Southern Fiction Thrillers

Rumford, Kentucky has glowing fields of bluegrass, a fine selection of bourbons, and now a professional pastry chef. Broken-hearted Sophia Cummings has come home from New York City. She's not there a minute before she's charmed into making her high school friend Charlotte's wedding cake. The kitchen at the Rumford Country Club seems perfect until Chef Emile's body is discovered, sprawled near the stove, a cast iron skillet on the floor close by. With one look at the shiny, new pan, Sophia knows it's not Emile's. She offers her knowledge to Sheriff Carter and her talents to the manager.

On the evening of November 24, 1971, D. B. Cooper hijacked Flight 305—Portland to Seattle—with a fake bomb, collected a ransom of $200,000, and then parachuted from the rear of the plane, disappearing into the night...and into history. Fifty years later, Agent Pendergast takes on a bizarre and gruesome case: in the ghost-haunted city of Savannah, Georgia, bodies are found with no blood left in their veins—sowing panic and reviving whispered tales of the infamous Savannah Vampire.

Ever since her father was killed when she was just a child, Miranda Crabtree has kept her head down and her eyes up, ferrying contraband for a mad preacher and his declining band of followers to make ends meet and to protect an old witch and a secret child from harm. But dark forces are at work in the bayou, both human and supernatural, conspiring to disrupt the rhythms of Miranda’s peculiar and precarious life.

Running his own law firm is harder than Leland Munroe ever imagined, but he’s determined to make it work. Judy Reed, accused of killing her wealthy father, is just the kind of high-profile and high-paying client he needs to keep his firm afloat. Yet the deeper he digs, the more complex her case becomes. Nurse LaDonna Winters’s financial situation isn’t as ideal. Struggling to make ends meet, she can barely afford legal representation. But her case is compelling—accused of a crime at her hospital she insists she didn't commit, LaDonna is desperate to clear her name.

Most Sinful residents are unaware of Carter’s crisis and are going about their daily lives as they always have, including local prankster Gage Babin. Except this time, Gage’s attempt to elicit laughs leaves him on a slab in the medical examiner’s office. Everyone knows how unhealthy he was, but Fortune thinks there’s more to his death than a poorly timed prank that caused his bad heart to give out.

In Murder Gets a Life, middle-aged sisters Mary Alice and Patricia Ann are sleuthing their way through a mystery that is hotter than Alabama in August. Mary Alice’s son has married Sunshine, a petite blond who is cute as a button. Her family, however, lives in a junk-filled trailer compound dotted with rusty engines and pit bulls. When Mary Alice and Patricia Ann pay a call on the family, the sisters hardly have time to meet Sunshine’s spirit-channeling grandmother before they stumble over a large corpse on her floor. The local sheriff just can’t seem to get moving in the summer heat.

Part love story and part ghost story, this is an unforgettable New York Times best seller about a science journalist and a North Carolina librarian who dare to believe in the impossible. As a science journalist with a regular column in Scientific American, Jeremy Marsh specializes in debunking the supernatural - until he falls in love with the granddaughter of the town psychic. When Jeremy receives a letter from Boone Creek, North Carolina, about ghostly lights appearing in a cemetery, he can't resist driving down to investigate.

Ethan Wate used to think of Gatlin, the small Southern town he had always called home, as a place where nothing ever changed. Then he met mysterious newcomer Lena Duchannes, who revealed a secret world that had been hidden in plain sight all along. A Gatlin that harbored ancient secrets beneath its moss-covered oaks and cracked sidewalks.

Rue's always known her vampire boyfriend's fears have always been that his past deeds would come back to haunt him and hurt her. When someone from Luke's past insists he return to his ancestral home, Ruby Mae insists on returning with him. While in Italy, she finds out just how much the death of his long-lost sister is affecting his whole family, and she makes it her mission to solve her murder. But when her own life gets threatened as she gets closer, will Ruby be able to find out the truth before she becomes the next victim?

The sheriff's deputy at the front door brings hard news to Ree Dolly. Her father has skipped bail on charges that he ran a crystal meth lab, and the Dollys will lose their house if he doesn't show up for his next court date. Ree's father has disappeared before. The Dolly clan has worked the shadowy side of the law for generations, and arrests (and attempts to avoid them) are part of life in Rathlin Valley.

In her small hometown, librarian Ruth Cornier has always felt like an outsider, even as her beloved father rains fire-and-brimstone warnings from the pulpit at Holy Fire Baptist. Unfortunately for Ruth, the only things the townspeople fear more than the God and the Devil are the myths that haunt the area, like the story of the Low Man, a vampiric figure said to steal into sinners' bedrooms and kill them on moonless nights. When a skull is found deep in the swamp next to mysterious carved symbols, Bottom Springs is thrown into uproar.

Ada promised herself she would never go back to the Trace, to her unbearable life on the swamp, and to her harsh father in Mississippi. But now, after running away to Baton Rouge and briefly knowing a different kind of life, she finds herself with nowhere to go but back home. Matilda, daughter of a sharecropper, is from the other side of the Trace. Doing what she can to protect her family from the whims and demands of some particularly callous locals is an ongoing struggle, so she forms a plan to go north.

Ever since their on-again, off-again college romance, Erin hasn’t been able to set a single boundary with charismatic but reckless Silas, who has been chasing the next big high since graduation. When he texts her to spring him out of rehab, she knows enough is enough. She is ready to start a career, make new friends, and meet a great guy—even if that means cutting Silas off. But when Silas turns up dead from an overdose, Erin’s world falls apart.

After the dead body of a beloved Cottonwood resident is found tangled up in an electric fence, Sheriff Kenni Lowry has a hunch that somethin' ain't right. Her investigation heats up with a fierce cook-off competition, a euchre game where the intel is sweeter than the brownies, and a decades-old family recipe that may just be the proof in the pudding. The icing on the cake is that Kenni is fighting an attraction to her recently sworn-in deputy sheriff, and election season is hot on her tail.

Sinister in Savannah is a fictional podcast exploring the city's most nefarious crimes with Southern-fried snark. The best-selling trilogy is now available in one collection. When the Sinister in Savannah team delves into the thirty-eight-year-old murder of a drag queen, they quickly discover that the story doesn't end with the alleged killer's confession in 1995. In Mr. Perfect, the podcast is back to investigate allegations that a local businessman is dabbling in money laundering. Pretty Poison follows Tess, a woman accused of killing her three husbands.

Thatcher Hutton, a war-weary soldier on the way back to his cowboy life, jumps from a moving freight train to avoid trouble...and lands in more than he bargained for. On the day he arrives in Foley, Texas, a local woman goes missing. Thatcher, the only stranger in town, is suspected of her abduction, and worse. Standing between him and exoneration are a corrupt mayor, a crooked sheriff, a notorious cathouse madam, a sly bootlegger, feuding moonshiners...and a young widow whose soft features conceal an iron will.

Meg Langslow’s in for a busy summer. Her husband is directing a production of Macbeth, and most of the cast and crew are occupying spare bedrooms in their house. She also has to keep an eye on Camp Birnam, where a group of medieval reenactors are commemorating the real-life Macbeth by setting up what they fondly believe is an authentic medieval Scottish military camp. And then there’s Damien Goodwin, a filmmaker who has been hanging around, trying to document the production.

No one knows who the victim was, where he came from, or why he staggered out in front of Chief Cade’s car. Guilt overwhelms him that he killed the mysterious stranger, until Cade learns that the man had been shot at close-range before he was struck. Determining his identity and finding the shooter becomes Cade’s top priority. But then Cade vanishes off of the island of Cape Refuge. Rumors spread like wildfire that Cade was involved with the dead man’s wife and that the death was not accidental. Did Cade run to escape murder charges, or has something sinister happened to him?

It’s homecoming weekend in Sugarland, Tennessee, and ghost hunter Verity Long is tickled to see so many souls - living and dead - back in town to celebrate. But not all reunions are happy ones, and when Verity stumbles upon a dead body by the football field, it appears someone has already evened the score. With her long-lost mother in tow and her ghostly sidekick Frankie showing her startling glimpses of a time long past, Verity untangles the secrets and scandal behind her town’s favorite traditions. Even more shocking? The murderer is tracking her.

Thirteen-year-old Loyal Raines is supposed to stay close to home on a hot summer day in 1934. When he slips away for a quick swim in the river and finds a dead body, he wishes he'd obeyed his mother. The ripples caused by his discovery will impact the town of Beverly, West Virginia, in ways no one could have imagined.