Short Stories Mystery Thrillers

A skilled mechanic and certified spitfire, Twinkle Winkleman is as hard as nails; she has to be with a name like hers. Twinkle learned everything there is to know about cars from her time in her daddy’s garage in Anchorage, and when her father dies, she gains ownership of the shop and Maude, her dad’s prized 1973 International Harvester Travelall. Life has not been kind to Twinkle: she grew up without her mother, her daddy’s gone, her ex-husband betrayed her, and her son Tad was killed after a trip to Seattle to handle some “unfinished business.”

Contains books one, two, and three of the Deliver series. She is a Deliverer. She lures young men and delivers them to be sold. She delivers the strikes that enforce their obedience. She delivers the training that determines their purchase price. As long as she delivers, the arrangement that protects her family will hold. The one thing she can't deliver is a captive from slavery. Until him. And her stubborn slave thinks he can deliver her...from herself.

Vitus Adamson is falling apart. As a pre-deceased private investigator, he takes the prescription Atroxipine hourly to keep his undead body upright and functioning. Whenever he is injured, he seeks Niko, a bombshell mortician with bedroom eyes and a way with corpses, to piece him back together. Decomposition, however, is the least of his worries when two clients posing his most dangerous job yet appear at his door looking for their lost son.

Here is the precursor to Jurassic Park. Victorian explorers have heard there is a remote plateau where dinosaurs still survive, and a group set outs on a dangerous mission to find out more about it.

Under the Great British Baking Contest tent, the competition's heating up to be crowned Best Baker in all of Britain. For amateur baker Poppy Wilkinson, there are mysteries, secrets, and lies, even murders to solve. As a fledgling witch, Poppy's having enough trouble controlling her sponge cake, never mind trying to control her powers. Besides solving crime, Poppy's also trying to uncover the mystery surrounding her own background. Will she discover who she really is before she gets sent home? Or worse?

After more than a decade, the handsome amateur detective Xavier Kilgarvan has returned to Winterthurn just in time to see the fifth young woman’s body carried from Devil’s Half Acre. A brutal fiend has left her mutilated body in this desolate plot of land filled with hulking boulders, quicksand, and twisted trees. Can detective Kilgarvan discover the forces motivating the mysterious “Gentleman Suitor” who has lured five innocent women to their deaths?

It’s a wily killer who dares to strike on Nero Wolfe’s hallowed turf - and leave a corpse strangled with Wolfe’s own soup-stained tie. But no sooner does the gourmandizing sleuth clean up this first course of murder than he faces a gun-toting wife who serves up a confession of homicidal intent - only to become the sole suspect when the corpus delicti is found.

Lawrence Block's 17 Matthew Scudder novels have won the hearts of readers throughout the world - along with a bevy of awards including the Edgar, the Shamus, the Philip Marlowe (Germany), and the Maltese Falcon (Japan). But Scudder has starred in short fiction as well, and it's all here, from a pair of late-'70s novelettes ("Out the Window" and "A Candle for the Bag Lady") through "By the Dawn's Early Light" (Edgar) and "The Merciful Angel of Death" (Shamus), all the way to "One Last Night at Grogan's", a moving and elegiac story never before published.

Who in Calmhaven does not know Molly Gertrude Grey, the gentle aging owner of the Cozy Bridal Agency? But Molly and her enthusiastic assistant Dora Brightside have more talents than just matchmaking. They are amateur sleuths with a nose for a great mystery. If you like light, clean cozy mysteries with a cat-loving sleuth, quirky characters, and unexpected surprises you will love this bumper bargain collection of Christian cozy mysteries.

As a young reporter, Arthur Crane exposed the secrets behind the Orchid Killer, a cult murderer from the late '60s whose crimes blackened the end of the Summer of Love. Half a century later, Arthur wakes to find an orchid resting on his pillow, a symbol of death from a killer connected to his estranged younger brother, Christian. To discover the horrifying truth, Arthur will risk all - even his very soul - for Christian may not be the brother that Arthur remembers....

A group of mountain climbers, caught in the dark, fight to survive their descent; in the British countryside, hundreds of magpies ascend into the sky, higher and higher, until they seem to vanish into the heavens; a professor and his student track a zombie horde in order to research zombie behavior; an all-girl riding school has sinister secrets; a town rails in vain against a curse inflicted upon it by its founders; and much more.

When the end of the world arrived, it came not with a bang, as most expected, but with more of a "pfft" instead. Humanity has been torn asunder and brought to the edge of total annihilation in less than an hour. For those who died, it was a quick death, so fast that their brains didn't have time to process the pain signals from their nerves. For those who survived, the true horror is about to begin as they struggle to not only stay alive, but come to grips with the shocking realization about what - and who - was responsible.

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.

This could be the most important mission of Nameless’s life. Because it’s putting him on a collision course with his own past and the nation’s future. The target: a fortified redoubt in the golden hills of California, the hub of a new world order that’s unthinkably close at hand. The time has come for Nameless to face its designer: the nihilist mastermind behind the One Solution. It’s also time for Nameless to discover who he is and was, and what brought him to this fateful endgame. But will the truth be a breaking point? Or a turning point?

Patterson Blake is an FBI Agent on a mission. When she was a teenager, her older sister vanished while on a cross-country road trip and hasn't been seen since. Patterson thought she'd put the trauma of her sister's disappearance behind her, but now there is new evidence, and suddenly the old wounds reopen. Except that Patterson isn't a kid anymore. She has a badge and a gun, and the resources to follow her sister's trail. But it won't be as easy as Patterson thinks.

A man is murdered in a back alley. Renowned forensic detective Lincoln Rhyme and his partner, Amelia Sachs, are left with a veritable mountain of evidence collected from the trash-filled alley, and their only lead is a young eyewitness: the man's eight-year-old son, who was riding along on his father's delivery route.

The rather disgruntled pair of Tommy and Tuppence are sequestered in the Grand Adlington Hotel, having made a pig's ear out of their latest case. But, while mournfully sipping cocktails, with Tommy oddly dressed as a parson, they are gleefully accosted by their old acquaintance Mr. Bulger, who has London's most beautiful stage actress, Gilda Glen, in tow. Featherbrained and a little confused, Gilda takes Tommy for a real clergyman and scrawls out a desperate note to meet him away from the hotel. While Tommy and Tuppence mull over the note, in storms an old flame of Gilda's, claiming he wants to wring someone's neck.

A Study in Emerald draws listeners in through carefully revealed details as a consulting detective and his narrator friend solve the mystery of a murdered German noble. But with its subtle allusions and surprise ending, this mystery hints that the real fun in solving this case lies in imagining all the details that Gaiman doesn't reveal, and challenges listeners to be detectives themselves.

Martin Walker presents his first collection of Bruno stories featuring all the familiar characters from the novels, the glories of the Périgord, and ample helpings of food and wine.

When Dan accidentally grabs the wrong luggage at the airport, he stumbles upon a shocking discovery - a stolen masterpiece by Vincent van Gogh. Suddenly thrust into the dangerous world of international art theft, Dan must outwit a ruthless criminal who will stop at nothing to reclaim the priceless painting. This gripping thriller explores the dark underbelly of the art world and the high-stakes risks one man must take to do the right thing.