Mystery Reads

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.

It’s spring in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Lucy and Connor have moved into their new home, at last, a historic cottage on the Nags Head Beach. Lucy is now happily immersed in her work at the Bodie Island Lighthouse Library, planning her wedding, and decorating the house. But then a dead body disrupts their peaceful new abode.

Edmond Dantes is falsely accused of treason on the day of his marriage. He is directly imprisoned in the fortress of If without any investigations being conducted. Edmond does not give up and he is determined to find his way out. The endpoint is the Isle of Monte Cristo which hides a great fortune.

Blair Charlston swapped the stock market for salvation - and now he's making a killing. Once a controversial venture capitalist, Charlston reinvented himself as a personal and business development guru after surviving an attempt to take his own life when a business deal went disastrously wrong. So when he decides to host a weekend retreat on the outskirts of Stirling for more than 300 people, Connor Fraser is drafted in to cover the security for a man who is at once idolised as a saviour and hated as a ruthless asset stripper.

After being jilted by her ex-boyfriend and best friend, Jade couldn't be more ready to embark on the adventure of a lifetime—11 countries in 4 months, all from the luxurious Campus on Board ship—and to wedge an entire globe between her and the people who broke her heart. But when Jade discovers the backstabbing couple are also setting sail, her obsession with them grows and festers, leading to a shocking murder.

Septuagenarian librarian Cleo Watkins believes in gracious manners, sweet tea, and justice - library justice. For over 40 years, Cleo has tried every trick in the book to get delinquent patron Dixie Huddleston to return the most overdue volume in Catalpa Springs, Georgia. When Dixie says she’ll finally relinquish the book, Cleo is shocked. She’s even more startled by the reason: superstitious Dixie says she’s seen the signs - she’s about to die and is setting her affairs in order.

Melanie Trenholm should be anticipating Christmas with nothing but joy - after all, it’s only the second Christmas she and her husband, Jack, will celebrate with their twin toddlers. But the ongoing excavation of the centuries-old cistern in the garden of her historic Tradd Street home has been a huge millstone, both financially and aesthetically. Local students are thrilled by the possibility of unearthing more Colonial-era artifacts at the cistern, but Melanie is concerned by the ghosts connected to it that have suddenly invaded her life and her house.

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.

Cricket Crosby is back . . . and she's licensed to snoop! Fresh off divorce and a private investigator's course, Cricket's ready to balance running her antiques store with proving her PI chops . . . if someone will take a chance on her. When a local PI catches a case involving the theft of luxury goods, he hires the former debutante to go undercover to trap a thief. But snooping during PTA meetings and cotillion parties is harder than it looks, especially when Cricket's missteps cause a hunky police detective to cast suspicion on her new bestie, Ruby Balthazar.

It’s 1927 in Victoria, Australia. A time after the Great War when women have more options opened to them. At a weekend house party at Thornton Park, Alexandra Thornton decides to break the news to her father that she wants to be an antiques dealer, like her father, grandfather and great-grandfather before her. Guests include Zhang Huo, a Chinese antiques dealer who, with his son, has brought a Ming dragon statue from China for Thomas Thornton, Alexandra’s father. Benedict Archer, manager of Thornton Antiques in Melbourne, is also invited.

Abandoned by her fugitive ex-husband, Lily Brown is rebuilding her life on the edge of a Kansas town that still feels the sting of his crimes. Lily lies low, managing the isolated storage facility where she lives with her twelve-year-old son, Everett, and planning a better future for them both. That requires keeping secrets. Everett has them too. After breaking into a storage unit, Everett finds photographs and news clippings of five girls missing for decades.

In the beautiful village of Vernazza, the Mazzone family have transformed an old convent overlooking the glamorous Italian Riviera into the elegant Lemon Tree Hotel. For Chiara, her daughter, Elene, and her granddaughter, Isabella, the running of their hotel is the driving force in their lives. One day, two unexpected guests check in. The first, Dante, is a face from Chiara's past, but what exactly happened between them all those years ago, Elene wonders. Isabella is preoccupied with the second guest, a mysterious young man who seems to know a lot about the history of the old convent.

I've never let anyone into my life. At least not like her. Not until her. She sees a side of me that isn't the bratva monster everyone else believes. Now that she knows, she's mine. Mine to keep and protect. Mine to please. In return, it's her love I crave. She's my soulmate.

It's the week before Christmas, and antiques dealer Weezie Foley is in a frenzy to deck out her shop for the Savannah historical district decorating contest, which she intends to win. Weezie is ready to shoot herself with her glue gun by the time she's done, but the results are stunning. She's certainly one-upped the owners of the trendy shop around the corner, but suddenly things start to go missing from her display and there seems to be an uninvited midnight visitor to her shop.

One freezing winter morning a dead body is found in the backyard of the Dharma family’s house. It’s the body of Anu Krishnan. For Anu, a writer seeking a secluded retreat from the city, the Dharmas' "back-house" in the sleepy mountain town of Merrit's Point was the ideal spot to take a year off and begin writing.

Mimi Lee is on top of the world. She has a thriving pet grooming business, the sweetest boyfriend, and a talking cat to boot. When she arrives at the elementary school where her sister Alice works, she’s expecting a fun girls’ night out - but instead finds a teacher slumped over in her car, dead.

Magpie Lewis started writing in her yellow notebook the day her family self-destructed. That was the night Eryn, Magpie's sister, skipped town and left her to fend for herself. That was the night of Brandon Phipp's party. Now, Magpie is called a slut whenever she walks down the hallways of her high school, her former best friend won't speak to her, and she spends her lunch period with a group of misfits who've all been socially exiled like she has. And so, feeling trapped and forgotten, Magpie retreats to her notebook, dreaming up a place called Near.

A gold-digging spouse who is also a serial killer.... The beautiful owner of a women’s dress shop brutally murdered on the floor.... A sexy dame who shows up unannounced at Dick Moonlight PI’s office claiming she’s about to be murdered.... Two numbskulls who decide to rob a home for the aged during bingo night.... These are just a few of the sexy, hard-boiled, and noir tales you’ll find in this first-ever volume of collected short stories by Thriller and PWA Shamus Award-winner Vincent Zandri.

For 19-year-old Mickey, Instagram offers a tantalizing portal into the world she wishes she inhabited. Though beautiful, cunning, and privileged, Mickey finds herself with a stalled modelling career, an escalating drinking problem, few friends, and next to nothing in the bank. To numb her growing despair, she spends her days frantically refreshing her Instagram feed, obsessively tracking the movements of Insta-famous model Gemma Anton.

Hitchcock's Rear Window meets Messud's The Woman Upstairs in this unnerving, superbly crafted novel which takes listeners deep into the mind of a serial stalker and, through him, the lives of his unsuspecting victims. Read Me is a seductive, haunting novel that holds a sinister mirror up to the ways in which we observe, judge, and influence people. Benedictus' prose commands and draws listeners into the dark, manipulative mind of a serial stalker as he targets women across London, escalating his efforts until he settles on Frances - a bright young professional....