Town Mystery

In "A Taste of Murder," the third Bunburry book, a local beef farmer is found dead and Betty Thorndike, vegetarian and Bunburry's only Green Party member, is in the frame. Despite what everyone thinks, Betty is absolutely not Alfie McAlister's girlfriend. But Alfie knows what it's like to be wrongly accused, and enlists the help of his fellow amateur detectives, Liz and Marge, to find out who's responsible. There's just one problem about a farm-based investigation - Alfie's scared of cows.

When Sheriff Bree Taggert discovers the body of a young woman floating near the bank of the Scarlet River, a note in her abandoned car suggests suicide. The autopsy reveals a different story. Holly Thorpe was dead long before she dropped off the bridge and hit the water. As Bree and her investigator Matt Flynn delve into the case, secrets in Holly’s personal life complicate their efforts to solve the murder.

A long-unsolved mystery gets a grim new break when the bones of Kim Ward are unearthed in Las Cruces, New Mexico, 45 years after her disappearance. Suspicion swiftly falls on her old college boyfriend: none other than retired police chief Kevin Kerney. The chief's hopes of clearing his name look bleak in the face of damning evidence compiled against him by State Police Lieutenant Clayton Istee. Left grasping for clues, with no alibi and not a single witness to speak for him, Kerney and his wife must race to reconstruct long-past events to identify the one person who can clear his name.

Newlywed Chief of Police Kate Burkholder is awakened by an urgent midnight call summoning her to a suspicious fire in the woods. When she arrives at the scene, she discovers a charred body. According to the coroner, the deceased, an Amish man named Milan Swanz, was chained to a stake and burned alive. It is an appalling and eerily symbolic crime against an upstanding husband and father.

Barton Dawes' unremarkable but comfortable existence suddenly takes a turn for the worst. A new highway extension is being built right over the laundry plant where he works - and right over his home. Dawes isn't the sort of man who will take an insult of this magnitude lying down. His steadfast determination to fight the inevitable course of progress drives his wife and friends away while he tries to face down the uncaring bureaucracy that has destroyed his life.

As a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master and multiple Edgar Award winner, Block is one of the premier crime writers of the 20th century. He has written over 50 novels, and five different mystery series. A stand-alone mystery, Small Town just so happens to be one of Block’s best yet! Here, he delivers a mesmerizing thriller that wholly embraces New York, the city he knows and loves so well.

Hollywood’s newest wunderkind is Peter Alan Nelsen, the brilliant, erratic director known as the King of Adventure. His films make billions, but his manners make enemies. What the boy king wants, he gets, and what Nelsen wants is for Elvis to comb the country for the wife and infant child the film-school flunkout dumped en route to becoming the third-biggest filmmaker in America. It’s the kind of case Cole can handle in his sleep - until it turns out to be a nightmare. For when Cole finds Nelsen’s ex-wife in a small Connecticut town, she’s nothing like he expects.

During a vicious heat wave, a county maintenance worker stumbles upon two suspicious suitcases abandoned by the side of the road. Sheriff Bree Taggert responds to find two bodies stuffed inside the luggage. The press demands action. The community is on edge. Suddenly, Bree is at the center of a media firestorm. In Oregon, a senator’s daughter goes missing. FBI Special Agent Mercy Kilpatrick agrees to keep the politically sensitive case on the down-low.

China Bayles gave up jurisprudence to settle down in small-town Texas and set up shop as an herbalist. But crimes that need solving keep coming her way, so China's back in action in this seventh book of the best selling, critically-acclaimed herbal mystery series. The story centers around an annual chili cook-off where a judge dies of a severe allergic reaction...to a peanut. Everyone knows peanuts don't belong in a bowl of Texas chili, so it's up to China to uncover the truth.

Betsy Devonshire has settled into her new home in Excelsior, Minnesota, as owner of the town’s needlecraft shop. So why is she suffering from terrifying nightmares? She hasn’t a clue—but thinks maybe it would help to get away for a while. With her friend Jill in tow, she heads north for a “stitch-in” at a remote, rustic lodge. But her nightmares only get worse—especially after she finds a dead woman no one else had seen.

Athena and Rosemary must embark on a perilous journey to the Underworld. Along the way, they uncover clues about a prophecy and encounter allies and adversaries in the dream realm. As they get closer to their goal, they face unexpected challenges, and true motives are revealed. Can they unravel the mysteries of the past before it's too late? The fate of the future hangs in the balance in this magical tale of fae, gods, and ancient prophecies.

Stephen King's first full-length solo novel since Dreamcatcher, the long-awaited From a Buick 8 is "nearly flawless and one terrific entertainment," says Publishers Weekly. A strange car acts as a conduit between our world and some other...and the boogeyman of this creepy story is our collective fascination with deadly things.

Erin Walsh arrives home to tiny New Belford, Kentucky, from college only to clash with her young stepmother, Shelby Rae. When Shelby Rae is kidnapped and a dear friend of the family is murdered, Erin discovers that both victims had secrets connected to the violent death of her mother seven years earlier. In a small town the pool of suspects is limited, but it also means the danger to Erin's own life is deathly close.

Failed academic Frank Nichols and his wife, Eudora, have arrived in the sleepy Georgia town of Whitbrow, where Frank hopes to write a history of his family's old estate - the Savoyard Plantation - and the horrors that occurred there. At first, the quaint, rural ways of their new neighbors seem to be everything they wanted. But there is an unspoken dread that the townsfolk have lived with for generations. A presence that demands sacrifice.

Lizzy Moon never wanted Moon Girl Farm. Eight years ago, she left the land that nine generations of gifted healers had tended, determined to distance herself from the whispers about her family’s strange legacy. But when her beloved grandmother Althea dies, Lizzy must return and face the tragedy still hanging over the farm’s withered lavender fields: the unsolved murders of two young girls, and the cruel accusations that followed Althea to her grave.

In a quest for a simpler life, Helen and Nate have abandoned the comforts of suburbia to take up residence on 44 acres of rural land where they will begin the ultimate, aspirational do-it-yourself project: building the house of their dreams. When they discover that this beautiful property has a dark and violent past, Helen, a former history teacher, becomes consumed by the local legend of Hattie Breckenridge, a woman who lived and died there a century ago.

This bundle includes The Mystery of the Pirate's Map, The Ghost Town Mystery, and The Mystery in the Mall.

New York Times best-selling author Nevada Barr continues her award-winning Anna Pigeon series with this riveting mystery that features the puzzling plot twists, deft characterizations, and sparkling dialogue that have become Barr's trademarks, and which her ever-growing fan base can't get enough of.

Part human comedy and part mystery, Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told is an enthralling, masterful story about what holds a village together and what keeps people apart. When journalist Patrick Bracken returns to Gohen, the Irish village where he was born, he knows the eyes of the townspeople are on him. He has come home to investigate two deaths that happened decades earlier when he was a child, deaths that were ruled accidental.

Bertram Stone is a former Texas Ranger running from the changes of an ever-evolving world. Horses were being replaced by cars. Laws were changing how Bertram could deliver justice. Wanting to live out his golden years in peace, Stone flees to the quiet town of Hamilton, Texas, where he becomes the local sheriff. In a small town where the law rarely needs enforcing, everything is going according to his plan—until a great evil plunges Hamilton into horror.