Mystery Girl

Critically acclaimed author Kathryn Miller Haines' debut YA novel The Girl Is Murder received an Edgar Award nomination. Its sequel, The Girl Is Trouble, uses the same exciting blend of mystery and historical detail to keep listeners on the edge of their seats. Iris Anderson is allowed to work at her pop's detective agency as long as she does things his way and learns his method. Yet when she discovers information about her mother's supposed suicide, Iris is thrown headfirst into the most personal case of her life.

Disgraced ex-cop Angie Pallorino is determined to make a new start for herself as a private investigator. But first, she and her lover, newly promoted homicide detective James Maddocks, attempt a quiet getaway to rekindle a romance struggling in the shadows of their careers. The peace doesn’t last long when human skeletal remains are found in a nearby mossy grove. The peace doesn’t last long when human skeletal remains are found in a nearby mossy grove.

Sherwood is a sleepy little town. A town full of friendly faces and even friendlier neighbors. Which is why FBI agent Emma Griffin isn't surprised when her new neighbor starts stopping by to chat. Turns out her neighbor has a dark past and secrets that made her run. As much as Emma wished it wasn’t true, a dark past and secrets are things that she is far too familiar with, especially now more than ever.

You might as well know this going in: Lawrence Block's new novel is not for everyone. It's recounted in journal form by its protagonist, and begins when he walks into a roadhouse outside of Bakersfield, California, and walks out with a woman. And rapes and murders her. But, um, not in that order. Right. But it's what he does with the rest of his life that's really interesting....

Nora O'Malley's been a lot of girls. As the daughter of a con-artist who targets criminal men, she grew up as her mother's protégé. But when her mom fell for the mark instead of conning him, Nora pulled the ultimate con: escape. For five years Nora's been playing at normal. But she needs to dust off the skills she ditched because she has three problems.

A professor shows a colleague a painting that he has kept secret for decades. The professor swears it is a Vermeer - but why has he hidden this important work for so long? The reasons unfold in a series of stories that trace ownership of the painting back to World War II and Amsterdam, and still further back to the moment of the work's inspiration.

A heartbreaking letter. A girl locked away. A mystery to be solved. 1956. When Ivy Jenkins falls pregnant she is sent in disgrace to St Margaret's, a dark, brooding house for unmarried mothers. Her baby is adopted against her will. Ivy will never leave. Present day. Samantha Harper is a journalist desperate for a break. When she stumbles on a letter from the past, the contents shock and move her. The letter is from a young mother, begging to be rescued from St Margaret's. Before it is too late.

After the horrific killings of two young people, the murder investigation immediately took on another twisted turn as the killings are linked to bloody and cryptic passages within books from the college library.

With shocking clues leaving the local police bewildered and desperate, they called on the FBI to spearhead the investigation.

When Detective Casey White discovers the body of a beautiful teenage girl in a white nightgown near the shoreline in North Carolina’s Outer Banks, a familiar fear floods through her. Could this be Hannah, her sweet, blue-eyed daughter snatched from home 14 years ago? But it only takes one look to confirm that the girl with dark bruising around her throat is another family’s tragedy. Putting her own grief aside, Casey digs into unsolved missing child cases in the area. The victim is Cheryl Parry, one of two little girls taken during a family beach vacation nine years ago.

Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she’s thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. They’ve only just started comparing natural hair care regimens, though, when a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and Nella is left in the dust.

When nine-year-old best friends Charlie and Amy disappear, two families are plunged into a living nightmare. A text message confirms the unthinkable; that the girls are the victims of a terrifying kidnapping. And when a second text message pits the two families against each other for the life of their children, the clock starts ticking for D.I. Kim Stone and the squad.

Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her unbearable life on the swamp, and to her harsh father in Mississippi. But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle, so she forms a plan to go north.

Website designer and high-society rebel Andrea Kendricks would never have gotten involved with ego-in-pumps lifestyle hostess Marilee Mabry if it weren't for the underhanded machinations of Andy's upper-crust mama. But thanks to Mother Cissy, Andy's donning designer duds to attend a launch party at the intolerable domestic diva's new Dallas TV studio - and she's on hand to witness the celebration site go up in flames!

In the Maya Gray series (which begins with Book 1—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.

Ever since The Night in Question left her with a hideous scar and no memory of what happened, Theo Lane has been hiding. An aspiring filmmaker, she uses a hidden button cam to keep the world at bay. She spends the entire summer in a Manhattan cafe, secretly documenting random "subjects".

When two young sisters disappear from a strip mall parking lot in a small Pennsylvania town, their devastated mother hires an enigmatic bounty hunter, Alice Vega, to help find the girls. Immediately shut out by a local police department already stretched thin by budget cuts and the growing OxyContin and meth epidemic, Vega enlists the help of a disgraced former cop, Max Caplan. Cap is a man trying to put the scandal of his past behind him and move on, but Vega needs his help to find the girls, and she will not be denied.

When Detective Casey White is called early one morning to a beachside vacation campsite in the Outer Banks, she finds the bodies of Carl and Peggy Pearson side-by-side, their throats cut, and their 13-year-old daughter, Lisa, nowhere to be found. Haunted by memories of her own missing girl, Casey fears this could soon become a triple murder: Because without the medication found in the bathroom cabinet, Lisa has just days to live.

Ellie Cavanaugh was only seven years old when her 15-year-old sister, Andrea, was murdered near their home in a rural village in New York's Westchester County. There were three suspects: Rob Westerfield, 19-year-old scion of a wealthy, prominent family whom Andrea has been secretly dating; Paul Stroebel, a 16-year-old schoolmate, who had a crush on Andrea, and Will Nebels, a local handyman in his 40s.

Detective Angie Pallorino took down a serial killer permanently and, according to her superiors, with excessive force. Benched on a desk assignment for twelve months, Angie struggles to maintain her sense of identity—if she's not a detective, who is she? Then a decades-old cold case washes ashore, pulling her into an investigation she recognizes as deeply personal. Angie's lover and partner, James Maddocks, sees it, too. But spearheading an ongoing probe into a sex-trafficking ring while keeping Angie's increasing obsession with her case in check is taking its toll.

On a frigid New Year’s Eve in Minneapolis, a young woman’s brutalized body falls from the trunk of a car into the path of oncoming traffic. Questions as to whether she was alive or dead when she hit the icy pavement result in her macabre nickname, Zombie Doe. Unidentified and unidentifiable, she is the ninth nameless female victim of the year, and homicide detectives Sam Kovac and Nikki Liska are charged with the task of not only finding out who Zombie Doe is but who in her life hated her enough to destroy her. Was it personal? Or could it just have been a crime of opportunity?