Suspense Genre

The Pope is dead. Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, 118 cardinals from all over the globe will cast their votes in the world's most secretive election. They are holy men. But they have ambition. And they have rivals. Over the next 72 hours, one of them will become the most powerful spiritual figure on earth.

Welcome to Derry, Maine. It’s a small city, a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry the haunting is real. They were seven teenagers when they first stumbled upon the horror. Now they are grown-up men and women who have gone out into the big world to gain success and happiness. But the promise they made 28 years ago calls them reunite in the same place where, as teenagers, they battled an evil creature that preyed on the city’s children.

When Muslim fundamentalists blow up a key Soviet oil complex, making an already critical oil shortage calamitous, the Russians figure they are going to have to take things into their own hands. They plan to seize the Persian Gulf, and more ambitiously, to neutralize NATO. Thus begins Red Storm, an audacious gamble that uses diplomatic maneuver to cloak a crash military build-up.

Some say the great mystery of how one can live in two worlds at once died with Thomas Hunter many years ago. Still others that the gateway to that greater reality was and is only the stuff of dreams. They are wrong. In the small town of Eden, Utah, a blind girl named Rachelle Matthews is about to find out just how wrong.

My name’s Ernest Cunningham. I used to be a fan of reading Golden Age murder mysteries, until I found myself with a haphazard career getting stuck in the middle of real-life ones. I’d hoped, this Christmas, that any self-respecting murderer would kick their feet up and take it easy over the holidays. I was wrong. So here I am, backstage at the show of world-famous magician Rylan Blaze, whose benefactor has just been murdered. My suspects are all professional tricksters: masters of the art of misdirection.

Sori. Western military generals shudder when they hear the name. It is a remote, inaccessible village in Afghanistan, high up in the Hindu Kush mountains. It is where a dreaded Taliban terrorist hides and from where he conducts his murderous raids. Villagers have a special name for the mountain on which Sori is perched. Mountain of Death. Sori is also where the Taliban hold three American soldiers captive. All attempts to free them have failed. As the terrorists threaten to execute the soldiers, Zeb Carter volunteers to mount a rescue attempt. Alone.

Eleanor Trewynn is a recently retired widow who has moved to the small village of Port Mabyn in Cornwall. Neither frail nor retiring, after a lifetime of traveling the world, she's ready for an uneventful life with her dog and friends in this quiet town. Unfortunately, excitement seems to happen around her. Her friend and neighbor, artist Nick Gresham, returns from a trip only to find several of his paintings slashed, reportedly by rival local artist Geoffrey Clarke.

For 30 years, a secret agency called the Southern Reach has monitored expeditions into Area X - a remote and mysterious place that's sequestered from civilization. After the twelfth expedition, the Southern Reach is in disarray, and John Rodriguez (a.k.a. "Control") is the team's newly appointed head. From a series of interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and more than 200 hours of profoundly troubling video footage, the secrets of Area X begin to reveal themselves - and what they expose pushes Control to confront truths about both himself and the agency he's promised to serve.

Peter Holstein writes his popular series of adventure novels under a pen name. With European politics boiling and his own neighbors suspicious of him, Peter debates whether it might be best to change his name for good. When Rosemary shows up at his door pretending to be a historian and offering to help him trace his family history, his question might be answered. But as the two work together and Rosemary sees his gracious reaction to his neighbors' scornful attacks, she wonders if her assignment is going down the wrong path.

Cal Hooper thought a fixer-upper in a bucolic Irish village would be the perfect escape. After 25 years in the Chicago police force and a bruising divorce, he just wants to build a new life in a pretty spot with a good pub where nothing much happens. But when a local kid whose brother has gone missing arm-twists him into investigating, Cal uncovers layers of darkness beneath his picturesque retreat, and starts to realize that even small towns shelter dangerous secrets.

There's something special about eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. With her carefully plaited hair and her sweet cotton dresses, she's the very picture of old-fashioned innocence. But when their neighborhood suffers a series of terrible accidents, her mother begins to wonder: Why do bad things seem to happen when little Rhoda is around?

With the snow falling fast on a New Hampshire mansion, seven 20-somethings gather for a weekend that will change their lives irrevocably. The extravagant trip to celebrate Will and Jessica's upcoming nuptials brings together a cast of characters who know each other from Ivy League schools and childhood Upper East Side haunts. There is Lulu, an LA-based Instagram influencer; Maxie, a former Park Avenue princess, now Midwestern housewife; Yael, an ER doctor from Ohio; Rob, a colorless Wall Street trader; Will, a morality-obsessed lawyer; Jessica, Will’s perfectionist bride-to-be....

Former pararescue jumper Orion Starr is haunted by the memory of a rescue gone wrong. He may be living alone in Alaska now, but the pain of his failure - and his injuries - has followed him there from Afghanistan. He has no desire to join Hamilton Jones' elite rescue team, but he also can't shirk his duty when the call comes in to rescue three lost climbers on Denali. Former CIA profiler and psychiatrist Jenny Calhoun's yearly extreme challenge with her best friends is her only escape from the guilt that has sunk its claws into her.

To most people, Maj. John Rexford is a retired marine living in the Catskill Mountains of New York on disability. Even John's girlfriend, Maggie, has no idea he's really a CIA spook recruited in Afghanistan and assigned to kill enemies on US soil. With exemplary skills in hand-to-hand combat and small-arms weaponry, John Rexford completes a string of successful kills, eliminating terrorists and their money supply in the New York metropolitan area.

It's summer on the Jersey Shore. Children play on the beach. Husbands are off working in the city. And the surf echoes in the night. Here, in this perfect place, a serial killer has no worries in the world - except choosing the next victim. Cam Hastings has come to Long Beach Island with her teenage daughter and the hope that maybe she can save her failed marriage. Cam has never stopped loving her husband, Mike, nor has she been able to outrun her flaws and demons - a vanished mother, a lost sister, and the ugly visions she has of missing children.

In the biggest case of her career, attorney Kate Sullivan is tapped as lead counsel to take on Mason Pharmaceutical because of a corporate cover-up related to its newest drug. After a whistleblower dies, Kate knows the stakes are much higher than her other lawsuits. Former Army Ranger turned private investigator Landon James is still haunted by mistakes made while serving overseas. He is hired by Kate to look into the whistleblower's allegation and soon suspects that the company may be engaging in a dangerous game for profit.

It was a typical evening at a mall outside Portland, Maine. Three teenage friends waited for the movie to start. A boy flirted with the girl selling sunglasses. Mothers and children shopped together, and the manager at the video game store tended to customers. Then the shooters arrived. The chaos and carnage lasted only eight minutes before the killers were taken down. But for those who lived through it, the effects would last forever.

In this gripping psychological thriller, a group of privileged suburban moms amuse themselves by googling everyone in town, digging up dirt to fuel thorny gossip. Caroline Thompson, devoted mother of two, sticks to the moral high ground and attempts to avoid these women. She's relieved to hear her name appears only three times, citing her philanthropy. Despite being grateful that she has nothing to hide, a delayed pang of insecurity prods Caroline to google her maiden name - which none of the others know.

When a woman is kidnapped off a Chicago street in broad daylight, Jack Reacher's in the wrong place at the wrong time. He's kidnapped with her. Chained together and racing across America toward an unknown destination, they're at the mercy of a group of men demanding an impossible ransom. Because Reacher's female companion is worth more than he imagines. Now he has to save them both - from the inside out - or die trying....

Introducing Audible's Thriller of the Year: Silent Child by Sarah A. Denzil, performed by Joanne Froggatt. In the summer of 2006, Emma Price watched helplessly as her six-year-old son's red coat was fished out of the River Ouse. It was the tragic story of the year - a little boy, Aiden, wandered away from school during a terrible flood, fell into the river, and drowned. His body was never recovered. Ten years later Emma has finally rediscovered the joy in life...until Aiden returns.