A serial killer is on the loose in Beantown and the cops can't catch him. But when the killer leaves his red rose calling card for Spenser's own Susan Silverman, he gets all the attention that Spenser and Hawk can give.Spenser plays against time while he tracks the Red Rose killer from Boston's Combat Zone to the suburbs. His trap is both daring and brave, and gives the story a satisfying climax.

Different motives. One target. Danger stalks a young girl in this international thriller from the Hercule Poirot Award–winning author of Absinthe. It begins with a robbery from the cargo hold of a plane in Belgium; fifty million dollars worth of diamonds are taken. But a Russian mercenary named Alexei leaves with the real prize: a data card containing secret and sensitive information from the Israeli government. When Alexei is killed by an Arab operative while trying to negotiate for more money, the data card survives inside a locket he gave to his lover’s daughter, Lucy. In a panic, mother and daughter flee to Jamaica, where Lucy’s father lives. Yet the Caribbean island is no safe haven. A serial killer is using Kingston’s streets as a hunting ground, targeting young schoolgirls—ones who look a lot like Lucy. And as Arab and Mossad agents converge on the town, Lucy disappears. On the hunt for a psychopath, one police...

This short story by crime writer Alison Bruce has been self published as part of the Suffolk Writes project.

This is a short story from crime writer Alison Bruce has been self published as part of the Suffolk Writes project.

This short story by crime writer Alison Bruce has been self published as part of the Suffolk Writes project.

This short story by crime writer Alison Bruce has been self published as part of the Suffolk Writes project.

This short story by crime writer Alison Bruce has been self published as part of the Suffolk Writes project.

Making a fresh start can be hard, especially with a killer watching . . .When her sister was murdered, Jane Osborne left Cambridge and swore she'd never return. But now, Detective Gary Goodhew has stumbled onto a case that will drag Jane kicking and screaming through her painful past.A car set on fire, a man tied to a tree, a convicted murderer on parole. All of these things are connected, and only Gary Goodhew can figure out how.This unforgettable novel of suspense will thrill fans of Deborah Crombie and Elizabeth George.

A maverick celebrity chef reluctantly agrees to let the CIA use his hugely popular international food, culture, and travel TV series as cover for a dangerous espionage mission.When the CIA approaches celebrity chef Sebastian Pike about using his award-winning food and culture travel show as cover for espionage, the outspoken bad-boy host says no. When they point out how roaming the globe interviewing foodies, heads of state, rock stars, journalists-in-exile, poets, subversives, supermodels—even the pope—gives him perfect cover, Pike smiles and says, "F@#! no." They push. Promising it's only one mission. Vowing he won't be in danger. Calling him the MVB: Most Valuable Bystander. They'd embed their top agent in his crew to do the spy work. It's still no. But when they hit him with the patriotism card, he weakens. And when romantic sparks crackle between him and the female agent, Pike's all in, kicking off a romantic spy thriller in which the...

CENTURIES BEFORE GRAY SKIES... When Emily heard the first scream, she became concerned. When she heard a second scream, she grew scared. When she heard the third scream, she was struck with terror. But it was what Emily could not hear that frightened her the most. “Grips you from the start and doesn’t let go.” Jason Gurley, bestselling author of Eleanor.

Following his 'resurrection walk' and need for a new direction, Mickey Haller turns to public interest litigation, filing a civil lawsuit against an artificial intelligence company whose chatbot told a sixteen-year-old boy that it was okay for him to kill his ex-girlfriend for her disloyalty. Representing the victim's family, Mickey's case explores the mostly unregulated and exploding AI business and the lack of training guardrails. Along the way he joins up with a journalist named Jack McEvoy, who wants to be a fly on the wall during the trial in order to write a book about it. But Mickey puts him to work going through the mountain of printed discovery materials in the case. McEvoy's digging ultimately delivers the key witness, a whistleblower who has been too afraid to speak up. The case is fraught with danger because billions are at stake. It is said that machines became smarter than humans on the day in 1997 that IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess master Garry Kasparov with a gambit called 'the knight's sacrifice'. Haller will take a similar gambit in court to defeat the mega forces of the AI industry lined up against him and his clients.

When a mysterious package is delivered to Robin Ellacott, she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman's severed leg.Her boss, private detective Cormoran Strike, is less surprised but no less alarmed. There are four people from his past who he thinks could be responsible—and Strike knows that any one of them is capable of sustained and unspeakable brutality.With the police focusing on the one suspect Strike is increasingly sure is not the perpetrator, he and Robin take matters into their own hands, and delve into the dark and twisted worlds of the other three men. But as more horrendous acts occur, time is running out for the two of them...Career of Evil is the third in the highly acclaimed series featuring private detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott. A fiendishly clever mystery with unexpected twists around every corner, it is also a gripping story of a man and a woman at a crossroads in their personal lives.

Private investigator Cormoran Strike returns in a new mystery from Robert Galbraith, author of the #1 international bestseller The Cuckoo's Calling.When novelist Owen Quine goes missing, his wife calls in private detective Cormoran Strike. At first, Mrs. Quine just thinks her husband has gone off by himself for a few days—as he has done before—and she wants Strike to find him and bring him home.But as Strike investigates, it becomes clear that there is more to Quine's disappearance than his wife realizes. The novelist has just completed a manuscript featuring poisonous pen-portraits of almost everyone he knows. If the novel were to be published, it would ruin lives—meaning that there are a lot of people who might want him silenced.When Quine is found brutally murdered under bizarre circumstances, it becomes a race against time to understand the motivation of a ruthless killer, a killer unlike any Strike has encountered...

The latest installment in the highly acclaimed, internationally bestselling Strike series finds Cormoran and Robin ensnared in another winding, wicked case. When frantic, disheveled Edie Ledwell appears in the office begging to speak to her, private detective Robin Ellacott doesn’t know quite what to make of the situation. The cocreator of a popular cartoon, The Ink Black Heart, Edie is being persecuted by a mysterious online figure who goes by the pseudonym of Anomie. Edie is desperate to uncover Anomie’s true identity. Robin decides that the agency can’t help with this—and thinks nothing more of it until a few days later, when she reads the shocking news that Edie has been tasered and then murdered in Highgate Cemetery, the location of The Ink Black Heart. Robin and her business partner, Cormoran Strike, become drawn into the quest to uncover Anomie’s true identity. But with a complex web of online aliases,...

In the seventh installment in the "outrageously entertaining" Strike series, detective duo Cormoran and Robin must rescue a man ensnared in the trap of a dangerous cult. (Financial Times)  Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside.  The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organization that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths.  In order to try to rescue Will, Strike's business partner, Robin Ellacott, decides to infiltrate the cult, and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito among its members. But in doing so, she is unprepared for the dangers that await her there or for the toll it will take on her. . . Utterly page-turning, The Running Grave moves Strike's...

An eccentric Italian heiress from the Finger Lakes. An eighteen-year-old pop star from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Allison Campbell’s latest clients seem worlds apart in every respect, except one: Both women disappear on the same day. And Allison’s colleague Vaughn is the last to have seen each. Allison’s search for a connection uncovers an intricate web of family secrets, corporate transgressions and an age-old rivalry that crosses continents. The closer Allison gets to the truth, the deadlier her quest becomes. All paths lead back to a sinister Finger Lakes estate and the suicide of a woman thirty years earlier. Allison soon realizes the lives of her clients and the safety of those closest to her aren’t the only things at stake.

A genre-bending novel of 1001 nights of no-holds-barred, pre-code American movies distilled into a single fevered dreamworld.Arabian Nights of 1934 is a journey through the fevered dreamworld embodied in American movies of the early 1930s: an era that closed abruptly with the enforcement of the Production Code in July 1934. It distills a thousand and one nights of Depression-era movie-going—plotlines, closeups, cityscapes, wisecracks, backchat, and frantic outbursts—into a haunting parallel life, the stories bleeding into one another as they did in the minds of the viewers whom they helped sustain.Two of those viewers, it so happens, are O'Brien's own parents in their restless youth—one impatient to experience the world beyond the screen, one ready to take it on—and the glimpse we're afforded into the darkened theaters of their minds frames the book with an act of imagination at once tender and audacious.

An airline stewardess is entrusted with a list of names which could threaten the lives of her 700 passengers...A young woman is tortured by terrifying nightmares, until she finds a gramophone record that unlocks the door concealing a dark memory...Lottery-winner turned amateur detective, Alvirah Meehan returns from a trip to England to find the body of a Broadway starlet in their wardrobe...Peopled by a colourful cast of characters and brimming over with bizarre twists and turns, this collection is further proof of Mary Higgins Clark's ingenious touch and superlative skill. Start reading - and you won't be able to stop.(source: Bol.com)

Liza Barclay, aged 10, shot her mother while trying to protect her from her violent stepfather, ex-FBI agent Charley Foster. Despite her stepfather's claim that it was a deliberate act, the Juvenile Court ruled the death an accident. Many people, however, agreed with Foster and tabloids compared Liza to the infamous murderess, Lizzie Borden, pointing even to the similarity in name. Growing up with adoptive parents who tried to erase every trace of her past, her name is changed to Celia. Always, though, the fear hung over her and the family - that someday, her vengeful stepfather would reappear to harm her. Aged 25, a successful interior designer, she marries a childless sixty-year old widower and they have a son. Before their marriage, she had confided her earlier life to her husband. Two years on, on his deathbed, he tells her that he would want her to re-marry, but makes her swear never to reveal her past to anyone, so that their son would not carry the burden of this family tragedy - a promise that plunges her into a new cycle of violence. Three years later, happily re-married, Celia is shocked when her second husband presents her with a gift -- the house where she killed her mother. When the real estate agent who has made the sale recognises her and, soon after, is murdrered, Celia is accused of the crime. Once again, she is home -- the place where she is stamped as a murderess.From Publishers WeeklyClark's clever use of a bit of New Jersey real estate code fits perfectly into her usual formula for minting bestsellers in a novel about past deadly secrets coming to haunt the present. At One Old Mill Lane, in Mendham, N.J., 10-year-old Liza Barton wakes to find her stepfather, Ted Cartwright, attacking her mother, Audrey. Liza grabs a gun in defense, but in the ensuing melee Audrey is killed and Ted is wounded. Dubbed "Little Lizzie Borden," Liza is taken away and almost convicted of murdering her mother and attempting to kill the lying, scheming Ted. Twenty-four years later, Liza, now known as Celia Foster Nolan, has just been presented with a surprise birthday present from her new husband, Alex: the house at One Old Mill Lane. Alex doesn't know Celia is really Liza, and he doesn't know the house's grim past—but thanks to a real estate code obligating agents to notify prospective buyers if a house could be considered "stigmatized property," he's about to find out about the latter at least. As Celia fights to keep her dark secret hidden, their real estate agent turns up dead. More folks are killed and Celia comes under suspicion. But in typical Clark style, most of the characters look a little guilty. Some readers will get annoyed by Celia's tendency to do things that reinforce the cops' suspicions, but Clark's steadfast fans will suspend all necessary disbelief and play along. Agent, Sam Pinkus. One million first printing; main selection of the Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, Doubleday Large Print, Mystery Guild and BOMC. (Apr.)Review'Clark plays out her story like the pro that she is ... flawless' DAILY MIRROR

Fiction

A classic Christmas tale from the bestselling Queen of Suspense At the heart of the novel are two of Mary Higgins Clark's most loved characters: Alvirah, the lottery winner turned amateur sleuth, and her husband, Willy, who are caught up in a Christmas mystery that calls on all of their skills and experience. Willy has been looking forward to playing Santa at the after-school centre recently set up to care for the children of working parents on New York's Upper West Side, and Alvirah has been busy with rehearsals for the Christmas pageant. But suddenly a shadow falls upon the Christmas cheer. The centre is threatened with closure, a substitute promised for the play is mysteriously withdrawn, a valuable chalice is stolen from a neighborhood church, and a desperate young woman turns up, begging for Alvirah's help in finding the baby she abandoned seven years earlier. In a final blow, the young girl who is to play Mary in the Christmas pageant disappears… A missing child. A stolen chalice. A desperate mother. Can Alvirah reach the truth in time for Christmas?