Mystery Girl

Crowley, Louisiana is the kind of town that runs on tradition: Crawfish, Ride an Cajun Music with handshakes, family names, and the belief that the parish takes care of its own. Until a troubling pattern starts to rise from the back roads and bayou shadows. Major Harvey John is pushed into a case that refuses to stay quiet. The leads don’t add up. The timing feels intentional. And the closer he gets, the more he realizes somebody isn’t just hiding somebody is working with precision. Then a phrase starts circling through the department and the town like a warning bell: The Thin Blue Line.

Caught in the enigmatic web of an unusual case, Special Agent Tess Winnett races against the ticking clock. A suspected serial killer is on the loose hunting prey in the depths of the Everglades. Several women have vanished from the Miami coast, leaving only echoes of their existence. The clues to their fates? Locked away in the tortured mind of one survivor, TV celebrity Kiana Bayliss.

When Sam Kornberg’s wife, Lala, walks out on him, he’s an unemployed used-book store clerk and failed experimental novelist with a broken heart. Desperate to win her back, he takes a job as assistant detective to the enigmatic Solar Lonsky, a private eye who might be an eccentric and morbid genius or just a morbidly obese madman. It’s a simple tail job, following a beautiful and mysterious lady around L.A., but Sam soon finds himself helplessly falling for his quarry and hopelessly entangled in a murder case involving Satanists, succubi, underground filmmakers, Hollywood bigshots, Mexican shootouts, video-store geekery, and sexy doppelgangers.

Where her daughter had played Gretel in front of a cheering audience, only two faint stage lights remained. The theater was deserted and eerily silent; the only sound she could hear was her own heart, pounding in a frenzy against her chest. She rushed outside and stopped sharply at the top of the stairs, stunned, her blood turned to icicles. Darkness had fallen, thick and filled with ocean mist, lampposts like ghosts sprinkling yellow haloes in the sky. Paige was gone. They’d taken her little girl.

When nine-year-old best friends Charlie and Amy disappear, two families are plunged into a living nightmare. A text message confirms the unthinkable; that the girls are the victims of a terrifying kidnapping. And when a second text message pits the two families against each other for the life of their children, the clock starts ticking for D.I. Kim Stone and the squad.

After 15-year-old Kaylee disappears without a trace, FBI special agent Tess Winnett is assigned to the case that falls outside of the normal purview of the FBI. With every lead she uncovers, more questions are posed and with only one possible, terrifying answer: There are others like her who have vanished, never to be seen or heard from again. Is there a pattern in these disappearances? What happened to the others who have vanished? Is there a connection, or is Tess chasing shadows?

When five-year-old Elsie Button was snatched from a garden in a sleepy town on the Welsh island of Anglesey, and a local man later confessed, it sent shockwaves through the tight-knit community. How could one of their own do such a thing? Especially when his own little girl was the same age – and the victim's best friend. Kathryn and her family left under the cloak of darkness one night, unable to bear the shame, and the anger of their neighbours. She hardly remembers that time. Now, she suffers the consequences of living under an assumed name, always looking over her shoulder.

She seemed peaceful, as if in her last moments her young body hadn’t agonized, desperately trying to live, to survive. Her lips were parted slightly, as if she were breathing gently while dreaming of something only she knew. Whatever her secret, she’d taken it with her.

Brought to you by Penguin. ‘The thing is, we always believe the best of our own kids. What mother thinks her own daughter will do something terrible? But every bad deed is carried out by a person who was once someone’s child.’ Get ready for your new obsession - it will make you question...

Part of a mystery series featuring renowned detective Fleming Stone. He is called on to decide whether it was suicide or murder in the case of a future college president. Stone has remarkable ingenuity for unraveling cases. Can he do it again? A young girl student is suspected. Was she guilty or was it just rumor? Several clues point both ways. Small footprints in the snow lead to a boarding house where the mystery girl is lodging and love letters between the two point to her guilt. Listening to the unusual tale will have you thinking both ways.

When the Girls accept a very strange invitation to a lavish party on a remote island estate, they find that murder has a way of ruining even the most glamorous of evenings. The invite delivered to 6151 Richmond Street was short on details, only promising to celebrate “the greatest artist of the century” and accompanied by a jewel-encrusted brooch—the whole package a brand of mysterious opulence that another Saturday night of gin rummy just can’t match.

When reports come in of an attack on a group of friends on the grounds of an abandoned summer camp, Detective Morgan Brookes races to the scene. Seeing a body in the lake, she throws herself into the freezing water, but the boy’s battered face and blue lips are evidence that she is far too late. With his killer at large, and one young girl missing, a desperate search ensues.

Her blue eyes wide open, glossed over. A few specks of sand clung to her long, dark lashes. Her beautiful face, immobile, covered in sparkling flecks of sand. Who is the beautiful girl found at dawn, on a deserted stretch of white sand beach? What is her secret? FBI special agent Tess Winnett searches for answers relentlessly. With each step, each new finding, she uncovers unsettling facts leading to a single possible conclusion: Dawn Girl is not the only victim. Her killer has killed before.

When the body of a young woman is found, tied to her bed and the victim of a brutal attack in her own home, Detective Morgan Brookes is sickened by what she finds as she searches the house, and unprepared for the nightmares it inspires about her childhood. When the DNA collected gives a positive ID, Morgan can’t wait to put the attacker behind bars. But the person it matches to is already in prison. How could the DNA of someone who has been locked up for over 20 years have shown up in Morgan’s crime scene? And then they make another close match - to Morgan herself.

National best-selling author Elaine Viets says the Gourmet Girl mysteries have "all the right ingredients!" Chloe Carter's boyfriend, Josh Driscoll, is prepping for the opening of Simmer, Boston's hottest new restaurant. But at a fund-raiser featuring samples of Josh's cuisine, a trendy club owner is found bludgeoned to death - by Josh's state-of-the-art, professional-grade food processor, the ominously-named Robocoupe. By opening night at Simmer, the list of suspects is almost longer than the line to get in. And Chloe is struggling to solve the crime before the final course is served.

Mary Jekyll and the Athena Club foil a plot to unseat the Queen and race to save one of their own in this electrifying conclusion to the Locus Award winning trilogy that began with The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter. Life’s always an adventure for the Athena Club...especially when...

Charlie Hudson, an autistic 17-year-old, is determined to leave Sawyer, PA, as soon as she graduates high school - in the meantime, she works as many hours as she can at a sandwich shop called The Triple S to save money for college. But when shop owner Clay Cooper - a man who is both respected and feared by many in this economically depressed community - is found dead, each member of his staff becomes a suspect in the perplexing case. Charlie must work to protect herself and her friends, and uncover the danger that may still be at large in their tightknit community.

In a fashionable Las Vegas hotel, with hundreds of witnesses and countless video surveillance cameras watching, a young girl is brutally murdered in an audacious crime that shocks the entire city. It looks like a relatively simple investigation for Detectives Laura Baxter and Jack Holt, but it soon proves to be anything of the sort, as the one vital piece of the jigsaw is missing; the killer.

Emma, Aiden and Gina stand on the brink of a new life. After the trauma of Aiden’s abduction and return, they are slowly healing and returning to a fragile normality. Emma is desperate to protect her children, but the world is fascinated by Aiden, the silent child who is finally learning to speak for himself. Against her better judgment, Emma allows her son to attend a talk show. Her worse nightmare comes true when her daughter, Gina, is snatched from the studio and a chilling game begins.

Haunted by his inability to track down and save his missing wife, DCI Robert Kett leaves the Metropolitan Police behind and moves to Norwich with his three young children, hoping to heal their broken family. But his newfound peace doesn’t last. Two newspaper delivery girls have gone missing in the city, and the clues point to a serial kidnapper. Kett is dragged into the centre of one of the darkest cases of his career - a case that pits him head-to-head against a horrifying evil.