Rural Town Mystery

On Christmas Eve in 1988, seven-year-old Alfie Marsden vanished in the Wentshire Forest Pass when a burst tyre forced his father, Sorrel, to stop the car. Leaving the car to summon the emergency services, Sorrel returned to find his son gone. No trace of the child, nor his remains, have ever been found. Alfie Marsden was declared officially dead in 1995. Elusive online journalist Scott King, whose Six Stories podcasts have become an internet sensation, investigates the disappearance, interviewing six witnesses, to try to find out what really happened that fateful night.

Doctor Rowan Dupont knows death. She grew up surrounded by it in her family’s Victorian funeral home, and it’s haunted her since the day her twin sister drowned years ago. Between her mother’s subsequent suicide and the recent murder of her father, coming home to run the funeral home feels fitting - even if it leaves her vulnerable to an obsessive serial killer.

In the first line of Ocean State, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from there with incredible momentum is thus one of the buildup to and fallout from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the four women at its heart. The murderer Angel, her mother Carol, and the victim Birdy, all come alive on the page as they converge in a climax both tragic and inevitable. Watching over it all is the retrospective testimony of Angel’s younger sister, Marie.

When Lori Shepherd returns from her trip to America, she is shocked to hear that Prunella "Pruneface" Hooper has been killed. This is the first murder in the village of Finch in more than a century, and everyone is in an uproar. Before the town implodes in the wake of this scandal, Lori sets out to solve the murder. Unfortunately, nearly everyone in Finch had a reason to want Mrs. Hooper dead.

Called to investigate the bloodstained aftermath of an eventful Christmas party, detectives Anderson & Costello discover that the holiday season can be anything but merry. A family man is stabbed to death at a crowded Christmas Ice Show. Murder in plain sight. No clues, no witnesses, no known motive.

Billy Edgewater is a harbinger of doom. Estranged from his family, discharged from the navy and touched by a rising desperation, he sets out hitchhiking home to East Tennessee, where his father is slowly dying. On the road, separately, are Sudy and Bradshaw, brother and sister, and a one-armed con man named Roosterfish. All, in one way or another, have their pasts and futures embroiled with D. L. Harkness, a predator in all the ways there are.

A classic story of imperiled love on the western frontiers of 19th-century America. While a battle rages between two outlaw gangs in a remote Utah canyon, Jim Wales struggles to rescue Helen Herrick, who has been captured and held for ransom. Robbers' Roost tells the story of their personal struggle to escape the clutches of the murderous outlaws while simultaneously safeguarding their passion, one that is not likely to survive the beautiful, yet deadly, terrain and people of the old American West.

Five-year-old Daisy Gonzalez's father is always waiting for her at the bus stop. But today he isn't, and Daisy disappears. When Daisy goes missing, nearly everyone in town suspects or knows something different about what happened. And they also know a lot about each other. The immigrants who work in the dairy farm know their employers' secrets. The hairdresser knows everything except what's happening in her own backyard.

A death rocks the Gulf Coast town of Port Leo, Texas. Beach-bum-turned-judge Whit Mosley is summoned to a yacht where the black-sheep son of a senator lies dead. Was it suicide, fueled by a family tragedy? Or did an obsessed killer use the dead man as a pawn in a twisted game? When Whit defies political pressure and conducts an inquest, he and Detective Claudia Salazar expose a nest of drug lords, con artists, and power-hungry sharks - all out for blood. With their careers - and their lives - at stake, Whit and Claudia must unearth a lethal trail of passion and deceit.

Menace awaits. Sleath. Quiet, peaceful. A small village hidden away in the Chiltern Hills, almost forgotten by the modern world. Nothing much seems to happen here; little disturbs the centuries-old tranquillity. Until the ghosts begin to appear and frighteningly bizarre events start to occur. Psychic investigator David Ash, a man burdened by the dark secret of his own past, is sent to Sleath to investigate the phenomena and his discoveries there drive him to the very edge of his own sanity.

The body of Reginald Williamson had been well concealed under a bush in Middlesbury Common and the murder efficiently carried out - a single stab wound to the chest. Reggie’s dog had been killed just as efficiently. With no clues or obvious motive, the case is going nowhere. Then he gets a break. Warren’s instincts tell him that the informant is dodgy - a former police officer under investigation. But when Warren hears the incredible story he has to tell, he's glad to have given him a chance to speak.

Maggie Gerber - one of the founding members of the Good Buy Girls - loves her quiet life in St. Stanley, Virginia. But all that changes when Sam Collins, her old flame, moves back to town as the new sheriff. On top of that, Claire Freemont, a librarian and the newest member of the Good Buy Girls, starts acting utterly strange. When Maggie goes to visit her the next day at the library, she finds the body of a very dead man. Turns out the man is someone from Claire's past.

Even if it means exposing an unsettling past, Rowan is determined to get to the bottom of her mother's suicide before the serial killer who's tracking her finds her.

Thea Slocombe, nee Osborne, is trying to settle into normal, domestic life with Drew and his two children in Broad Campden. But in the course of an attempt to make friends locally, she finds the body of a close neighbour and suddenly feels much less settled and secure. No longer a house-sitter, she has no choice but to stay in the village and deal with whatever happens next. And doing this risks damage to her marriage.

A deafening explosion rocks a historic Oklahoma City hotel, sending archaeologist Faye Longchamp-Mantooth crashing to the lobby floor. Faye's in town for a conference celebrating indigenous arts but is soon distracted by the aftermath of the explosion, which cracks open the hotel’s floor to reveal subterranean chambers that had housed Chinese immigrants a century before. Faye's fascinated by the tunnels, which are a time capsule back to the early 20th century - but when the bodies of three children are discovered deep beneath the city, her sense of discovery turns to one of dread.

Mutée disciplinairement à New York, Colorado, un petit village raciste du fin fond de l'Amérique, sans couverture mobile et où il ne se passe jamais rien, la lieutenant de police de couleur noire, à forte corpulence, Agatha Crispies a trouvé un échappatoire à son désœuvrement dans l'animation d'un club de lecture au sein du commissariat. Mais alors qu'elle désespérait de pouvoir un jour enquêter à nouveau sur un meurtre autre que celui d'un écureuil, une série d'effroyables assassinats et disparitions viennent (enfin) troubler la tranquillité des lieux.

Two months a widow, Mallory Dent has made the impulsive decision to pack up and move on. In remote McNamara, nestled in the northern mountains, she can escape her grief, guilt, and pain. But the day Mallory arrives, death follows her, lapping just outside her door. A woman’s body is found floating in Loss Lake - and it’s not the first death on these shores. Locals talk about a monster in the depths with an almost disturbing reverence. Sergeant Joel Benson understands Mallory’s unease. Years ago, his own brother was killed in the home Mallory now owns.

On a cold day in 1997, student Sara Morgan was killed in the woods surrounding her liberal-arts college in Upstate New York. Her boyfriend, Blake Campbell, confessed, his plea of temporary insanity raising more questions than it answered. In the wake of his acquittal, the case comes to haunt a strange and surprising network of community members, from the young woman who discovers Sara’s body to the junior reporter who senses its connection to convicted local serial killer John Logan.

A feared cage fighter in mixed martial arts, Daniel is closing in on greatness - until an injury derails his career. Out of work in his country hometown, Daniel slips into the underworld, moonlighting as muscle for a childhood friend turned midlevel gangster. While his wife works nights and his 12-year-old daughter gets into scraps of her own, Daniel tries to escape and build a nobler life for his family - but he sinks deeper into a violent, unpredictable world, soon sparking a conflict that can be settled only in blood.

Doyle Redmond, 35-year-old nowhere writer, has crossed the line between imagination and real live trouble. On the lam in his soon-to-be ex-wife's Volvo, he's running a family errand back in his boyhood home of West Table, Missouri - the heart of the red-dirt Ozarks. The law wants his big brother, Smoke, on a felony warrant, and Doyle's supposed to talk him into giving up. But Smoke is making other plans: he is about to harvest a profitable patch of homegrown marijuana.