Psychological Domestic Mystery Thriller

Fern Castle works in her local library. She has dinner with her twin sister, Rose, three nights a week. And she avoids crowds, bright lights, and loud noises as much as possible. Fern has a carefully structured life, and disrupting her routine can be...dangerous. When Rose discovers that she cannot get pregnant, Fern sees her chance to pay her sister back for everything Rose has done for her. Fern can have a baby for Rose. She just needs to find a father. Simple.

Knocking on the front door, clutching my son Noah’s small hand, my heart is beating fast. When my foster mother sees me, her hands fly to her mouth in disbelief and she pulls us inside, asking the question I don’t want to answer: Why have you come back? Soon the whole town is whispering about my miraculous return, fifteen years after I vanished in the middle of the night. But not everyone is happy to see me. My oldest friend thinks I’m keeping secrets, and they aren’t wrong. We were seen arguing the night I returned. And then my friend is found dead.

Catherine Sterling thinks she knows her mother. Ruth Sterling is quiet, hardworking, and lives for her daughter. All her life, it's been just the two of them against the world. But now, Catherine is ready to spread her wings, move from home, and begin a new career. And Ruth Sterling will do anything to prevent that from happening.

Seventeen-year-old Ellie was last seen at a party with her boyfriend, star quarterback Josh, before she went missing… Twenty years later, Ellie has rebuilt her life. The man who ruined it is behind bars. He can't hurt her now. But as Ellie leaves her therapy group, a face she hasn't seen in decades appears before her. Josh, her high school boyfriend, is back in town. As they reconnect after years apart, trying to make sense of their shared trauma, a few streets away, Ellie's seventeen-year-old daughter Jess vanishes.

At the Little Academy, mothers fret over their preschoolers, who have developed an unsettling syndrome. The children’s odd craving for blood is considered relatively benign (to everyone except their beleaguered moms) until a young teacher is found dead and the only potential witnesses are ten adorable four-year-olds. It becomes clear that the police are looking at the children as not just witnesses, but also suspects…and they’re watching the mothers as well. Cutting Teeth is a witty story that asks if there is anything a mother is not asked to sacrifice for her children.

The wealthy community of Esperance is picture-perfect. Big houses, stunning views, beautiful people. A brand new running track for the local club to jog around in the evenings. From the outside, it looks like paradise. But the women of the town know the truth: you can hide anything—from wrinkles to secrets from your past—if you have enough money. You could even hide a murder.

When Jace Montgomery comes home late from entertaining clients, he discovers that his wife, Tessa, is missing. There’s broken glass at the back door. Clumps of her hair. Blood. The cops in their small New Jersey town have him pegged as a suspect, especially after he explodes at a reporter during a press conference. Jace maintains his innocence despite the mounting evidence against him, but when a coworker he’s accused of having an affair with also disappears and a search warrant turns up an illegal gun in Jace’s home, all signs point to him as the culprit.

At 26, Dahlia Lighthouse is haunted by her upbringing. Raised in a secluded island mansion deep in the woods and kept isolated by her true crime-obsessed parents, she is unable to move beyond the disappearance of her twin brother, Andy, when they were 16. After several years away and following her father’s death, Dahlia returns to the house, where the family makes a gruesome discovery: buried in their father’s plot is another body—Andy’s, his skull split open with an ax.

It’s the perfect home for the perfect family: pretty Nora Howell, her handsome husband, their two teenage daughters, and lovable dog. As California transplants making a fresh start in Brooklyn, they expected to live in a shoebox, but the brownstone has a huge kitchen, lots of light, and a backyard. The catch: its previous residents were victims of a grisly triple homicide that remains unsolved. Soon, peculiar things begin happening. The pug is nosing around like a bloodhound. Nora unearths a long-hidden rusty box in the flowerbed.

It’s 2011 and Deecie Jeffries’s missing person’s case in Austin, Texas, is still cold. New mom Bee, struggling with postpartum depression, is living in Portland, Maine, having left Austin–and those memories–far behind. Until Leo, her childhood crush and her estranged twin Gus’s best friend, suddenly resurfaces, drawing Bee back into their shared past. Bee’s predictable life is upended, pushing her to return to her childhood home and piece together a neighborhood’s shattered history.

Julia and Christopher Hygate have the picture-perfect life: gobs of money thanks to their lucrative shipping enterprise and an estate on a secluded island. When they meet Eve Sylvester, they know she is the exact person they should hire to be their child's nanny. Eve doesn’t have any living relatives, she’s lost touch with her friends, and her partner is out of the picture. Best of all, she’s expecting a baby. Eve thinks she’s landed the greatest gig—previously penniless, now she’ll live like a queen and have a promising future for her daughter. But the job seems too good to be true.

Tatum hasn’t seen her daughter, Adrienne, in years, not since Tatum’s husband—the pastor in their small California town—all but disowned her. When she finally gathers the courage to secretly reconnect with Adrienne, Tatum’s thrilled she’s even willing to talk to her. But then—Adrienne disappears. When Adrienne doesn’t show up for her shift at the bar where Tatum’s been visiting her, she knows something is wrong. Adrienne may have been a bit of a wild child, but she hasn’t missed a day of work without calling in for years.

Blame the booze, her shaky marriage, her troubled son, or a thousand other things, but Jewelann Jordan has one thing on her mind when she attends her class reunion: making sure her old crush Christian Campbell sees exactly what he lost all those years ago. A late night, a hotel room, a rekindled flame that burns even hotter than it did back then—what could go wrong? Everything. The night with Christian isn't the first secret Jewelann has kept from her husband Ken, so one more shouldn't be much harder—except that Christian shows up without warning.

After the sudden death of her husband, Kate Turner is looking for a fresh start for herself and her teenage daughter, Alex. They relocate to the beachside town of Shoreham, Florida, where all is not as sunny as it seems. Although Kate makes fast friends with a trio of fellow moms, their daughters take an instant dislike to Alex, who attempts to document their bullying in her video diary. Kate brushes off Alex’s concerns—until she receives a series of chilling warnings about the clique of moms from other parents and neighbors.

When a soldier is found stabbed through the heart at a US Army base, there is no doubt that his wife, Luz, is to blame. But was it an act of self-defense? An attempt to save her infant daughter? Or the cold-blooded murder of an innocent man? Ambitious public defender Abby is determined to win at all costs. As a new mother herself, she wants to keep Luz out of prison and with her daughter. But when the surprises stack up and shocking new evidence emerges, Abby realizes the task proves far more difficult than she suspected and will require a terrible sacrifice.

A family under constant scrutiny from both the police and the press as a fifteen-year-old goes missing after a sleepover with a friend; a marriage at breaking point; a father who has seemingly lied about his alibi; and a detective feeling the pressure to deliver an arrest, are thrust together to make for yet another incredibly intricate and dark thriller from Lynda La Plante.

Aldrich University is rocked to its core when a hacker dumps 40,000 people's e-mails - the entire faculty, staff, students, alums - onto an easily searchable database. Rumors and affairs immediately leak, but things turn explosive when Kit Manning's handsome husband, Dr. Greg Strasser, is found murdered. Kit's sister, Willa, returns for the funeral, setting foot in a hometown she fled 15 years ago, after a night she wishes she could forget. As an investigative reporter, Willa knows something isn't right about the night Greg was killed, and she's determined to find the truth.

A few years ago, Laura lost her daughter in tragic circumstances. Now, she is running from her past, but a chance encounter with a frightened teenager, Miriana, drags her back into a web of secrets and danger. As Miriana’s cryptic story unravels, Laura realises the threat is closer than she ever imagined. Someone is hunting Laura, determined to bury the truth about what really happened to her daughter. A predator is watching. Waiting. Ready to strike again. Trapped between fear and fury, Laura must confront her darkest suspicions and uncover the terrifying truth before the hunter closes in.

Siblings Hazel and Kagan Bailey haven’t been close for a long time, but when their mother passes under mysterious circumstances an investigation quickly follows, and the siblings are high on the list of possible suspects. As they deal with the emotional tragedy of losing their only living parent, brother and sister are forced to team up against a master con man—someone they once called “family”. After the silver-tongued trickster disappears with the family fortune, Hazel and Kagan must put aside their differences to track him down.

Kenzi Brannon's life was turned upside down when she moved into her family's abandoned home to raise her niece. Problems compound when her aging mother starts to remember things. And clues the police find regarding the knife don't match anything Kenzi knows about her family. Things go from bad to worse when she and her niece discover something horrifying in their house. But not even that compares to the strange ways her mom is acting.