Psychological Crime Thrillers

Amy Penrose knows how it feels to grow up in a home where your parents harm you more than raise you. Now an adult, she’s newly qualified as a child psychologist and hopes to help children who’ve gone through struggles of their own. When a father brings a 12-year-old boy into her office, she recognizes the bruises and the way the boy withdraws into himself. And she wants to help. As she delves into the family’s past, and starts to feel unsafe in her own home, she starts to wonder if this is one child beyond her help....

The two strikingly original short novels brought together here - in new translations by award-winning translators - were both literary gambles of a sort for Fyodor Dostoevsky. The first real expression of his genius, The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelgänger. Written 20 years later under the pressure of crushing debt, The Gambler is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction.

As the anniversary of the murders approaches, Faith Winters is released from the psychiatric hospital and yanked back to the last spot on earth she wants to be - her hometown where the slayings took place. Wracked by the lingering echoes of survivor's guilt, Faith spirals into a black hole of alcoholism and wanton self-destruction. Finding no solace at the bottom of a bottle, Faith decides to track down her sister's killer - only to discover that she's the one being hunted. How can one woman uncover the truth when everyone's a suspect - including herself?

Feeling her stardom fading, struggling soap-actress Adele Rafferty is ready to give up on her dreams when she gets a last-minute offer to play the lead in upcoming horror film Final Draft. Could this be her big break? Will she have redemption for what happened the last time she was on a film set? Adele doesn’t think twice before signing the dotted line. But when life on set starts to mirror the sinister events portrayed in the script, Adele fears the real horror lies off the page. Isolated and unsure who in the crew she can trust, is there anywhere or any time left to run?

Cassie Kramer and her younger sister, Allie, learned the hazards of fame long ago. Together, they'd survived the horror of a crazed fan who nearly killed their mother, former Hollywood actress Jenna Hughes. Still, Cassie moved to LA, urging Allie to follow. As a team, they'd take the town by storm. But Allie, finally free of small-town Oregon, and just that little bit more beautiful, also proved to be more talented - and driven.

They aren't the kind of women anyone misses. Truck-stop hookers, runaways...no one would even notice they'd disappeared if the killer didn't photograph their lifeless bodies, posed in the back of a semi-trailer. Exactly like the infamous Trucker murders. Carmen Jacobs interviewed the world's most terrifying serial killers for her best-selling book. The police might not believe her, but she knows there's a monster out there, paying homage to other murderers. The only person who can predict where he'll strike next is Griffin Archer - a reclusive software millionaire with ample reason not to help her.

A couple found brutally murdered in the Coronado Cays pulls San Diego CSI Holly Jennings from a bliss-filled morning with her new baby and husband into a twisted maze of cheating spouses and Hollywood gore. As Holly and her team track the bloody trail left by the killer, the questions and the body count continue to rise like the damned who've been drowned. The killer fits the profile of a professional. But Holly can feel the rage and need for redemption behind these deaths that tells her that for the killer - or killers - this is all intimately personal.

Newlyweds Sam Statler and Annie Potter are head over heels, and excited to say good-bye to New York city and start a life together in Sam's sleepy hometown upstate. Or, it turns out, a life where Annie spends most of her time alone while Sam, her therapist husband, works long hours in his downstairs office, tending to the egos of his (mostly female) clientele. Little does Sam know that through a vent in his ceiling, every word of his sessions can be heard from the room upstairs.

Vowing to make a fresh start, Sarah McAdams has come home to renovate the old Victorian mansion where she grew up. Her daughters, Jade and Gracie, aren’t impressed by the rundown property on the shores of Oregon’s wild Columbia River. As soon as they pull up the isolated drive, Sarah, too, is beset by uneasy memories - of her cold, distant mother, of the half-sister who vanished without a trace, and of a long-ago night when Sarah was found on the widow’s walk, feverish and delirious.

A hugely enjoyable, must-listen murder mystery sure to appeal to fans of Elly Griffiths, Anthony Horowitz, and Agatha Christie, with one of the best and most satisfying conclusions you'll ever hear. A classic in Japan, available in English for the first time.

At last, Helena Pelletier has the life she deserves. A loving husband, two beautiful daughters, a business that fills her days. Then she catches an emergency news announcement and realizes she was a fool to think she could ever leave her worst days behind her. Helena has a secret: she is the product of an abduction. Her mother was kidnapped as a teenager by her father and kept in a remote cabin in the marshlands of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That’s what his mother always told him. Years later, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success—and a movie adaptation—to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s.

The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father's caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys' prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city.

Elissa arrived in Memory Wood on the most important day of her life. The 13-year-old chess prodigy was competing at the English Youth Grand Prix when she was snatched, and then woke up in a makeshift cell underground. Elijah has lived beside Memory Wood for as long as he can remember. He's only 12, but he's spent his life so far exploring every inch of it, and that's how he finds Elissa. When he appears in her cell, Elissa assumes Elijah will help her; that he'll go to the police and give them the answers they desperately need. But Elijah doesn't want her to leave.

A stranger wearing a mask stands in the shadow of a garden. He's watching his first victim through the window. He will kill him slowly, make it last - play him a nursery rhyme - make him pay. There's only one person the police can turn to - ex-Detective Joona Linna - but he's serving time in a high-security prison. So they offer him a chance to secure his freedom: help Superintendent Saga Bauer track down the vicious killer known as the Rabbit Hunter, before he strikes again. Soon, another three victims have been murdered, and Stockholm is in the grip of terror.

Michael Hart had been convicted for killing his wife and spent 10 years in prison. But now he has escaped, and his lawyer is tracking down new evidence that might clear him. But then the sleepwalking begins.... And one by one, the members of the jury that convicted him are being murdered.

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?

In The Perfect Smile (book four), criminal profiler Jessie Hunt, 29, fresh from the FBI Academy, is assigned a disturbing new case: a woman in her 30s has been murdered after using a dating website for her affairs with married men. Had she gotten too close to one of the married men? Was she the victim of blackmail? Of a stalker? Or was there some far more nefarious motive at stake? The list of suspects takes Jessie into wealthy, manicured neighborhoods, behind the veil of seemingly perfect lives, lives which are actually rotten to the core.

Every seven years, a boy disappears from Camp Waukeelo. Joey Proctor can't swim, but that doesn't stop camp counselor Alex Mason from leaving him out on a raft in the middle of the lake in a fit of rage. Alex only meant to scare the kid, teach him a lesson. He didn't mean to forget about him. But now Joey is gone, and his body is never found. More than 20 years later, Alex is a success. No one knows what happened that summer at camp. At least, no one should know. But it looks like Joey Proctor may be back to take his revenge.

Fuminori Nakamura's Akutagawa Prize-winner plunges us into the depths of a young man's winding, troubled psyche. An unnamed taxi driver in Tokyo has experienced a rupture in his everyday life. He cannot stop daydreaming of suicide, envisioning himself returning to the earth in what soon become terrifying blackout episodes. His live-in girlfriend, Sayuko, is in a similarly bad phase, surrendering to alcoholism to escape the memory of her miscarriage.