Short Stories Mystery Thrillers

It's autumn in Painter's Mill, and 14-year-old Katie Burkholder has been tasked with picking apples in Zimmerman's Orchard with her brother. It's just another day filled with chores - until her best friend, Mattie, arrives to help. Somehow boredom transforms into fun and games whenever the girls are together. The innocent fun comes to an end when Billy Marquardt and his gang of friends interrupt. Katie is no prude, but she knows better than to associate with the older English boys.

Do you love a good whodunit? Detectives and mobsters, newshawks and murderers–all ingredients for disaster in this murder mystery collection. Whether it was sending a detective after zombie killers on the prowl or chasing down grisly headhunters at a carnival, Ron knew how to thrill readers and keep them guessing until the end.

First appearing in print in 1890, the character of Sherlock Holmes has now become synonymous worldwide with the concept of a super sleuth. His creator, Conan Doyle, imbued his detective hero with intellectual power, acute observational abilities, a penchant for deductive reasoning and a highly educated use of forensic skills. Indeed, Doyle created the first fictional private detective who used what we now recognize as modern scientific investigative techniques.

Jack's a retired ex-cop from New York, seeking the simple life in Cherringham. Sarah's a Web designer who's moved back to the village to find herself. But their lives are anything but quiet as the two team up to solve Cherringham's criminal mysteries. This compilation contains episodes 25 - 27. SECRET SANTA: Bill Vokes has played Santa at the children's Christmas show for years. But with the show just hours away, he vanishes with no explanation. The whole village is baffled. Did something bad happen to loveable Bill: upstanding citizen, churchgoer, life and soul of the party and the holiday season?

A beautiful young girl was walking down the street - when suddenly …Julia Carroll knows that too many stories start that way. A beautiful and intelligent nineteen-year-old college freshman, she should be carefree. But instead she is frightened - because girls are disappearing without a trace. Fellow student Beatrice Oliver and a homeless woman called Mona-No-Name are missing, both gone after being snatched off the street. Julia is determined to discover the reason behind their disappearances - before she's next.

Three full-length cozy mysteries in one Westwick Witches paranormal omnibus box set! 1. Witch You Well: Be careful what you wish for...Dead billionaires are not good for business! Especially at Cendrine's wedding rehearsal and the witches' cozy family inn grand opening. 2. Rags to Witches: Win, lose, or draw...Cendrine is kidnapped by renegade witch Aunt Pearl, who is intent on avenging a friend’s untimely death. 3. Witch and Famous: Can Cen keep her family in check and unmask the killer before he strikes again? Welcome to the wild, wild Wests!

A short ghost story from the best-selling author of Abbot's Keep. A photographer reluctantly agrees to take images of an abandoned manor house on the Dorset clifftops only to find the building is not completely empty.

Just when things have finally cooled down for 88-year-old Maud after the disturbing discovery of a dead body in her apartment in Gothenburg, a couple of detectives return to her doorstep. Though Maud dodges their questions with the skill of an Olympic gymnast a fifth of her age, she wonders if suspicion has fallen on her, little old lady that she is. The truth is, ever since Maud was a girl, death has seemed to follow her....

Even if you think you don't know him, you know him. Few in the Hollywood orbit have had greater influence; few have experienced more humiliating failure in their lifetime. Thanks in part to the biopic directed by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp, and bearing his name, Ed Wood has become an icon of Americana. Perhaps the purest expression of Wood's théma - pink angora sweaters, over-the-top violence, and the fraught relationships between the sexes - can be found in his unadulterated short stories.

In three beautifully crafted, dramatic acts, James's little-known novel unravels the painfully complicated emotional bonds which exist within a group of friends and lovers connected by two neighboring homes as they fight publicly for preferment, reciprocation, and successful marriage....

A collection of Smith's apace adventure stories featuring Captain Volmar, including the never before published novella, "Red World of Polaris."

Evie and her daughter, Asteria, are fleeing an abusive cult when they meet a stranger in an abandoned Arizona shopping mall. Fate hasn’t set Nameless on their trail. It’s a premonition, and a chance to make reparations for a failure from his past he can’t even remember. This time, Nameless must do everything in his power not to fail those who trust him with their lives.

Maxine was made to do one thing: die. Except the minor non-player character in the world Riley is building makes her own impossible decision - veering wildly off course and exploring the boundaries of the map. When the curious Riley extracts her code for closer examination, an emotional relationship develops between them. Soon Riley has all new plans for her spontaneous AI, including bringing Max into the real world. But what if Max has real-world plans of her own?

A vicar nailed to a tree in Yorkshire. The theft of a priceless artefact during a fire. A detective forced to tell the truth for 24 hours. A body hidden in a basement. From the restless streets of London to the wilds of the Lake District, displaying all his trademark humour, playfulness and clever plotting, this landmark collection brings together the very best of Reginald Hill’s short stories for the first time, complete with a foreword from Val McDermid.

In his three novellas, In Short Measures, Strong Conspirators, and Sally Forth, Michael Ruhlman delves deeply into the nuanced complexity of romantic and sexual love - and the inevitable evolution of the heart over the span of years and decades. Each novella asks questions about the nature of love in terms of loyalty and fidelity - what are one's obligations toward one's spouse, one's family, and one's heart?

In the parish of St. Bruno, sex is easy, corruption festers, and double-dealing is a way of life. Rene Shade is an uncompromising detective swimming in a sea of filth. As Shade takes on hit men, porn kings, a gang of ex-cons, and the ghosts of his own checkered past, Woodrell's three seminal novels pit long-entrenched criminals against the hard line of the law, brother against brother, and two vastly different sons against a long-absent father.

For lovers of the supernatural and the macabre comes this collection of ghostly and chilling stories from legendary mystery writer Agatha Christie. Fantastic psychic visions, specters looming in the shadows, encounters with deities, a man who switches bodies with a cat - be sure to keep the light on whilst listening to these tales. The Last Séance gathers 20 stories, some featuring Christie’s beloved detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, in one haunting compendium that explores all things occult and paranormal, and is an essential omnibus for Christie fans.

Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies. This collection, with voices of French and English writers, visits many neighborhoods and combines them into something that is, if not totally coherent, at least as coherent as the beautiful mess that is Montreal....

This collection of short stories from the master of modern fiction is available only as an audiobook. In Blood and Smoke, Stephen King takes us inside a world of yearning and paranoia, isolation and addiction. It is the world of the smoker. In this audio-only collection, the now politically incorrect habit plays a key role in the fates of three different men.

In Agatha Christie’s class mystery Murder on the Links, Hercule Poirot attempts to unravel the grisly conundrum of not one, but two dead bodies discovered on a French golf course.