Serial Killer Mystery Fiction

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.

As bogus corruption charges loom over her, DS Kat Ballantyne finds herself deskbound and stuck with cold cases. Her hated boss, DI Carver, has given her just one week to explain how £50,000 found its way into her bank account. If she can’t, she’ll be lucky to have a desk at all. Then a close friend calls her from a murder scene, claiming to have strangled a local gangster’s wife. Kat has no choice but to disobey orders and investigate. Despite overwhelming forensic evidence supporting her friend’s confession, something still doesn’t add up…

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....

A psychopath the police have dubbed “Billy Dead Mates” is targeting pairs of best friends and killing them one by one. Before they die, each victim is given a small, white book. For months, detectives have failed to catch Billy or figure out what the white books symbolize and why the killer leaves them behind. The police are on edge; the public is in a panic. Then a woman, scared by what she’s seen on the news, comes forward. What she reveals shocks the investigators and adds another troubling layer to an already complex case.

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.

In the late 1960s, the Zodiac Killer went on a rampage in California. To this day the case remains unsolved and the killer’s identity is still unknown. Forty-eight years later, after a series of new murders and taunting ciphers uploaded to the internet gain attention, the San Francisco Police believe he's back. When an old flame contacts Jack Winchester to inform him that her son is dead, the case becomes personal. As the bodies pile up, and Jack gets close, the psychopath turns the tables to play a deadly game of cat and mouse, where there’s no telling who will survive.

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.

A stunningly brilliant psychopathic killer who has skillfully eluded the police from London to Paris to New York. A beautiful woman journalist suddenly in grave danger. An unorthodox New York detective whose motive for stopping the killer couldn't be more personal or emotional. With his latest release, the best selling author of When the Wind Blows and Cat and Mouse, turns 1999 into the Summer of St. Germain. You'll listen in terror as New York Cop John Stefanovich pursues Alexandre St. Germain, the most deadly and powerful member of the secret society of criminals known as the Midnight Club.