Serial Killer Mystery Fiction

Montreal, 1970. The "Vampire Killer" has murdered three women and a fourth is missing. Bombs explode in the stock exchange, McGill University, and houses in Westmount. Riots break out at the St. Jean Baptiste parade and at Sir George Williams University. James Cross and Pierre Laporte are kidnapped and the Canadian army moves onto the streets of Montreal. A young beat cop working out of Station 10 finds himself almost alone hunting the serial killer, as the rest of the force focuses on the FLQ crisis.

When a fellow FBI agent is kidnapped and a protected witness vanishes, Leo Gallagher will stop at nothing to find them both. So when he discovers a link between the case and a single mother in Wyoming, Leo and his trusty K-9 partner rush to question Alicia Duncan. Could she be the key to locating the missing persons?

Two years ago, Maria Fontana, the head of the Psychology Department at Columbia University, sat on a jury for one of the most depraved cases ever to pass through the hallowed halls of City Hall. Wyatt Butler, an antique watch restorer and alleged serial killer, was portrayed in the courtroom as a brutal monster. But Maria had to make the tough choice.

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 boy vanishes on his way home from school. His frantic mother receives a ransom call: pay or else. It’s only hours before the deadline, and the police have no leads. Enter Timothy Blake, an FBI consultant with a knack for solving impossible cases but whose expertise comes at a price. Every time he saves a life, he takes one, trying to satisfy an urge he fears he can only control for so long. And this time Blake may have met his match. The kidnapper is more cunning and ruthless than any he’s faced before.

10am: A mother rushes for a train after dropping her daughter at school but is reported missing when she doesn't return to pick her up. 2.47pm: The same train causes the death of a young woman; her body bound and placed on the tracks. When Detective Alana Mack discovers the missing mother has vanished from the same train that claimed the life of the young woman, she fears the worst. A killer is on the loose, targeting women and leaving their broken bodies scattered across Dublin's Dart train line.

Spiritualism has captured the public’s imagination. Séances are all the rage, and Detective Ian Hamilton’s otherwise sensible aunt Lillian is not immune to their allure. But for Ian, indulging her superstitions has its limits. When members of Lillian’s circle of séance friends begin turning up dead, Ian doesn’t need a medium to tell him these aren’t freak accidents.

After a long run as a respected journalist, Edward “Fitz” Fitzhugh is on his way out when he stumbles across the story of a lifetime. The Gravedigger is a serial kidnapper who taunts the police with riddles. The other puzzle is his motive, which Fitz is determined to piece together. When an eyewitness to the latest abduction leads Fitz closer to the facts, he realizes that the last great story of his career is not at all what it appears to be.

When you search for the missing, there’s no telling what you’ll find. PI Jessie Cole learned that painful truth firsthand when her sister disappeared. Now a new case will test Jessie and Ben once again. Owen Shepard, the public face of one of the country’s biggest health insurance companies, has become the target of a vengeful father. The man blames Shepard for his child’s death and plans to make the CEO know what it’s like to live with a broken heart - and watch others die.

Five years ago, Tessa Chamberlain was the lone survivor of a beach house massacre that left three of her friends dead—and Tessa with an inescapable, unending dread. Now she’s going back to face her fears. Renting the same beach house where she almost died, Tessa returns to lonely Cassadaga Island off the coast of Maine long after the tourists and summer residents have departed for the winter. But as the fog rolls in and the nights grow longer, she wonders if she made a terrible mistake. There are footsteps on the porch, creaks from the second floor, and an unsettling feeling of being watched.

Finn-Leandro, dreizehn Jahre alt, Schüler aus Aurich, ist tot. Gestorben an einer Überdosis Heroin. Der, der dafür verantwortlich ist, wurde gerade freigesprochen. Aus Mangel an Beweisen. Weil Zeugen sich plötzlich nicht mehr erinnern konnten. Weil die Polizei Fehler einräumen musste. Als Dr. Bernhard Sommerfeldt alias Dr. Ernest Simmel, Leiter einer Kurklinik in Norden, die Schlagzeile in der Zeitung sieht, weiß er genau, wem er einen Besuch abstatten muss. Seine zukünftige Ehefrau Frauke ahnt, dass es mit dem ruhigen, beschaulichen Leben in Norden so schnell nichts werden wird.

In 1999 and 2000, a number of young women go missing in the Perth suburb of Claremont. One body is discovered. Others are never seen again. Snowy Lane (City of Light) is hired as a private investigator, but neither he nor the cops can find the serial killer. Sixteen years later, another case brings Snowy to Broome, where he teams up with Dan Clement (Before It Breaks) and an incidental crime puts them back on the Claremont case.

It was a vicious, calculated murder. The killer selected his victim at Euston station, followed her home on the tube, strangled her to death in front of her child. At the same time, killed in the same way, a second body is discovered at the back of King's Cross station. And this grisly event eerily echoes the murder of two other women, stabbed to death months before on the same day. It is DI Tom Thorne who sees the link and comes to the horrifying conclusion. This is not a serial killer the police are up against. This is two of them - and two killers are way more deadly than one....

L'inspecteur Pendergast est désemparé. Sa pupille Constance Greene est parvenue à retourner dans le New York des années 1880 pour sauver sa sœur avant qu'elle serve de cobaye au sinistre Dr Leng, l'ancêtre de Pendergast devenu son pire ennemi.

Lifelong New Yorker Ronnie Khan never thought she’d leave Queens. She’s not an “aim high, dream big” person - until she meets socialite wellness guru Marley Dewhurst. Marley isn’t just a visionary; she’s a revelation. Seduced by the fever dream of finding her best self, Ronnie makes for the desert mountains of Sedona, Arizona. Healing yoga, transcendent hikes, epic juice cleanses...Ronnie consumes her new bougie existence like a fine wine. But is it, really? Or is this whole self-care business a little sour?

DS Kat Ballantyne is still reeling from a revelation that turned life as she knew it upside down. But when a dog walker discovers the body of a woman among the standing stones known locally as the Three Sisters, there’s no time to focus on her own troubles. Kat is drawn back to work to investigate. At first, the death appears to be an accident. But then Kat discovers an infinity symbol branded onto the dead woman’s abdomen.

Haunted by a series of horrifying and violent episodes in their past, Grace McBride and the oddball crew of her software company, Monkeewrench, create a computer game where the killer is always caught, where the good guys always win. But their game becomes a nightmare when someone starts duplicating the fictional murders in real life, down to the last detail.

Tim and Susannah have ordinary lives on the surface. He's a mortician for whom death is a serious business, and she's a chef who really knows her way around a knife. And if the neighbors in their small Midwestern town knew of her dark hobby, they'd run for the hills. Raised by an apathetic mother and a cruel father, Susannah was bullied and pushed to her breaking point long before she met mild-mannered Tim, and learned to channel her murderous impulses into a strange form of art, which keeps her clueless husband safe...for now.

A serial killer is terrorising London, removing a body part from each victim and leaving in its place a single pink rose. Dr Vernon Sange, a multiple murderer awaiting extradition, seems to know the culprit’s identity - but he’ll only talk to profiler Ziba MacKenzie, the woman responsible for putting him away. Though there’s something he wants in return from her. And time is running out. With one killer whispering in her ear and another running rings around the police, Ziba must play a game in which only her opponent knows the rules, and the forfeit is death.

For fans of Tana French and The Silent Wife, The Last Winter of Dani Lancing is a chilling debut thriller hailed by Sophie Hannah as "brilliant" about one murder's devastating ripple effects.

Twenty years ago, college student Dani Lancing was kidnapped and brutally murdered. The killer was never found. Dani's family never found peace.

Thrust into an intense devastation that nearly destroys their marriage, Patty and Jim Lancing struggle to deal with their harrowing loss. Patty is fanatically obsessed with the cold case; consumed by every possible clue or suspect no matter how far-fetched, she goes to horrifying lengths to help clarify the past. Meanwhile, Jim has become a shell of his former self, broken down and haunted - sometimes literally - by his young daughter's death. Dani's childhood sweetheart, Tom, handles his own grief every day on the job - he's become a detective intent on solving murders of other young women, and hopes to one day close Dani's case himself.

Then everything changes when Tom finds a promising new lead. As lies and secrets are unearthed, the heartbreaking truth behind Dani's murder is finally revealed.

The Last Winter of Dani Lancing is a shockingly disturbing and deeply powerful debut, and P.D. Viner immediately joins the ranks of Tana French, A. S. A. Harrison, and Gillian Flynn.