips a little parted like she’s about to speak. That’s when I realize I’ve been holding my breath, because the gasp when I inhale almost chokes me. Sadie Kelly has lost her job. Until last month, she was a teacher at Horton College - the same high school she went to 10 years ago along with her best friend, Fiona.

When Amy Chang, partner of NSA hacker Trevelle Williams—a friend of Jon Reznick—is found dead on a Manhattan subway, everyone says it was a suicide. But Trevelle knows that someone had been watching Amy’s every move, and he isn’t about to let them slip away. Trevelle calls on Jon Reznick to help him uncover what happened to Amy and protect Amy’s brother, Kevin Chang, a Hong Kong student-activist living in New York. Before long, two government organizations are hunting them, forcing the trio to go on the run.

I’ve worked so hard to be the lawyer I am today. Helping as many women as I can—including my sister—escape toxic marriages makes it all worth it. But as I stand in the courtroom, listening to this poor woman break down sobbing, my stomach twists. I can’t look. Her husband says she can’t be trusted. Her child is about to be taken away from her. And it’s all my fault.

When Detective Casey White is called to a murder scene on an empty stretch of coastal road, her whole team is in a panic. Could the body be their missing colleague Samantha? The promising investigator was last seen two days ago, going home after an evening of dancing with friends. Her family are beside themselves with worry. Casey’s relief is short-lived when she sees the short dark hair of another woman. Pauline Rydel has been missing for a week. Devastated that anyone would take this innocent life, the tear-shaped cuts on the victim’s face make Casey’s heart stop.

Evie and her daughter, Asteria, are fleeing an abusive cult when they meet a stranger in an abandoned Arizona shopping mall. Fate hasn’t set Nameless on their trail. It’s a premonition, and a chance to make reparations for a failure from his past he can’t even remember. This time, Nameless must do everything in his power not to fail those who trust him with their lives.

When Bear and Mandy Logan’s travels take them to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, they expect to settle in for a quiet winter on the barrier island. But when a mysterious man shows up harassing their elderly neighbors, Bear can’t stop himself from getting involved. His search for answers soon leads him to more shocking discoveries, as he realizes the small town where he spent summers as a kid holds more secrets than he could have imagined.

This could be the most important mission of Nameless’s life. Because it’s putting him on a collision course with his own past and the nation’s future. The target: a fortified redoubt in the golden hills of California, the hub of a new world order that’s unthinkably close at hand. The time has come for Nameless to face its designer: the nihilist mastermind behind the One Solution. It’s also time for Nameless to discover who he is and was, and what brought him to this fateful endgame. But will the truth be a breaking point? Or a turning point?

When Detective Morgan Brookes is called to Lake Thirlmere one frosty night, she’s devastated to find the body of a young woman positioned in front of the glistening reservoir. She has ligature marks on her limbs, glue residue on her eyes, and her beautiful face is as cold as ice. Knowing only a dangerous serial killer would arrange a scene so carefully, Morgan is in a race against time to stop them before more innocent lives are lost.

Blair Charlston swapped the stock market for salvation - and now he's making a killing. Once a controversial venture capitalist, Charlston reinvented himself as a personal and business development guru after surviving an attempt to take his own life when a business deal went disastrously wrong. So when he decides to host a weekend retreat on the outskirts of Stirling for more than 300 people, Connor Fraser is drafted in to cover the security for a man who is at once idolised as a saviour and hated as a ruthless asset stripper.

When Congressional staffer Ben Walsh receives this cryptic text from his wife he initially doesn’t think much of it. But while waiting to hear from her again, Ben discovers that the text came an hour before a shooting that occurred along her daily running route. Veronica won’t pick up her phone, and when she doesn’t return home, he knows she is somehow involved. If she isn’t one of the victims, then where is she, and what did she know? While Ben searches for his wife, he stumbles upon another violent death, with clear connections to the shooting.

A teenage girl is boldly kidnapped from her school, minutes after her mother dropped her off. While a frenzied search begins, bringing together the entire police force of the city that never sleeps, for Detectives Baxter and Holt, this isn’t a crime like any other - it is personal. Detective Holt is faced with an inconceivable decision: Sacrifice everything he holds sacred or jeopardize the life of an innocent girl. But the man holding all the cards in this game of life and death isn’t willing to negotiate; he’s only willing to kill.

Where her daughter had played Gretel in front of a cheering audience, only two faint stage lights remained. The theater was deserted and eerily silent; the only sound she could hear was her own heart, pounding in a frenzy against her chest. She rushed outside and stopped sharply at the top of the stairs, stunned, her blood turned to icicles. Darkness had fallen, thick and filled with ocean mist, lampposts like ghosts sprinkling yellow haloes in the sky. Paige was gone. They’d taken her little girl.

On the fourth floor of Chaucer House, two teenagers are found chained to a radiator. The boy is dead but the girl is alive. For Detective Kim Stone every detail of the scene mirrors her own terrifying experience with her brother Mikey, when they lived in the same tower block 30 years ago. When the bodies of a middle-aged couple are discovered in a burnt-out car, Kim can’t ignore the chilling similarity to the deaths of Erica and Keith - the only loving parents Kim had ever known.

Jo is my best friend. From high school to adulthood, we’ve gone through everything together. Even when I made a foolish mistake and betrayed her in the worst way, she forgave me. She’s godmother to my son, and our lives are intertwined. We want the best for each other, always. I hope she approves of my new boyfriend, Noah. How could she not? Noah is kind, attentive, and loves me for who I am. But when I introduce them over dinner one evening, Jo doesn’t look happy. She’s always been protective of me, and as Noah clutches my hand, I force her reaction to the back of my mind.

I made a new friend at playgroup today. She’s different from the other mothers. She feels like someone I can trust. Someone I can confide in. But there are some things I can’t tell her. Things I can’t tell anyone. Because I have a secret that no one else knows. One that still haunts my dreams, wakes me up in cold sweat at night. Even another mother would never understand. Unless, of course, she’s hiding something, too.

Penny has never met anyone smarter than her. That’s par for the course when you’re a savant—one of less than one hundred in the world. But despite her photographic memory and super-powered intellect, there’s one question Penny doesn’t know the answer to: where did her father go when he left her and her mother years ago? On Penny’s 21st birthday, she receives a card in the mail from her father, just as she has every year since he left. But this birthday card is different. For the first time ever, there’s a return address.

Ian McAllister has searched the world over, hunting for that all-elusive perfect photograph. He finds it on a tourist trip to North Korea when he stumbles upon a young street kid foraging for roots. Unaware that this single act will brand him a spy and cost his freedom, Ian takes the shot. Now, he must pay the penalty.

The year 1934. Kitty Underhay steps out of the battered Rolls Royce and onto the graveled driveway of Thurscomb Castle in deepest Yorkshire. She’s honored to be a bridesmaid at her cousin Lucy’s wedding to the reluctant Lord Rupert Woodcomb, but as family and friends gather for welcome drinks, Kitty dodges intrusive questions about her own marital status by taking a stroll about the castle grounds. As she passes through the manicured gardens, a fatal shot rings out....

If you passed Alice on the street, you couldn’t help but smile. At how she holds hands with her husband, Jack, who she has been with since she was at university. At the way she admires her three boys, the center of her universe. But if you looked very closely, you’d see how tightly she holds Jack’s hand, afraid to let go. You’d see how carefully she watches her boys, scared to look away. She has told Jack that she ran away from home when she was younger - but she didn’t tell him the whole story.

As I hear the words every mother dreads, my pulse races, and I go cold. But even as my world turns upside down, I know the things I’m being told just don’t add up. I have to find out what really happened the night my beautiful boy died. The police tell me it was a tragedy no one could have prevented. But then they reveal the terrible things Tom was keeping from me. The person they describe is nothing like the decent, honest man I raised.