Short Thrillers Suspense

On a foggy spring night, an Amish man crashes his buggy after a large, unidentified animal spooks his horse. Kate Burkholder arrives on scene to find the man shaken and bleeding, claiming he was attacked by a large beast. But his description of the creature sounds like something straight out of the Amish folklore from Kate’s childhood. Throughout the night, more incidents of an aggressive animal on the loose are reported, putting the citizens of Painters Mill on edge. There’s a monster menacing the countryside, and Kate must follow its tracks into the dark woods along Painters Creek.

Alden McCausland and his mother are what they call “accident rich”; thanks to an unexpected life-insurance policy payout and a winning Big Maine Millions scratcher, Alden and his Ma are able to spend their summers down by Lake Abenaki, idly drinking their days away in a three-room cabin with an old dock and a lick of a beach. Across the lake, they can see what “real rich” looks like: the Massimo family’s Twelve Pines Camp, the big white mansion with guest house and tennis court that Alden’s Ma says is paid for by “ill-gotten gains” courtesy of Massimo Construction.

Seichan is ripped out of the Sigma series for an adventure all her own - but can she survive? The beautiful and elusive assassin wakes in a hotel in Paris with a deadly electronic collar fastened to her throat. Joined by a boy who is similarly threatened, she must rescue the son of a hated enemy, who has fallen under the sway of the nefarious leader of an apocalyptic cult. To survive she must venture into the dark world beneath the City of Lights, into the infamous catacombs of Paris.

Off the blustery streets in the medieval heart of Budapest, Captain Tucker Wayne and his war dog, Kane, rescue a mysterious woman fleeing three armed men. The secret she holds will unlock a terrible treasure, one steeped in blood and treachery, tied to a crime going back to the fall of Nazi Germany and a heritage of suffering and pain that reaches out from the past to wreak havoc today.

FBI special agent Kate O’Hare has made it her mission to nail international con artist Nicolas Fox. When she discovers his plot to plunder a venture capitalist’s 20th-story Chicago penthouse of all its cash and treasures while the self-proclaimed "King of Hostile Takeovers" is getting married, Kate is 85 percent - okay maybe 92 percent - sure that she’s finally going to bag Nick Fox. Problem is, first Kate has to convince her boss, building security, and maybe even herself, that wedding planner Merrill Stubing is actually Nicolas Fox. Second, she has to figure out how to corner and capture him without disrupting the event of the year.

With gimlet-eyed cool and razor-sharp wit, these spare, stylish stories from a master of modern-crime fiction assemble a world of gangsters and con men, of do-gooders breaking bad and those caught in the crossfire. The uncle of an FBI agent spends his life as sheriff in different cities, living too close to the violent acts of men; a cocktail waitress moves through several desert towns trying to escape the unexplainable loss of an adopted daughter; a drug dealer with a penchant for karaoke meets a talkative lawyer and a silent clown in a Palm Springs bar.

A serial kidnapper is on the loose in a small town in Maine, targeting wealthy women and demanding a huge ransom in bitcoin for their safe return. When his latest victim’s husband claims that he can’t come up with the money, the word “deadline” takes on a disturbingly literal meaning. The local police are out of their depth, but Colter Shaw takes the lead in the investigation. Soon, he’s using his survivalist instincts to uncover clues and pursue suspects, putting his own life on the line to catch the would-be killer before the countdown hits zero.

Before Miss Peregrine gave them a home, the story of peculiars was written in the Tales. Wealthy cannibals who dine on the discarded limbs of peculiars. A fork-tongued princess. These are but a few of the truly brilliant stories in Tales of the Peculiar - the collection of fairy tales known to hide information about the peculiar world, including clues to the locations of time loops - first introduced by Ransom Riggs in his number-one best-selling Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series.

Detectives Hannah and Bernard are called to investigate the violent death of Jacqueline Mune. But what seems to be a straightforward case of a shooting in a bad neighborhood turns out to be a lot more complicated. Jacqueline had been a psychic, doing tarot readings and selling mystic medicines and oils. And it seems like everyone around her had a reason to want her dead.

This new Cyanide Publishing edition contains three classic audiobooks by Maurice LeBlanc as well as background articles.Follow the exploits of Arsene Lupin, the greatest of all white-glove thieves and the original gentleman burglar. Mystery and tension build, but humor prevails throughout as Monsieur Lupin and Chief Inspector Guerchard try mightily to outwit each other. Slapstick humor, witty asides, and some unexpected twists.

From the number-one best-selling author of The Missing and the Dead comes the short novel 22 Dead Little Bodies; two short stories: 'Stramash' and 'DI Steel's Bad Heir Day'; and a novella: The 45% Hangover, all featuring his most popular characters - DS Logan McRae and DCI Roberta Steel. They say 'small is beautiful', but as Stuart MacBride demonstrates in these four tales, it can also be dark, violent, disturbing, and sometimes really quite rude.

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....

These six cases are among the last undertaken by Sherlock Holmes before he retired to the Sussex downs. However, the problems facing the sleuth are as diverse and challenging as ever. What with seeking the whereabouts of the stolen Mazarin Diamond, discovering the importance of being called Garrideb, encountering a mysterious murder on Thor Bridge, searching for eternal youth and the threat of a vampire in Sussex, there is no sign of Holmes' deductive powers slowing down.

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.

In this first collection of short pieces, including two novella-length works, since his western anthology Tonto Woman, Leonard demonstrates the superb characterization, dead-on dialogue, vivid atmosphere, and driving plotting that have made him a household name.

Now a Lifetime original movie, Stephen King's haunting story about an author of a series of mystery novels who tries to reconcile her old life with her life after a horrific attack and the one thing that can save her: Revenge.

Six months into her marriage, Samantha True she learns her new husband's been killed in a freak accident, she’s inherited his secret PI business, and he had another wife. Broke and devastated, she dives into learning the PI business—how hard can it be? Following a binge-watching how-to session on YouTube, Sam’s ready to take her first case. When mysterious strangers show up at her doorstep demanding information about her dead husband, she realizes she's in over her head. Samantha must discover who he really was. But what if the truth puts her in danger, too?

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.

I wasn't always like this, you know - paranoid, temperamental, vindictive. I mean, sure, I've always been a bit....high strung. But, I never used to stalk my therapist patients. Or yell at them. Or hold them captive in my garage. No, all of that started after the incidents at Lonesome Woods Boarding School. And I'm not talking about the school shooter. This was something far more insidious - something....infectious. Like a cancerous disease that tore through the student body, rotting young hearts one by one.

Seventeen-year-old Amish boy Noah Kline is struck by a car as he walks alongside a dark country road late one night in Painters Mill. Seriously injured, he lapses into a coma. Initially, Chief of Police Kate Burkholder believes it’s a straightforward hit-and-run, a driver that panicked and fled. But evidence soon emerges that the incident wasn’t accidental at all - and Kate uncovers a story of teenage passion and jealousy that may have led to attempted murder.