Mystery Reads

Jen Weinstein and Lauren Parker rule the town of Salcombe, Fire Island every summer. They hold sway on the beach and the tennis court, and are adept at manipulating people to get what they want. Their husbands, Sam and Jason, have summered together on the island since childhood, despite lifelong grudges and numerous secrets. Their one single friend, Rachel Woolf, is looking to meet her match, whether he’s the tennis pro. But even with plenty to gossip about, this season starts out as quietly as any other. Until a body is discovered, face down, off the side of the boardwalk.

Pete Riley answers the door one morning and lets in a parent's worst nightmare. On his doorstep is Miles Lambert, a stranger who breaks the devastating news that Pete's son, Theo, isn't actually his son - he is the Lamberts', switched at birth by an understaffed hospital while their real son was sent home with Miles and his wife, Lucy. For Pete, his partner Maddie, and the little boy they've been raising for the past two years, life will never be the same again.

Summer is in full swing as tourists flock back to the Northwoods and travel to Lofty Pines, Wisconsin. For Rain Wilmot, owner of the Lakeside Library, this is the perfect opportunity to bring back her mother’s summer book club. But the summer sun starts to really heat up when one of the club’s members, Lily Redlin, is found dead in her own home not long after the first meeting.

Victorian London was notorious for its pickpockets. But in the country houses of the elite, gentleman burglars, art thieves and con men preyed on the rich and titled. Wealthy victims—with their pride and reputation at stake—would never go to the police. What they needed was a society insider, one of their own, a person of discretion and finely tuned powers of observation.

Viktor Kornilov is a cold-blooded beast. His name alone makes my blood run cold. But his cruel touch makes my heart beat faster and faster. We're trapped in a high-stakes game of lies and violence. One wrong move, and he'll take my son away. So when he gives me his sinful offer—become his fake wife or become his latest victim—the only answer I can give is yes.

A terrorist doesn't let strangers in her flat because they might be undercover police or intelligence agents, but her children bring their mates home and they run all over the place. The terrorist doesn't know that a kid has bugged every room in her house, cloned the hard drive on her PC, and copied all the numbers in her phone book. The kid works for Cherub. Cherub agents are aged between 10 and 17. They live in the real world, slipping under adult radar and getting information that sends criminals and terrorists to jail.

A classic mystery for the festive season: mulled wine, mince pies...and murder. Mordecai Tremaine, former tobacconist and perennial lover of romance novels, has been invited to spend Christmas in the sleepy village of Sherbroome, at the country retreat of one Benedict Grame. Arriving on Christmas Eve, he finds that the revelries are in full flow - but so, too, are tensions amongst the assortment of guests.

Cassandra Bowden is no stranger to hungover mornings. She's a binge drinker, her job with the airline making it easy to find adventure, and the occasional blackouts seem to be inevitable. She lives with them and the accompanying self-loathing. When she awakes in a Dubai hotel room, she tries to piece the previous night back together, counting the minutes until she has to catch her crew shuttle to the airport. She quietly slides out of bed, careful not to aggravate her already pounding head, and looks at the man she spent the night with.

Zecharia Sitchin’s best-selling series The Earth Chronicles provided humanity’s side of the story concerning our origins at the hands of the Anunnaki, “those who from heaven to earth came.” In The Lost Book of Enki we now view this saga from the perspective of Lord Enki, an Anunnaki leader revered in antiquity as a god, who tells the story of these extraterrestrials’ arrival on Earth from the planet Nibiru.

Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog find excitement and adventure wherever they go in Enid Blyton's most popular series. In book four, the Famous Five stay at the large old house at Smuggler's Top. They discover secret hiding places and underground tunnels, and one night they catch people signalling out to sea! Are there still smugglers at Smuggler's Top?

Books seven, eight and nine in the Skulduggery Pleasant series - known collectively as the Darquesse Trilogy, Derek Landy's fantastically imaginative series about our favourite dead detective.

A struggling actor, a Brit in America without a green card, Claire needs work and money to survive. Then she gets both. But nothing like she expected. Claire agrees to become a decoy for a firm of divorce lawyers. Hired to entrap straying husbands, she must catch them on tape with their seductive propositions. Then the game changes. When the wife of one of Claire’s targets is violently murdered, the cops are sure the husband is to blame. Desperate to catch him before he kills again, they enlist Claire to lure him into a confession.

Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog find excitement and adventure wherever they go in Enid Blyton's most popular series. In book 11, the Famous Five are on an adventurous holiday in horse-drawn caravans. They discover a ruined castle that looks deserted. But is that a face at the window? Or is it a trick of the light? Just who is hiding in the castle?

In London, journalist Jo Clifford plans to debunk the belief in past lives in a hard-hitting magazine piece. But her scepticism is shaken when a hypnotist forces her to relive the experiences of Matilda, Lady of Hay, a noblewoman during the reign of King John. She learns of Matilda's unhappy marriage, her love for the handsome Richard de Clare and the brutal death threats handed out by King John, before it becomes clear that Jo’s past and present are inevitably entwined.

A tale of magic, mystery and determination which is also in development for film adaptation. Emily longs to be ordinary. But when her parents disappear, she stumbles into the secret world of the Midnight Hour. A Victorian London frozen in time, the Midnight Hour is a haven for all things spooky, including monsters determined to end the world. What secrets have her parents been hiding? There's only one way Emily can find out and rescue her mum and dad: she must be brave enough to embrace her own inner magic....

Summer Merriweather's career as a Shakespeare professor hangs by a bookbinder's thread. So she spends her summer in England, researching a scholarly paper that, with luck, will finally get her published, impress the dean, and save her job. But her English idyll ends when her mother, Hildy, shuffles off her mortal coil from an apparent heart attack. Returning to Brigid's Island, North Carolina, for the funeral, Summer is impatient to sell her mom's embarrassingly romance-themed bookstore and go home. But then she finds threatening notes addressed to Hildy: Sell the bookstore or die.

After a disastrous sixth grade, Jake Herndon is anxiously awaiting his Big Do-Over, starting with his new school's notorious seventh-grade sleepover. Awkward team-building games and forced fun quickly become the least of his problems, however, when a dangerous organization invades and the night takes a shocking turn. Jake and two new classmates, Lucy and TJ, barely escape, only to find themselves in a fight for survival on the streets of Chicago. Over the next 48 hours, they unravel a mystery dating back to the Civil War and an incredible secret about Jake s family.

Git O'Rourke is from the wrong side of the tracks - even if, in the depressed Rust Belt town of Baxter, it's not always clear where that designation begins. A single mother, she works hard to support her daughter, Charlie, but still finds time to cut loose every once in a while, to go to a local bar, drink martinis, and find a companion for the night. Which is exactly how she ends up in a hotel room with a strange man passed out on heroin and how she comes to possess the bag of money and guns that he left open as he got his fix.

Word of Abby's talents reading tarot cards has reached a mob boss who wants her help in some business matters and he doesn't take no for an answer. When the police seek out her psychic intuition to shed light on a masked man who's been attacking women, Abby finds herself working both sides of the law on her own, leading her to wonder, why didn't I see this coming?

Burt Reynolds reads three of Robert B. Parker's finest Spenser novels. Includes Chance, Hush Money, and Small Vices.