Psychological Suspense

Stay-at-home mom Sarah Johnson has the perfect family - a handsome, hardworking husband and two healthy and beautiful children. At least, that's what she's been telling herself for years. After the tragedies in her youth, Sarah deemed living a lie easier than dwelling on the past and facing her everyday failures. But Sarah's world is about to crumble around her when she receives a phone call from a man with a heavy foreign accent telling her that her perfect husband has put a price on her head. She is offered two weeks to come up with a counteroffer or die.

The Baxter house has been on the estate agent’s books for decades. Dilapidated and near derelict, nobody is interested in it. But, for one buyer, the remote location and rat-infested cellar are perfect. For the first year, Mackenzie’s marriage to Derek was ideal. But Derek believes she is having an affair, and when she realises her husband is becoming controlling, she knows she’s made a terrible mistake. When she threatens to leave and then disappears, no one believes she has been abducted.

Five weeks ago Carly Drake stood at her grandfather's grave. Now she's burying Drake Trucking's top driver, and the cops have no leads on the hijacking or murder. Faced with bankruptcy, phone threats, and the fear of failure, Carly has to team up with the last man she wants to owe - Lincoln Cain. Cain is magnetic, powerful, controlling - and hiding more than one secret. He promised Carly's granddad he'd protect her.

Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summer crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins. A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.

It’s hard to find an employer who doesn’t ask too many questions about my past. So I thank my lucky stars that the Garricks miraculously give me a job, cleaning their stunning penthouse with views across the city and preparing fancy meals in their shiny kitchen. I can work here for a while, stay quiet until I get what I want.

Limerick, Ireland. The driveway of the Stokes family home. American Oscar Harvey opens the trunk of the car his hosts have loaned him and finds in it the body of a woman beaten and bloody. But let's start from the beginning. Kate and Mannix Stokes and their children live beside Curragower Falls in Limerick, in a house they love but can barely afford in postrecession Ireland. On top of that, their autistic son, Fergus, is being bullied at school, and their daughter, Izzy, blames herself for not being able to protect him.

On still nights, when the curve of a winter moon is smudged in the flow of the River Quaggy, the dead clamor for him. And sometimes he coaxes the living to join them. To other people, his victims might be mere medical oddities. To him, they are fascinating specimens, worthy of display. Above all, he is a collector, eager for recognition even as he hides in the shadows. Detective Sergeant Etta Fitzroy is the first to recognize the connection between the disappearance of a young girl and a cold case that almost cost her the career she's sacrificed so much for.

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

In a small town, everyone knows everyone else's business. But in Brindle, Oregon, there's a secret nobody wants to see. Todd Fielding, a newly married young woman, comes to Brindle for a job with the local newspaper, which plans to celebrate the town's centennial by printing photos and letters from the town's history. But the relics of the past hide a dark secret.

In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting - a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage. But Stella's knowledge of Edgar's crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction that ensues -a passion that will consume Stella's sanity and destroy her and the lives of those around her.

It's summer on the Jersey Shore. Children play on the beach. Husbands are off working in the city. And the surf echoes in the night. Here, in this perfect place, a serial killer has no worries in the world - except choosing the next victim. Cam Hastings has come to Long Beach Island with her teenage daughter and the hope that maybe she can save her failed marriage. Cam has never stopped loving her husband, Mike, nor has she been able to outrun her flaws and demons - a vanished mother, a lost sister, and the ugly visions she has of missing children.

Caressa Horvath, raised in the corrupting atmosphere of a traveling carnival, marries an anthropologist named Jacob Bowman, who takes her on a journey to North Africa. Jacob gets himself killed by a band of Bedouin who spare Caressa’s life. The only one of her party left alive, Caressa is forced to join the caravan on a harrowing journey across the African desert.

In a renovated Gothic church on Long Island lives Jonathan Hemlock, an art professor and a world-renowned mountain climber who finances his black-market art collection by working as a freelance assassin. Now, Hemlock is being tricked into a hazardous assignment that involves an attempt to scale one of the most treacherous mountain peaks in the Swiss Alps: the Eiger. His target is one of his three fellow climbers. The problem is that the CII can't tell him which one.

Professor Anne Waverly teaches religious studies at a respected university. Middle-aged and slightly lame, she spends her days in lecture halls and offices. But occasionally, she works for the FBI. As Ana Wakefield, an eager seeker of higher truths, she infiltrates cults. Now, leaving the security of academia, she is on her way to Arizona in a battered VW bus.

Milly has barely spoken to her sister Judith in years. They hardly exchanged a word at their mother's funeral. They could not be further apart. So when Milly gets an invitation to go on a hiking trip, she hopes it will be an opportunity for reconciliation. Inviting her school-friend Harper along with her for support, the small party head off together into the bush. What awaits Milly is far from just a bracing hike in the wilderness, but an unexpected encounter with the past. The form it takes is revenge. But who is enacting it against Milly, and why?

On a cold night in October 1937, searchlights cut through the darkness around Alcatraz. A prison guard's only daughter - one of the youngest civilians who lives on the island - has gone missing. Tending the warden's greenhouse, convicted bank robber Tommy Capello waits anxiously. Only he knows the truth about the little girl's whereabouts and that both of their lives depend on the search's outcome.

When Allison’s wealthy and charming husband Peter is found dead, she appears distraught, devastated...delighted? Because despite an apparently picture-perfect marriage, Allison knows it was all built on a bed of lies. And as the truth regarding Peter’s life and death are revealed, Allison must try to keep her own dark past buried. Because if Peter was keeping secrets, then his widow is too.

Sisters, Strangers and Slaughter is a psychologically thrilling collection of short stories focusing on the remote and inchoate hollows of the human condition. Each of the three stories features a narrator battling inner separateness, an arcane secret that threatens an otherwise healthy existence. In their suffering, the subjects are unable to tell physical pain from its mental shape.

Every year, Úna prepares for her father to leave her. He will wave good-bye early one morning, then disappear with seven other men to traverse the Irish countryside. Together, these men form the Butchers, a group that roams from farm to farm, enacting ancient methods of cattle slaughter.

She's generous, kind, and compassionate - yet Delilah Grey will forever be an outcast in the small seaside town of Camden Beach, Maryland. She takes in women shattered by abuse, poverty, illness, or events beyond their control. But no matter how far she's come or how many she's helped find their way back, there is no safe place for Delilah. Acquitted of her rich husband's mysterious death decades ago, she lives in her beautiful mansion consumed by secrets - and mistakes she feels she can never atone for...until she takes in desperate mother Tracey Walters and her two young children.