Gripping Thriller

I wrap my arms around the tree trunk, pressing my cheek against it until the bark digs in and the missing poster is finally secured. I try not to look at the photograph on it. At the features so similar to mine. Perhaps this will be the year someone comes forward. Were crucial mistakes made by detectives from the very beginning? Could the pressure of living two lives have led my sister to run away - or even end it? Or did someone in her tight circle of friends and family have reason to want her gone? Someone out there must know something.

On the last day of school, my friends and I gather on the beach to celebrate the long summer ahead. Sipping cans of warm cider and watching campfire embers dance into the inky sky, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier. Until a scream pierces the night. The next morning, we find shy newcomer Pippa on the beach, sandflies gathering on her lifeless body…

When Maggie sees the beautiful Venetian blinds moving in the Caldwells' front window, she freezes. Her favorite neighbors Cady and Josh are away, so who is in their house? The pretty young woman who answers the door tells a convincing story. She's Sarah. The house-sitter. Just here for a month. An old friend of Cady's who needed a place to stay. She's pleasant and warm, and Maggie wanders back to her house thinking she might have made a new friend. Yet she can't help but wonder why Cady never mentioned Sarah.

Piper cycles off one hot Oklahoma evening for a sleepover with her new friend, Miley, from summer camp. But when she doesn’t come home, her grandparents raise the alarm. Their little angel is missing, last seen on her pink bicycle, heading toward the dark woods on Black Heart Lane. Detective Kimberley King knows that the first 24 hours in a missing-child investigation are the most critical, but with no witnesses, and darkness falling in the small town of Dead Woman Crossing, she begins to fear the worst.

When the remains of two bodies are found in an open grave along a desolate highway in Stillwater, Minnesota, Special Agent Nikki Hunt knows exactly who they are. The bright blue jacket lying on the frozen earth belongs to Kellan Rhodes, the missing boy she’s desperately been trying to find for the last two days. The other body is his mother Dana, who had been Nikki’s lead suspect.

You're not who you say you are. Neither is she. She thinks she knows me. She believes my marriage is falling apart at the seams, that my husband can barely look me in the eyes. She thinks I’m desperate for a baby, that my longing for a family keeps me up at night. As much as I hate to admit it, all of this is true. She thinks I listen to her advice, that I care about her opinion. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Because she has no idea who I am. She has no clue that I know everything. I know her secret. I know that she did the unforgivable. I know how many lives she ruined.

When the call comes in about Lucy, a 17-year-old girl murdered after the secret party she held in her parents’ home, Detective Lottie Parker is first on the scene. As Lottie breaks the news to Lucy’s heartbroken parents and the devastated partygoers, she discovers that hours before her death Lucy had revealed a terrible secret about her friend Hannah. And when Lottie finds Lucy’s bloodstained clothing hidden in Hannah’s bedroom, she has no option but to bring the shy, frightened girl into custody. But Hannah claims to have no memory of the night Lucy died.

Seasoned obituary writer Eve Mallow has a new assignment: to tell the life story of famed musician Bernard Fitzpatrick. A chance to spend a few days in the sweet little village of Saxford St. Peter, walking the country lanes with her beloved dachshund, Gus, and meeting new people sounds like a dream. But it turns out that Bernard’s life was much less interesting than his death. On the day she arrives, news breaks that the charismatic cellist was the victim of a grisly murder. Could this quaint English village be hiding a dark secret?

Newly married Natasha has the perfect house, a loving husband, and a beautiful little girl called Emily. She’d have it all if it wasn’t for Jen, her husband’s ex-wife who just won’t leave them alone. Then Natasha returns home one day to find her husband and Emily gone without trace. Desperate to get her daughter back, Natasha will do anything even if it means accepting an offer of help from Jen.

Kate Youngblood is disappearing. Muddling through her late 30s as a creative writing professor at Blackwood college, she's dangerously close to never being noticed again. The follow-up novel to her successful debut tanked. Her husband left her for a woman 10 years younger. She's always been bright, beautiful, independent and a little wild, but now her glow is starting to vanish. She's heading into an age where her eyes are less blue, her charm worn out, and soon no one will ever truly look at her, want to know her, again. Except one.

Then: Three-year-old Ally was found alone in a parking lot. She was barefoot and dressed only in a yellow sundress. In the middle of winter. What kind of person would abandon their daughter? Now: Fifteen years later and Ally has a new family. But her real father has sent her a letter. And now, Ally is missing.

When the body of a man is found in the dense forest surrounding Black Rock Falls, Sheriff Jenna Alton immediately sees disturbing similarities with a past case - the same murder weapon, the remote beauty spot, and the way the victim is perched against a tree with no sign of a struggle. But the killer in that case was jailed for life.

When construction workers unearth a girl’s skeleton in Stillwater, Minnesota, Special Agent Nikki Hunt is called to the scene by her boyfriend Rory. Nikki knows instantly that the girl was murdered, but she is shocked when Rory immediately recognizes her. The victim was his childhood sweetheart, Becky, and he was the last person to see her before she went missing 24 years ago.

On a lonely stretch of coast at daybreak in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, Detective Casey White is shocked to find the drowned body of a much-loved local woman, Ann Choplin, her beautiful face covered with specks of sand. The green and white rope binding her wrists reveals the terrifying truth that this innocent mother’s death was no accident.

Kate Palmer has relocated to Cornwall for a quiet life. Moving into picturesque Lavender Cottage with her sister, Angie, the little village of Lower Tinworthy should be the perfect place for their fresh new start. But within weeks of their arrival, there’s a death in the close-knit community.... A woman is found dead in the village hall, with her own kitchen knife next to the body, covered in blood. Kate, a practice nurse at the local medical center, begins to piece together the clues.

When a young woman is brutally murdered in the Norfolk countryside, the locals blame Black Shuck - a legendary wild dog. There’s only one problem: The wounds weren’t made by an animal. DCI Robert Kett is battling a black dog of his own. With his wife still missing, and the injuries from his last case leaving him in constant pain, everything seems impossible - not least looking after his three young children.

Fact: During the night of February 1, 1959, in the remote reaches of Siberia, nine Russian hikers slash open their tent from the inside and flee into a blizzard in subpolar temperatures. Fact: By morning all are dead, several having suffered gruesome, violent deaths. What happened to them has baffled investigators and researchers to this day.

In the pretty, privileged college town of Milford, New Hampshire, everyone is friendly, and everything is safe. And on this cold autumn day, as red and yellow leaves begin to fall from the trees, and everyone wraps up for the first time, it would be easy to believe nothing bad could ever happen here. Until a screech of tires is heard, a thud, a child’s scream. The crash that sees Jenna’s six-year-old daughter, Amy Rose, being hit by a car driven by 17-year-old Maddie.

Charley Willis was 13 years old when her parents were killed in their family home and she was found hiding in a cupboard upstairs. Fifteen years later, Charley is marrying Seth Chambers. It should be the happiest day of their lives, a chance for Charley to put her past behind her, but just hours after the ceremony, she is missing. No one saw her leave. No one knows where she is. One thing is for certain…Seth is about to discover he doesn’t really know the woman he just married. And his nightmare is only just beginning.

Those are the only words on the phone call. Then they hang up. Surely, a prank? A mistake? A wrong number? Anything but the chilling truth... That someone is watching, waiting, ready to take your life in one hour. But why The job of finding out falls to DI Helen Grace: a woman with a track record in hunting killers. However, this is one case where the killer seems to always be one step ahead of the police and the victims. With no motive, no leads, no clues - nothing but pure fear - an hour can last a lifetime....