Womens Mystery Fiction

Zane Bigelow grew up in a beautiful, perfectly kept house in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Strangers and even Zane’s own aunt across the lake see his parents as a successful surgeon and his stylish wife, making appearances at their children’s ballet recitals and baseball games. Only Zane and his sister know the truth, until one brutal night finally reveals cracks in the facade, and Zane escapes for college without a thought of looking back....

Lee Barrett has agreed to attend a storage auction with Aunt Ibby - even though she suspects the forgotten rooms will yield more junk than treasure. Her skepticism vanishes once the two win a bid on an overlooked locker and uncover a trove of beautiful curiosities, including a stunning wooden carousel horse with gentle eyes and fading paint. But just before Lee leaves the fairground relic at a local repair shop, the sight of a silver samovar awakens her psychic abilities and conjures visions of murder.

Meet Helen - youngest of the Walsh sisters and a law unto herself. She’s easily bored, has an inability to filter her thoughts and was fired from every job she ever had before she found her true calling as a private investigator. But times are tough for PIs, and Helen’s had no choice but to take on the search for AWOL boyband has-been Wayne Diffney: The Wacky One.

Colin Hancock is giving his second chance his best shot. At 28, he's focused only on walking a straight line - getting his teaching degree, working out at the gym religiously, and avoiding all the places and people that proved so destructive in his earlier life. The last thing he's looking for is a serious relationship. But when Maria Sanchez crosses paths with him on a rainswept night in North Carolina, his plans are upended in a way that will rattle the foundations of his carefully structured life.

Normally, not even drunk on a bet would Violet Parker go to Slagton, a creepy ghost town inhabited by those too stubborn - or deranged - to leave. But a certain bullheaded Deadwood detective has a problem - his informant from Slagton has gone missing. When Violet is shanghaied into taking a hunting trip to the ghost town to search for the missing snitch, she stumbles into trouble that will take more than a double-barreled shotgun to escape. Will Violet survive this new hell that haunts her, or will she end up on Slagton's growing list of those "gutted and hung"?

Maureen's career as a sportswear buyer hits a snag just before Halloween, when the department store declares bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Finn's lost his way as a guide dog after flunking his test for being too friendly and easily distracted. Sadly, only one of them can earn unemployment, so Maureen's facing a winter of discontent in Boston - when she realizes she can't afford her apartment. Salvation comes when she receives a mysterious inheritance: an inn in Haven, Florida.

Tending to the soldiers in the trenches of France during the First World War, battlefield nurse Bess Crawford can't help but notice the photo of a young pilot's wife every time she tends to him. But then at the railway station, in a mob of troops leaving for the front, Bess glimpses a familiar face - the pilot's wife, with another man. Later, back in France, Bess sees a newspaper with a drawing of the woman's face on the front page. She'd been murdered - the very day Bess saw her.

When she was 9 years old, Melody Browne's house burned down, and it took all of her childhood memories with it. Now she's a single mother of a teenage boy living in Central London. She hasn't seen her parents since she left home at 15, but she doesn't mind. She's better off on her own. She works as a dinner lady at her son's school and has no idea where her humdrum life is heading. But one summer's night, a hypnotist inadvertently unlocks memories of her childhood, and her whole life is turned upside down.

"This is a very difficult letter to write. I hope you will not hate us too much.... My son broke into your home recently while you were out." In a quiet, leafy suburb in upstate New York, a teenager has been sneaking into houses - and into the owners' computers as well - learning their secrets, and maybe sharing some of them, too. Who is he, and what might he have uncovered? After two anonymous letters are received, whispers start to circulate, and suspicion mounts. And when a woman down the street is found murdered, the tension reaches the breaking point.

To get a fresh start away from a bad relationship, Kylie Strange moves across the country to open a shop in a seemingly quiet town in rural Maine. During renovations on Strange Herbs & Teas, she discovers a peculiar and ancient codex, The Booke of the Hidden, bricked into the wall. Every small town has its legends and unusual histories, and this artifact sends Kylie right into the center of Moody Bog's biggest secret.

Daughter of a cold, controlling mother and an anonymous donor, studious, obedient Elizabeth Fitch finally let loose one night, drinking too much at a nightclub and allowing a strange man’s seductive Russian accent to lure her to a house on Lake Shore Drive. Twelve years later, the woman now known as Abigail Lowery lives alone on the outskirts of a small town in the Ozarks.

Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she’s known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community’s past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block - her neighbor, Theo. But Sydney and Theo’s deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear.

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.

Justice Parish takes down bad guys. Rescued from the streets by the world renowned Parish family, she joined their covert sisterhood of vigilante assassins. Her next target: a sex-trafficking ring in the war-torn Middle East. She just needs to get close enough to take them down. Sandesh Ross left Special Forces to found a humanitarian group to aid war-torn countries. But saving the world isn't cheap. Enter Parish Industries and limitless funding, with one catch - their hot, prickly "PR specialist", Justice Parish.

Chester Henry and his adult granddaughter Clare lovingly repair old typewriters and restore old books. Who ever thought their quaint store would hold the key to some modern-day trouble? When a stranger to town demands they turn over an antique Underwood typewriter they're repairing for a customer, Clare fears she may need to be rescued. A call to the police scares the man off, but later Clare finds his dead body in the back alley. What about a dusty old typewriter could possibly be worth killing for?

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.

Kelly Roth, FBI profiler, returns home to Syracuse to stop a sadistic serial killer. Three murders in three separate jurisdictions in central New York State have the same pattern: women killed by fatal headshots from a hunting rifle. Kelly Roth is sent from Virginia to help the local police. Each victim was found murdered in a remote area or in a quiet park. The media call him “The Park Killer.” But Kelly doesn’t think the killer lurks in the bushes. She thinks he hunts his victims somewhere else.

Summoned to an abandoned theme park to retrieve a body, Dr. Kay Scarpetta is devastated to learn that the victim is a man she once had an intense love affair with. The murder scene is bizarre, with a crop circle of petals around the body, and Giordano’s skin is strangely red. Scarpetta’s niece Lucy believes he was dropped from an unidentified flying craft. Scarpetta knows an autopsy can reveal the dead’s secrets, but she is shocked to find her friend seems to have deliberately left her a clue.

Lucy Albright is far from her Long Island upbringing when she arrives on the campus of her small California college and happy to be hundreds of miles from her mother, whom she's never forgiven for an act of betrayal in her early teen years. Quickly grasping at her fresh start, Lucy embraces college life and all it has to offer - new friends, wild parties, stimulating classes. And then she meets Stephen DeMarco. Charming. Attractive. Complicated. Devastating.

Christmas is Bailey King's favorite time of year. For her first Yuletide in Harvest, Ohio, the former big-city chocolatier is recreating a cherished holiday treat. But her sugar high plummets when her former boyfriend walks into the candy shop she now runs with her Amish grandmother. New York celebrity chef Eric Sharp and his TV crew have arrived to film an authentic Amish Christmas. Unfortunately, she gets more publicity than she bargained for when Eric's executive producer is found strangled to death - and Eric's the prime suspect.