Literary Mystery Thriller

It's everyday business when Wattles, the San Fernando Valley's top "executive crook", sets up a hit. He establishes a chain of criminals to pass along the instructions and the money, thereby ensuring that the hitter doesn't know who hired him. Then one day Wattles finds his office safe open and a single item missing: the piece of paper listing the crooks in the chain. When people associated with the chain begin to pop up dead, the only person Wattles can turn to for help is Junior Bender, professional burglar and begrudging private eye for crooks.

My son and I are in danger. The life and death kind. The kind that forces me to make choices no mother should have to. I’ll do anything to keep my son safe and not sacrifice my responsibility to my patients. I’m desperate. Desperate enough to beg broody Special Agent Micah Emmett for help. But he has a job, and it doesn’t include protecting me. Why should he? He doesn’t know me.

When Apollo Kagwa's father disappeared, all he left his son were strange recurring dreams and a box of books stamped with the word improbabilia. Now Apollo is a father himself - and as he and his wife, Emma, are settling into their new lives as parents, exhaustion and anxiety start to take their toll. Apollo's old dreams return and Emma begins acting odd.

This is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age novel and a richly plotted suspense tale told through the distinctive voice of its heroine, Blue van Meer. After a childhood spent moving from one academic outpost to another with her father, Blue is clever and possessed of a vast lexicon of knowledge. But when a drowning and the shocking death of a teacher lead to a confluence of mysteries, Blue is left to make sense of it all with only her gimlet-eyed instincts and cultural references to guide - or misguide - her.

Mo's latest assignment is assisting the police in containing an unusual outbreak: ordinary citizens suddenly imbued with extraordinary abilities of the superpowered kind. Unfortunately these people prefer playing superpranks instead of superheroics. The mayor of London being levitated by a dumpy man in Trafalgar Square would normally be a source of shared amusement for Mo and Bob, but they're currently separated because something's come between them - something evil.

The powerful forces of science and family collide when geneticist Paige Robson finds her world in upheaval: Her eight-year-old son Miles is struggling to fit in at his new school and begins asking questions about his biological father that Paige can’t answer - until fate thrusts the anonymous donor she used into their lives.

I Am Liu Yuejin, by prize-winning Chinese novelist Liu Zhenyun, is a novel of Beijing that paints a microcosm of contemporary China, dealing with classes at the two extremes: the super rich and the migrant workers who make them rich through deceit and corruption. The protagonist, Liu Yuejin, is a work site cook and small-time thief whose bag is stolen. While searching for it, he stumbles upon another bag, which contains a flash disk that chronicles high-level corruption, and sets off a convoluted chase.

In The Cold Six Thousand, James Ellroy's most ambitious and explosive novel yet, he puts the whole of the 1960s under his blistering lens. The result is a work of fierce, epic fiction, a speedball through our most tumultuous time.

Frieda Klein is uninterested in catching up on old times when her former classmate, Maddie Capel, shows up at her door - until she hears about Maddie’s troubled daughter, Becky. The teenager claims she was raped in her own bed one night while her mother was downstairs. Her assailant left her with a warning: “Don’t think of telling anyone, sweetheart. Nobody will believe you.” And no one does - except Frieda.

Dr Will Raven is a man seldom shocked by human remains, but even he is disturbed by the contents of a package washed up at the Port of Leith. Stranger still, a man Raven has long detested is pleading for his help to escape the hangman. Back in the townhouse of Dr James Simpson, Sarah Fisher has set her sights on learning to practise medicine. Almost everyone seems intent on dissuading her from this ambition, but when word reaches her that a woman has recently obtained a medical degree despite her gender, Sarah decides to seek her out.

Dracula. A name of horror, depravity and the darkest sensuality. Yet the real Dracula was just as alluring, just as terrifying, his story not of a monster but of a man - and a contradiction. For the one they called 'The Devil's Son' was both tyrant and lawgiver, crusader and mass slaughterer, torturer and hero, lover and murderer. His tale is told by those who knew him best. The only woman he ever loved, who he must sacrifice. His closest comrade and traitor.

Professor David Ullman's expertise in the literature of the demonic - notably Milton's Paradise Lost - has won him wide acclaim. But David is not a believer. One afternoon he receives a visitor at his campus office, a strikingly thin woman who offers him an invitation: travel to Venice, Italy, witness a "phenomenon", and offer his professional opinion, in return for an extravagant sum of money. Needing a fresh start, David accepts and heads to Italy with his beloved 12-year-old daughter, Tess. What happens in Venice will send David on an unimaginable journey from skeptic to true believer....

Although the Green Dolphin is a bar of ill repute, it is there that Tancred Palmieri, a thief with elegant and erudite tastes, meets Willow Azarian, an aging heroin addict. She reveals to Tancred that her very wealthy father has recently passed away, leaving each of his five children a mysterious object that provides one clue to the whereabouts of a large inheritance. Willow enlists Tancred to steal these objects from her siblings and solve the puzzle.

Living on his posh French estate with his elegant heiress wife, Tom Ripley, on the cusp of middle age, is no longer the striving comer of The Talented Mr. Ripley. Having accrued considerable wealth through a long career of crime—forgery, extortion, serial murder—Ripley still finds his appetite unquenched and longs to get back in the game.

Librarian Martha Storm has always found it easier to connect with books than people—though not for lack of trying. She keeps careful lists of how to help others in her superhero-themed notebook. And yet, sometimes it feels like she’s invisible. All of that changes when a book of fairy tales arrives on her doorstep. Inside, Martha finds a dedication written by her best friend—her grandmother Zelda—who died under mysterious circumstances years ago. When Martha discovers a clue within the book that her grandmother may still be alive, she becomes determined to discover the truth.

Deep in the Rocky Mountains, a gruesome discovery - hundreds of mummified bodies - stirs international attention and fervent controversy. Despite doubts to the bodies' origins, the local Native American Heritage Commission lays claim to the prehistoric remains, along with the strange artifacts found in the same cavern: gold plates inscribed with an unfathomable script.

Balford-le-Nez is a dying seatown on the coast of Essex. But when a member of the town's small but growing Asian community is found dead on its beach, his neck broken, sleepy Balford-le-Nez ignites. Working solo without her longtime partner, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, Sergeant Barbara Havers must probe not only the mind of a murderer and a case very close to her own heart, but the terrible price people pay for deceiving others...and themselves.

Four strangers and six weeks: this is all that separates Mara from one life-changing payday. She was surprised when reality TV producers came knocking at Primal Instinct—the survival school where she teaches rich clients not to die during a night outdoors—and even more shocked to be cast in their new show, Civilization. Now she just has to live off the land with her fellow survivors for long enough to get the prize money.

Kellie Scott has just returned to work after a decade of being a stay-at-home mom. She's adjusting to high heels, scrambling to cook dinner for her family after a day at the office - and soaking in the dangerous attention of a very handsome, very married male colleague. Kellie's neighbor, Susan Barrett, begins every day with fresh resolutions: She won't eat any carbs, she'll go to bed at a reasonable hour, and she'll stop stalking her ex-husband and his new girlfriend.

Two days before Christmas, a young woman is found dead beneath the cliffs of the deserted village of Kalfshamarvik. Did she jump, or did something more sinister take place beneath the lighthouse and the abandoned old house on the remote rocky outcrop? With winter closing in and the snow falling relentlessly, Ari Thor Arason discovers that the victim's mother and young sister also lost their lives in this same spot, 25 years earlier....