Gripping Thriller

It’s their daughter’s graduation and Rachel and Ed Hartley are expecting it to be one of their family’s happiest days. But when she stumbles and falls on stage during the ceremony, a beautiful moment turns to chaos: Gemma has been shot, and just like that, she’s fighting for her life. PI Matthew Hill is one of the first on the scene. A cryptic message Gemma received earlier in the day suggests someone close to her was about to be exposed. But who?

It’s after midnight when Detective Eve Bennet receives a distraught phone call from an unknown number. The voice at the other end begs her not to hang up—a baby has gone missing. But what the caller says next makes Eve’s heart race. “She isn’t the first. There are many, many more.”

I’d heard of the Baby Caroline case, of course. When a baby is snatched from her mother’s arms, the whole country knows about it. I knew about the parents left lying by the swimming pool, the open window in the nursery. But I never dreamed it had anything to do with me. Today, my beautiful daughter turned one. We were unwrapping gifts and blowing out candles when the knock came at the door, and they took my mother away. The police say she’s not really my mother. That she stole me, 30 years ago.

In the elite world of luxury real estate, it is often kill or be killed, something agent Andi Hart knows all too well—and after recent events, she’s ready to set her own rules. So when her boss challenges the team to find a buyer for a glitzy Malibu beach house, with a prize commission of a cool $1 million, she knows it’s her ticket to a new life. But she’s not the only one who not only wants but needs the money. Each of her four colleagues has secrets they’re eager to hide—secrets $1 million would go a long way in concealing.

Imogen Brown is a normal 16-year-old girl. She's obsessed with beach volleyball, she occasionally enjoys the company of her younger sister, Jemima, she's saving for her first car...and she feels like she doesn't belong. She thinks that her parents, Kat and Dylan, are hypocrites, playing the perfect family when she knows they really argue all the time. One Friday evening, Kat and Dylan have their biggest fight yet - the next day, Imogen is missing.

Everyone in the village admires Anna because she’s a wonderful mother. Juggling family life with a small sewing business, she’s the one they turn to for a warm hug after a hard day. Her kind, polite daughters are a credit to her - even Bay, her stepdaughter, whom Anna loves as much as her own two girls. But normal family life changes overnight when Anna’s middle daughter’s beauty catches the eye of a stranger in a café. As jealousy erupts between the siblings, Anna’s perfect blended family begins to unravel around her.

After escaping near-death, Kelly Danvers, a famed writer with a dark past retreats to a remote, off-the-grid fire lookout in northern Idaho to finish her novel. But when a freak and hostile snowstorm blows in and a lost forest ranger turns up, shivering, and claiming an EMP has destroyed the power grid, trouble soon follows. As Kelly tries to make sense of the danger and make contact with the outside, she quickly finds herself at odds with the stranger, and fighting for survival.

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.

It’s the fourth of July and the whole town is gathered at the local pool. Through the sweltering afternoon, we single mothers don’t mix with the other women - the ones with the perfect lives and happy marriages. Women like Sabine Miller. But when Sabine shoots me a desperate look across the water and suddenly disappears, my blood runs cold....

When new mother, Laura Caldwell, opens the card dropped through her letterbox, she expected to see a heartfelt note, congratulating her on the birth of baby Shay. Instead, she sees a message that makes her blood run cold. 'Your husband is a murderer.' It couldn't be true, could it? Not Conor, her adoring husband. He couldn't be behind the brutal killing of local barmaid, Vicky. Not him. But while Laura fights to discover the truth about her husband, she's also holding dark secrets of her own; secrets she's spent years trying to hide.

When Penny O’Dwyer is snatched from the quiet streets of Cahirsiveen, a small town in the west of Ireland, her family is distraught. Bright, beautiful, career-driven, she had the world at her feet. Local police scour the muddy hills surrounding the town, but, finding no leads, they turn to criminal behaviourist Jessie Boyle.

Freya loves her new home on a quiet suburban street. And her beautiful neighbor, Emily, is everything she’s ever wanted in a best friend. Finally, she has somebody to share her secrets with over a glass of wine. But as Freya watches her new friend setting the table for dinner one evening, she sees something shocking that makes her think that Emily’s life might not be as perfect as it seems. Days later, Emily and her daughter vanish.

Kids can be so cruel. They'll call you names. Hurt your feelings. Push you to your death. In the garden of an abandoned house, Luke Connolly lies broken, dead. The night before, he and his friends partied inside. Nobody fought, everybody else went home safely. And yet, Luke was raped and pushed to his death. His alleged attacker is now in custody. DCI Tom Reynolds is receiving the biggest promotion of his career when a colleague asks him to look at the Connolly case, believing it's not as cut and dried as local investigators have made out.

Fifteen-year-old Kayla is the apple of her parents’ eyes, their beautiful only daughter. They tried for so long to have her that she was even more precious when she arrived. But deep down, her mother Sherrie has always been terrified that their worst fear would come true: that Kayla would be taken from them. Then one day—just as Sherrie had dreaded—Kayla fails to return home after a sleepover. In desperation, Sherrie and her husband Richard call Kayla’s friends. They scour the streets, their search becoming more frantic. Until the police arrive and deliver the shocking news.

Detectives Laura Baxter and Jack Holt are members of the elite: Las Vegas Metro PD, one of the toughest and most respected law enforcement agencies in the United States. In the middle of a city with two million residents and 43 million annual visitors, they’re hunting for a killer. At the heart of a glamorous Las Vegas hotel, in front of hundreds of witnesses and under the lenses of countless video surveillance cameras, a young girl is brutally murdered. The most recorded crime in Vegas is missing one key protagonist, the killer.

Kit Mason has lived a life of unimaginable pain. An ex-prostitute, she has fled the clutches of an abusive pimp and now finds herself living hand to mouth in a new city, without anyone to help her. Frances Thornton seems to be living the perfect life. A lawyer from a privileged background, her perfect façade hides the painful secrets that still haunt her.

After five years away from her hometown of Fawn Lake, Detective Freya Sinclair isn’t expecting a warm welcome from the people she’s sworn to protect. She became a detective to bring serial killers like her parents to justice, but the tight-knit North Carolinian community can’t see past her twisted roots. Minutes after stepping foot back home, the body of a dark-haired young girl is pulled from the river and Freya races to the scene.

Rachel is no stranger to the darkness in the hearts of men. When the body of a young woman is found, tragically killed in her own home, Rachel is devastated to discover she knew the victim. Gillian helped her when she was at her lowest; now Rachel vows to find her friend’s murderer. When the killer strikes again, frighteningly close to home, Rachel sees a chilling pattern to his victims. As she races to decipher the clues, she unravels a twisted plan years in the making.

Tensions explode across Los Angeles as violence ravages the city–an unarmed Black man shot dead by the cops, a little girl caught in gang crossfire, an LAPD officer killed by pre-dawn gunfire in the Hollywood Hills–the first in a string of cop killings that have the force on edge. Under the sweltering California sun, LAPD cop Tony Calvanese pulls his sweat-stained uniform collar from his neck, surveying the aftermath of these senseless killings rippling through a city primed to erupt.

At the center of the novel is a private investigator named Archie Lightman. Archie and his partner Delia Sanchez stumble upon a pattern of killings in which the victims are all criminals who---in an age of rampant plea bargaining---are often too lightly punished for their crimes. The investigation leads them to a support group modeled along the lines of a traditional 12-step program called COSOVO, Circle of Survivors of Violent Offenses. Its members the surviving kin of murdered loved ones.