Kidnapping Mystery

After moving from a small country town to Seattle, Heather Baxter marries Tom, a widowed doctor with a young son and teenage daughter. A working vacation overseas seems like the perfect way to bring the new family together, but once they’re deep in the Australian outback, the jet-lagged and exhausted kids are so over their new mom. When they discover remote Dutch Island, off-limits to outside visitors, the family talks their way onto the ferry. But as soon as they set foot on the island, which is run by a tightly knit clan of locals, everything feels wrong.

As the sun sets into the sea over the pretty Cornish town of St Ives, a young woman, Freya Kempston, hasn’t returned home after a day out in the mall at St Austell. Panicking, her husband begs Detective Lauren Pengelly and her team to find her. Has Freya run out on her stable, loving marriage, or has something more sinister taken place? Grainy security footage from the mall provides the first break in the case—capturing Freya talking intently with a well-known local mechanic on the day she disappeared. But when cornered, the mechanic denies even knowing her.

When her four year old daughter informs her a sick man is in their yard, Honor Gillette rushes out to help him. But that "sick" man turns out to be Lee Coburn, the man accused of murdering seven people the night before. Dangerous, desperate, and armed, he promises Honor that she and her daughter won't be hurt as long as she does everything he asks. She has no choice but to accept him at his word.

When gunshots ring out from an exclusive family home on the edge of Northern Pine Lake, Agent Tori Hunter races through the gathering snowstorm to discover that ten-year-old Teddy Marist has disappeared. His mother and her new boyfriend are dead in the family kitchen, breakfast still cooking on the stove. And racing to track down Teddy’s father, Tori finds he is missing too. Local police are certain this is a simple case of a jealous ex-husband turned violent over his recent divorce.

When he wakes in a pitch-black room with his hands bound, Roland Britten – accountant and champion steeplechase jockey – knows he’s entered a nightmare of someone else’s making. Wracking his brain to figure out who’s out to get him and why, he comes up empty, but somehow manages a death-defying escape. It isn’t long, though, before he’s recaptured.

A beautiful Italian girl driving home in an open top sports car, a little boy playing on a South Coast beach and the senior steward of the Jockey Club on his way to a press reception in Baltimore. One after the other they suffer the same nightmare ordeal - kidnapping. But there is one thing connecting these particular cases. For the Italian girl is a jockey, and the little boy an only son of a racehorse owner.

A decade ago, kidnappers grabbed two boys from wealthy families and demanded ransom, then went silent. No trace of the boys ever surfaced. For 10 years their families have been left with nothing but painful memories and a quiet desperation for the day that has finally, miraculously arrived: Myron Bolitar and his friend Win believe they have located one of the boys, now a teenager. Where has he been for 10 years, and what does he know about the day, more than half a life ago, when he was taken?

Eric disappeared when he was three years old. Ben looked away for only a second at the grocery store, but that was all it took. His brother was gone. Vanished right into the sticky air of the Florida Panhandle. They say you've got only a couple days to find a missing person. Forty-eight hours to conduct searches, knock on doors, and talk to witnesses. Two days to tear the world apart if there's any chance of putting yours back together. That's your window. That window closed five years ago, leaving Ben's life in ruins.

Once a land of Pueblo dwellers, the town of San Geronimo Peak, New Mexico, is prime ski country. PI Howard Moon Deer and ex-cop Jack Wilder are headed there to meet their first client - a former US senator and the ski slope's owner. Instead, they find his body - and a murder case to solve.

The boy was born and raised on the Main Line, but he vanished on Philadelphia's mean streets, last seen in a downtown cheater's hotel. The boy's mother, Linda Coldren, is a golf superstar and Myron Bolitar's client. When he goes after the missing boy, presumed kidnapped, he crashes through a crowd of lowlifes, blue bloods, and liars on both sides of the social divide. Meanwhile, Linda's husband is trying to stage a comeback at the U.S. Open, only to be found dead in a sand trap.

While filming on location in scenic Santa Barbara, California, Peter Barrington and Ben Bacchetti look to expand Centurion Studios' business by making a deal with a young Croatian tech billionaire. But when the magnate’s wife is kidnapped, Teddy Fay is brought in to assess the threat and recover the young woman. As Teddy unravels the threads of her disappearance, he quickly comes to find an old vendetta seethes at the center, one that puts them all at risk. And danger is lurking even nearer to home as an obsessive fan with perilous intentions weasels his way onto the film set.

Rachel Jenner is walking in a Bristol park with her eight-year-old son, Ben, when he asks if he can run ahead. It's an ordinary request on an ordinary Sunday afternoon, and Rachel has no reason to worry - until Ben vanishes. Police are called, search parties go out, and Rachel, already insecure after her recent divorce, feels herself coming undone. As hours and then days pass without a sign of Ben, everyone who knew him is called into question, from Rachel's newly married ex-husband to her mother-of-the-year sister.

When seven-year-old Emma disappears, her stepmother Amanda uncovers dark secrets lurking in their small town. Facing corrupt police and uncooperative locals, Amanda and her niece Renee follow chilling clues leading to a familiar neighbor with a hidden, deadly past. Racing to save Emma, they risk everything to expose a truth that could destroy their town.

In the Maya Gray series (which begins with book one, Girl One: Murder) FBI Special Agent Maya Gray, 39, has seen it all. She’s one of BAU’s rising stars and the go-to agent for hard-to-crack serial cases. When she receives a handwritten postcard promising to release 12 kidnapped women if she will solve 12 cold cases, she assumes it’s a hoax. Until the note mentions that, among the captives, is her missing sister. Maya, shaken, is forced to take it seriously.

Eight-year-old Brooklyn Mercer has gone missing. And as accustomed as FBI agents Eliza Sterling and Brandon Eddison are to such harrowing cases, this one has struck a nerve. It marks the anniversary of the disappearance of Eddison’s own little sister. Disturbing, too, is the girl’s resemblance to Eliza - so uncanny they could be mother and daughter. With Eddison’s unsettled past rising again with rage and pain, Eliza is determined to solve this case at any cost. But the closer she looks, the more reluctant she is to divulge to her increasingly shaken partner what she finds.

A year has passed since DI James Walker cracked his biggest case yet, and he’s hoping for peace and quiet this festive season. But across the fells, a local farmer returns home on Christmas Eve to find footsteps in the fresh snow that lead down to his unused basement - and no footsteps leading away. Days later, his body is found, alongside those of his wife and daughter. Without a neighbour for miles, there are no witnesses and little evidence. And the crime scene has strange echoes of another terrible murder committed at the farmhouse, 20 years earlier.

For ex-FBI profiler Pierce Quincy, it's the beginning of his worst nightmare: a car abandoned on a desolate stretch of Oregon highway, engine running, purse on the driver's seat. And his estranged wife, Rainie Conner, gone, leaving no clue to her fate.

Cleary, North Carolina, is a sleepy mountain town, the kind of place where criminal activity is usually limited to parking violations. Not so, lately. Four women have disappeared from Cleary over the past two years. And there's always a blue ribbon left near the spot where each of the women was last seen. There are no bodies, no other clues, and no suspicion as to who their abductor might be. And now, another woman has disappeared without a trace.

When an attack leaves one of the members of the Women's Murder Club struggling for her life, the others fight to keep a madman behind bars before he hurts anyone else. And Lindsay Boxer and her new partner in the San Francisco police department try to stop a series of kidnappings: children and their nannies are being plucked off the streets.

Not much happens in Deerfield, Connecticut. The sleepy little town nestled at the foot of Taconic Range near two pristine lakes is the stuff of Hallmark movies. Picturesque town square, friendly neighbors, the changing seasons… but Deerfield’s small-town charm will lose its allure after a girl goes missing.