Rural Town Mystery

Rene Descartes, a recently released ex-con, is living in a ramshackle trailer only a short distance from Hidden Cove, a secluded paradise for the country’s rich and famous. A savage attack against Rene by the son of the fourth richest man in the country spurns a brutal act of revenge that will ignite this paradise into a fiery vision of hell on earth. As the flames threaten to engulf rich and poor alike, only Deacon Riis, a small-town reporter haunted by his own past, suspects it wasn’t Rene who set Hidden Cove ablaze but someone with a far more sinister agenda.

Three years ago, someone brutally killed four people on the scow Mygirl. In a crowded courtroom, Cecil Younger helped the accused go free. Now the man charged with the Mygirl murders has disappeared. As a new father, Cecil just wants to move on from the Mygirl killings, but finds he can't just walk away when more and more people associated with the case end up dead. Younger is certain someone is trying to finish the grisly job begun on the Mygirl. He must discover the truth behind what happened three years ago before he can settle what's happening now.

It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow. In the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day, 14-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field - an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law.

As if baking holiday cookies, knitting a sweater for her husband, and making her daughter’s angel costume for the church pageant weren’t enough things for Lucy Stone’s busy Christmas schedule, she’s also working nights at the famous mail-order company Country Cousins. But when she discovers Sam Miller, its very wealthy founder, dead in his car from an apparent suicide, the sleuth in her knows something just doesn’t smell right.

Private McAuslan’s admirers already know him as court-martial defendant, ghost-catcher, star-crossed lover and golf caddie extraordinary; in this third and final volume of army memoirs, he appears as the most unlikely of batmen to his long-suffering protector and persecutor, Lieutenant Dand MacNeill; as guardroom philosopher and adviser to the leader of the Riff Rebellion; and even as Lance Corporal McAuslan, the Mad Tyrant of Three Section!

With Holding Lies, John Larison takes us deep into a thriving subculture of the Northwest, one born of the ferns and firs, rain and hot-springs, firebombs and whitewater. He takes us even deeper into the troubles of Hank Hazelton, a 59-year-old river guide, as he struggles to reconnect with his only daughter after a 14-year estrangement. His failure as a father haunts him, along with other deep regrets, tragedies, and longings. In the days before his daughter's arrival, Hank discovers a drift boat stranded below a rapid, empty except for a long smear of blood on its seat.

Bristol detective DS George Cross, champion of the outsider, the voiceless and the dispossessed. DS George Cross can be rude, difficult and awkward with people. But his unfailing logic and dogged pursuit of the truth means his conviction rate is the best on the force. An outsider himself, having been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, DS Cross is especially drawn to cases concerning the voiceless and the dispossessed. Now, Cross is untangling the truth about a young woman who died three days ago.

Big secrets run deep. Former FBI agent Jack McBride took the job as chief of police for Stillwater, Texas, to start a new life with his teenage son, Ethan, away from the suspicions that surrounded his wife's disappearance a year earlier. With a low crime rate and a five-man police force, he expected it to be a nice, easy gig; hot checks, traffic violations, some drugs, occasional domestic disturbances, and petty theft. Instead, within a week he is investigating a staged murder-suicide.

Joan Didion's electrifying first novel is a haunting portrait of a marriage whose wrong turns and betrayals are at once absolutely idiosyncratic and a razor-sharp commentary on the history of California. Everett McClellan and his wife, Lily, are the great-grandchildren of pioneers, and what happens to them is a tragic epilogue to the pioneer experience, a story of murder and betrayal that only Didion could tell with such nuance, sympathy, and suspense.

On a solo ski vacation in Canyon Mines, Colorado, Tucker has a love-hate relationship with his wealth, spending indiscriminately while skiing fearlessly and preparing to conquer the overgrown slope of Hidden Run, a dangerous run not attempted in decades. As genealogist Jillian tries to uncover enough of Tucker's family tree to understand his charming nature but reckless resolve, Jillian's equally charming father, Nolan, cajoles Tucker into giving him ski lessons to get him talking about the suspicious circumstances surrounding his grandfather's life in St. Louis in the 1930s.

World War Two vet Art Kenning is the alcoholic first-aid man in an isolated sawmill village in the interior of BC, where he dreads the sound of the five whistles that summon him to the mill floor whenever a worker is hurt. Traumatized by an incident in Holland, when he stood by while members of his unit committed a horrific act, he loses himself in drink, and in memories of the love affair he had with a woman in wartime Paris. Then one of the most powerful men at the mill arrives at his door late one evening to ask for his help.

The Lindsay family has come west hoping to help the father, John, recover from an illness. When they arrive, they are induced to purchase Spanish Peaks Ranch, an abandoned United States military post surrounded by mountains. It seems like a perfect place to settle into their new life as ranchers. As they soon find out, though, this deserted fort is equally suited for both protection and imprisonment.

When the exuberant president of Ng'ombwana proposes to dispense with the usual security arrangements on an official visit to London, his old schoolmate, Chief Superintendent Alleyn, is called in to persuade him otherwise. Consequently, on the night of the embassy's reception, the house and grounds are stiff with police.

Already suffering the privations of the 1930s Dust Bowl, an Oklahoma town is further devastated when a passenger train derails—flooding its hospital with the dead and maimed. Among the seriously wounded is Etha, wife of Sheriff Temple Jennings. Overwhelmed by worry for her, the sheriff must regain his footing to investigate the derailment, which rapidly develops into a case of sabotage.

FBI Agent Dillon Savich is on a challenging case involving the kidnapping of two teenage boys when trouble boils up in his personal life. His younger sister Lily has crashed her Explorer into a redwood in California's Hemlock Bay. Is it another suicide attempt, the second since the loss of her young daughter some seven months before? Savich and Sherlock discover that four of Lily's paintings, left to her by their very famous grandmother, artist Sarah Elliot, now worth millions, are at the heart of an intricate conspiracy.

A spa stay turns into a homicidal holiday.... A bit snobbish and a trifle high strung, Sybil Foster prides herself on owning the finest estate in Upper Quintern and hiring the best gardener. In fact she is rapturous over the new asparagus beds when a visit from her unwelcome stepson sends her scurrying to a chic spa for a rest cure, a liaison with the spa's director...and an apparent suicide. Her autopsy holds one surprise, a secret drawer a second.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Catch a tiger by its toe. It's seared into Atlee Pine's memory: the kidnapper's chilling rhyme as he chose between six-year-old Atlee and her twin sister, Mercy. Mercy was taken. Atlee was spared. She never saw Mercy again. Three decades after that terrifying night, Atlee Pine works for the FBI. She's the lone agent assigned to the Shattered Rock, Arizona, resident agency protecting the Grand Canyon. So when one of the Grand Canyon's mules is found stabbed to death at the bottom of the canyon - and its rider missing - Pine is called in to investigate.

A new Miss Julia novel from New York Times best-selling author Ann B. Ross is a special treat for her devoted fans as well as those new to the adventures of the titular senior citizen. This time out, the proper Southern lady has a couple doozies on her plate. It seems that her friend Hazel’s PI husband, J.D,. has gotten himself in some trouble in West Virginia - and he’s one tirade away from landing in a jail cell. Meanwhile, a crew of misfits has followed wealthy Agnes Whitman back to Abbotsville, and they have all the makings of a crazy religious cult!

This time, Sheriff Joanna Brady may expect to see her maternity leave through to completion, but the world has other plans when a serial homicide case surfaces in her beloved Cochise County. Rather than staying home with her newborn and losing herself in the cold cases to be found in her father’s long-unread diaries, Joanna instead finds herself overseeing a complex investigation involving multiple jurisdictions.

Already widowed by the age of 40, Ilka Nichols Jensen, a school portrait photographer, leads a modest, regimented, and uneventful life in Copenhagen. Until unexpected news rocks her quiet existence: Her father - who walked out suddenly and inexplicably on the family more than three decades ago - has died. And he's left her something in his will: his funeral home. In Racine, Wisconsin. Clinging to this last shred of communication from the father she hasn't heard from since childhood, Ilka makes an uncharacteristically rash decision and jumps on a plane to Wisconsin.