Town Mystery

When Jem knocked on the door of an isolated cottage overlooking the beautiful Neptune Cove, she was hoping for help fixing a birthday cake baking disaster. She was not expecting to find the tenant dead on the tiled floor, specks of blood on the collar of his navy and red satin pajamas. The victim is Arthur Ajax, a handsome and wealthy American businessman who arrived in the Isles of Scilly as a tourist 10 months ago and never left.

Abigail Sutton's beloved husband walks out one night, doesn't return, and two years later is found dead, a victim of a long ago crime. It's made her sympathetic to the missing and their families. Starting her new life, Abigail moves to small town and buys a fixer-upper house left empty when old Edna Summers died. Once it was also home to Edna's younger sister, Emily, and her two children, Jenny and Christopher, who, people believe, drove away one night, thirty years ago, and just never came back.

A white woman has been bludgeoned to death with an altar cross in a rural church on Cicada Road in Walterboro, South Carolina. Sam Jenkins, a Black man, is found covered in blood, kneeling over the body. In a state already roiling with racial tension, this is not just a murder case: it's a powder keg. Two young women are murdered on quiet Edisto Beach, an hour southeast of Walterboro, and the killer disappears without a trace. Thirty-four years later, the mystery remains unsolved. Could there be a connection to Stander's case?

The summer of 1919 is now over, and on the high prairie, a small army of men, women, and machines moves across the land, harvesting the wheat. Custom threshers, steam engineers, bindle stiffs, cooks, camp followers, and hobos join the tide. Wheat is king as people gleefully embrace the gospels of bounty and progress. But with the wheat comes a serial killer who calls himself the Windmill Man and who believes he has a holy calling to water the newly plucked earth with blood.

When K9 Renegade finds a single black high-heeled shoe with a blood-red sole, he and his handler, Deputy Caitlyn Reed, search for its missing twin. They find it on the foot of a woman’s body floating facedown in a mountain lake. The death appears to be a suicide, but when Deputy Reed and Sheriff Colt Branson search for the woman’s identity, they come face-to-face with a ruthless killer. If you like unexpected twists and nail-biting thrills, you’ll love Maverick, book two of the Tin Star K9 Series.

Thea Osborne reconnects with her friend Emmy while on a visit to the church in Baunton, near Cirencester with her stepdaughter Stephanie. Emmy, now married to local farmer Nick Weaver, asks Thea to help them find their missing niece, Ginny. Before Thea can get started, she stumbles upon the recently killed body of Alice, a woman they had briefly seen in Cirencester the day before.

Caleb Cantrill still can't find where he hid the bandit's gold or his cavern of riches. The only thing it seems he can find is more and more of the monstrous blight he unleashed on the peaceful valley he now calls home. Adding to his troubles, his twenty-four-hour reprieve from the gang is up soon, and the bandits will be returning, looking for their gold, or his life is forfeit. Kitty Welch is swept up in a corrupt scheme which may result in her arrest and deportation back to Scotland. Though she wants to flee, there is something keeping her in the valley.

Two cyclists die on the Somerset Levels, and the Exham bakery gets the blame. Libby Forest runs into danger as she sets out to solve the mystery, save the bakery and rescue her career, helped by Bear, the enormous Carpathian Sheepdog, Fuzzy, an aloof marmalade cat, and the handsome, secretive Max Ramshore. Set in the coastal resort of Exham on Sea, Murder on the Levels features a cast of local characters, including Mandy the teenage Goth, her new boyfriend, Steve, Frank the baker, and Detective Sergeant Joe Ramshore, Max's estranged son.

In a tale inspired by real events, pregnant journalist Joan Harken is cautiously excited to follow her fiancé back to his Minnesota hometown. After spending a childhood on the move and chasing the screams and swirls of news-rich city life, she’s eager to settle down. Lilydale’s motto, “Come Home Forever,” couldn’t be more inviting. And yet, something is off in the picture-perfect village. The friendliness borders on intrusive. Joan can’t shake the feeling that every move she makes is being tracked. An archaic organization still seems to hold the town in thrall.

Praised by Bookpage as “America’s best-kept literary secret,” Amanda Eyre Ward delivers a debut short story collection imbued with humor, clear-eyed insight, and emotional richness. Here a small-town librarian considers the possibility of a new future. A recent New York widow braves the dating scene. And—in six linked stories spanning a decade of her life—Lola Wilkerson navigates lingering questions about who she wants to be when she grows up, elopement, and motherhood.

The Nomination is a fast-paced action and suspense thriller that brings events from the final days of the Vietnam War into direct conflict with contemporary American politics. Vietnam War hero and Massachusetts Judge Thomas Larrigan is hand-picked by his friend the president to fill the upcoming vacancy on the Supreme Court. Larrigan seems like the perfect candidate: a family man with an uncontroversial judicial record. The president's credibility needs a sure bet. Larrigan will do anything to win the nomination, but he has some old skeletons rattling around in his closet. He calls his old Marine buddy, now a hit man, to sweep the closet clean.

Private Investigator Liz Talbot is a modern Southern belle. She blesses hearts and takes names. She carries her Sig 9 in her Kate Spade handbag, and her golden retriever, Rhett, rides shotgun in her hybrid Escape. When her grandmother is murdered, Liz hightails it back to her South Carolina island home to find the killer. She’s fit to be tied when her brother—the chief of police—shuts her out of the investigation, so she opens her own. Then her long-dead best friend pops in and things really get complicated.

As the Hughes family celebrates bonfire night, a terrible accident leaves the garden shed in flames - and father and grandfather Thomas trapped inside. Tragic though it is, Thomas’ death passes without suspicion - until a local journalist makes accusations of a police cover-up in the press. WPC Trudy Loveday is sent to investigate and asks Coroner Clement Ryder to help.

Bailey Meadows has just moved into the remote Topanga Canyon home of thriller author Jack Beckham. As his writer-in-residence, she’s supposed to help him once again reach the bestseller list. But she’s not there to write a thriller—she’s there to find Sam Morris, a community leader dedicated to finding missing people, who has disappeared in the canyon surrounding Beckham’s property. The missing woman was last seen in the drought-stricken forest known for wildfires and mountain lions.

Twelve-year-old Epic McDade isn't ready for middle school. He'd rather help out at his family's dog-friendly bed-and-breakfast all summer or return to his alternative elementary school in the fall, where learning feels safe. But change comes in all shapes and fur colors. When Carmelito, California, is named America's number one dog-friendly town, all the top dogs and their owners pour into Epic's sleepy seaside neighborhood for a week of celebration.

Newly arrived on the sun-drenched shores of Croatia, Claire Thomson’s life is about to change forever when she starts working at a local bookshop. With her cousin Vedran, employee Luna and Karmela, a professor, they form an unlikely book club. But when their first book club pick – an engrossing cosy crime – inspires them to embark upon an investigation that is close to the group’s heart, they quickly learn the value of keeping their new-found friends close as lives and stories begin to entwine.

Rene Descartes, a recently released ex-con, is living in a ramshackle trailer only a short distance from Hidden Cove, a secluded paradise for the country’s rich and famous. A savage attack against Rene by the son of the fourth richest man in the country spurns a brutal act of revenge that will ignite this paradise into a fiery vision of hell on earth. As the flames threaten to engulf rich and poor alike, only Deacon Riis, a small-town reporter haunted by his own past, suspects it wasn’t Rene who set Hidden Cove ablaze but someone with a far more sinister agenda.

When his father leaves town, 12-year-old Rodney Culver's mother takes up with Otis Dell, a fry cook at the local diner - and a well-known petty thief. While Rodney resists the man's influence at first, Otis soon draws the boy into his small-time criminal world. After a simple heist goes violently wrong, Rodney becomes an unwitting fugitive, swept away from his mother to the primitive mountain sanctuary of the mysterious Lester Fanning.

Every year, Úna prepares for her father to leave her. He will wave good-bye early one morning, then disappear with seven other men to traverse the Irish countryside. Together, these men form the Butchers, a group that roams from farm to farm, enacting ancient methods of cattle slaughter.

It’s been seven years since Gloomy Knob landed in the Ted Stevens High-Security Federal Penitentiary and five years since the end of the war, the one North Korea started when they sent a missile to Cold Storage, Alaska. Serving a life sentence for the murder of his sister, Gloomy spends his time trying to forget about the past. Then one day, Gloomy is snatched from his off-site work station. Instead of celebrating his newfound freedom, Gloomy comes unmoored - he feels he belongs in prison. But his kidnappers believe Gloomy knows where a second nuclear warhead is hidden.