Small Town Crime

As kids, Amelia and Kylee were found unharmed in their upstairs bedroom the night their teenage cousin Grace, who was babysitting them, vanished from the farmhouse in Beaumont, Missouri, leaving blood all over the kitchen. Scrappy and driven, Grace, the first in their family to go to college instead of getting married and working at the meatpacking plant, had been on the verge of escaping their dead-end town. Her disappearance is a warning to any local girl who dared hope for better.

New Mexico Undersheriff Bill Gastner is presented with a case that appears to have brought big-time crime, including drug gangs, into Posadas County.

Former FBI special agent Cate Wilde is a new bakery and bookstore owner--and retirement is now complete with a doctor boyfriend. Although she struggles with PTSD, the sweet life she’s living is a far cry from the gruesome work she left behind six months ago. But when skeletal remains turn up on Widow’s Island--and the MO of the killer is too familiar to Cate--the dream abruptly ends. What if the case she solved eight years ago isn’t as closed as she thought? Her hometown needs her, and despite her mental health and her boyfriend’s protests, she has no choice but to return.

In May 1997, eighteen-year-old Laura McPherson left her house for a run and didn’t return. Twenty years later, a reporter arrives in the small town of Griffiths to write an article about the unsolved murder of Laura McPherson. He is the most recent in a long line of journalists, podcasters, and amateur sleuths seeking new insights into what really happened to Laura. Laura’s younger brother, David, a repressed and stuck thirty-something, is dealing with the recent death of his mother when the reporter comes knocking.

Given a chance to salvage his law enforcement career, Dona Ana County Sheriff’s Detective Clayton Istee catches a bizarre late-night double homicide at a Las Cruces hotel. Both victims, a man and a woman, have been scalped with their throats cut. The murders show all the signs of a signature hit, but national and state crime databases reveal no similar profiles. Digging into the victims’ backgrounds, Clayton discovers that six months prior the couple had walked out of a nearby casino with $200,000 of a high-stakes gambler’s money.

As a single mother, Annie has an especially close relationship with her son, Ben. They have always been together. Just the two of them. So, when Ben brings home his mysterious beautiful new wife, Daisy, immediately Annie doesn’t trust her. Who is this woman who has taken her son away from her? And what is she hiding? She’ll protect him with her life....

When the abduction of a nine-year-old child sends a small town into a frenzy, Detective Sally Lawson is tasked with finding the person responsible. But when evidence points to a janitor employed at the museum where the child was the last seen, Lawson isn’t sure they’ve caught the right man. Desperate to solve the case before another child disappears, Detective Lawson must uncover the truth before worried parents bring the town to the brink of chaos.

Just an average, perhaps boring, man in an average, perhaps boring, town. But when things in this small town get turned upside down, he must figure out who is friend and who is foe. The past has come back to haunt him, and it's either learn to survive - or die. Revenge does not discriminate.

Aging Undersheriff Bill Gastner's vacation is interrupted by the dead body of a young woman, apparently thrown from a moving car. Other murders convince the Undersheriff to lend a hand.

Life in a small town creates understandings...and suspicions. When Mike Carraday has a near-death experience, he calls on Jonas Kirk to help him sort through the evidence. Mike gets answers, and Kirk gets insight.

For 20 years Daniel Paquette's murder in New Hampshire went unsolved. It remained a secret between two high school friends until Eric Windhurst's arrest in 2005. What was revealed was a crime born of adolescent passion between Eric and Daniel's stepdaughter, Melanie - redefining the meaning of loyalty, justice, and revenge.

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Catch a tiger by its toe. It's seared into Atlee Pine's memory: the kidnapper's chilling rhyme as he chose between six-year-old Atlee and her twin sister, Mercy. Mercy was taken. Atlee was spared. She never saw Mercy again. Three decades after that terrifying night, Atlee Pine works for the FBI. She's the lone agent assigned to the Shattered Rock, Arizona, resident agency protecting the Grand Canyon. So when one of the Grand Canyon's mules is found stabbed to death at the bottom of the canyon - and its rider missing - Pine is called in to investigate.

The small and idyllic village of Merrywell is getting ready to host its first ever book festival, and Violet Brewster is delighted when she is asked to interview the star author. Leonie Stanwick, now a bestselling romance author, is the featured guest of the festival. She was born in Merrywell, but abruptly left when she was 18 years old and never came back. But the festival takes a dark turn when Leonie is found murdered; her return to the village had clearly shaken someone up. When a shocking secret about Leonie’s past is revealed, Violet’s suspicions must turn to her own neighbours.

In the vein of Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone and the works of Ron Rash, a novel set in a tough-and-tumble Mississippi town where drugs, whiskey, guns, and the desire for revenge violently intersect.

Mike and his wife, Barbara, moved to Lincoln, Illinois, in 1972. The town of 17,000 was charming, friendly, and safe. Then the campus was hit with a series of burglaries and a student disappeared. Finally, the murders began. This is Mike Hartnett’s personal story, memories that have taken him more than 40 years to write. This is not a true crime exposé or a whodunnit mystery. This is simply a story about one man on the periphery of a series of events that devastate a community for a time. It is a story about the guilt that lingers and the questions that remain.

March 12, 1985, Columbia, Mississippi, Police Station Dispatch Office, 8:58 pm. "This is James Jackson at Red Carpet Motors. We've been robbed. My wife is hurt bad. I need an ambulance." Thus began, a year-long investigation and prosecution into Mary Nell Jackson's killer....

Sixteen years ago, the beloved mayor of Glenville vanished without a trace, leaving behind his wife and two young children. He became the talk of the town, and over time the theories behind his disappearance turned into a sort of folklore. Many believed that he was gone for good. But no one expected that his arrival in the present would send a ripple, disturbing the peace throughout the small community.

When pregnant Alice Warren and her husband Paul settled into their dream home in the woods, all was blissful. But as Alice attempts to adjust to her new life in the countryside, a string of strange happenings occur, from a dead deer by the door to strange sounds in the night. Alice believes that there’s more to these occurrences than they appear, but Paul believes her paranoia is simply an overreaction. Until she vanishes, leaving behind a cryptic letter.

Street-smart and straightforward police chief Cuddy Mangum and his refined homicide detective Justin Savile V are determined to keep their town’s cultural, political and racial divisions stable…even peaceful. But when a young black activist is murdered while in the process of fighting for his brother’s freedom from death row, the lines keeping Hillston, North Carolina, in balance start to crumble.

Behind every act of domestic terrorism there is someone's child whose life took a radical turn for reasons that often remain mysterious. Camilla Hall is a case in point: a pastor's daughter from small-town Minnesota who eventually joined the ranks of radicals in the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army before dying in a shootout with Los Angeles Police in May 1974. How could a "good girl" become one of the most wanted domestic terrorists in the United States? Rachael Hanel tells her story here, revealing both the deep humanity and the extraordinary circumstances of Camilla Hall's life.