Forensic Mystery Fiction

Sasha Grover-Williams hated her wealthy father's dubious business affairs - and ended up dead on a railway track. But did she jump or was she pushed? That's the burning question for Chief Inspector Beverley Wharton. She and her pathologist lover, Dr John Eisenmenger - an expert in forensics - are immediately plunged into a messy world of corruption and violence. Who is the father of the Sasha's foetus that unexpectedly comes to light? How can Beverley be mired in the charge of collusion?

Seven years after making her escape from an abusive marriage, Dr. Annabelle Schwartzman is settling into her position as medical examiner in the city of San Francisco. Doing what she loves, she can almost put the trauma of her past behind her—until she confronts the case of a young woman, 16 weeks pregnant. Everything about the case says the woman took her own life. As hard as Schwartzman tries to make peace with the evidence in her head, something about the case won’t leave her alone. She’s all too aware of how similar the circumstances are to her own past.

Making rounds to homes one wet spring morning, veterinarian Dr. Kate Turner rescues a family's hamster from a vacuum cleaner then visits an estate whose owners breed champion Cavalier King Charles spaniels. Instead of sharing traditional tea with the couple, she confronts a bloody scene of bodies and 27 blue-ribbon dogs running wild. Police initially suspect a murder-suicide, but when Dr. Kate proves the famous best-in-show champion is missing, a darker reality intrudes.

Alex Wolfe is an elite agent with the CIA. He has a proven track record of stopping international bioweapons programs. Skylar Cruz is a skilled Marine whose battlefield injury sidelined her from serving her country. When they’re recruited for a brand-new covert-op group, Vector, combating biological and chemical weapons threats, their first mission had better be a success. Because it’s not just their careers at stake. It’s all of humanity.

The onset of summer brings predictably steamy weather to the Body Farm, Dr. Bill Brockton's human-decomposition research facility at the University of Tennessee. But Brockton's about to get more heat than he's bargained for when Angie St. Claire, a forensic analyst with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, asks him to help prove that her sister's death was not suicide, but murder. Brockton's quick consulting trip takes a long, harrowing detour when bones begin turning up amid the pines and live oaks of the Florida panhandle.

Psychologist Alan Gregory is living through a season of discontent. With a new daughter, a wonderful wife, and a prospering career, he has little to complain about but lots of regrets: past cases that won't let him go, patients who don't get better, and a growing unease with keeping secrets. But Gregory has two new patients who will drag him out of his introspection and dare him to enter a storm of injustice and revenge.

What was supposed to be an Italian vacation for forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver and his wife turns into a busman's holiday when their hosts' only child goes missing - and nearby construction workers unearth human bones. The family awaits Oliver's conclusions with both dread and cautious hope. But along the way, he'll expose some extraordinary deceptions that lay bare the long-hidden secrets at the dark heart of a highborn family.

When Dr. Tom More (of Love in the Ruins) is released on parole from state prison, he returns to Feliciana, Louisiana, the parish where he was born and bred, and where he practiced psychiatry before his arrest. Upon arriving, he notices something strange in almost everyone around him: unusual sexual behavior in women patients, a bizarre loss of inhibition, a lack of complexity in speech - even his own wife’s extraordinary success at bridge tournaments, during which her mind seems to function like a computer.

Trapped in the shower by her undead husband, Morgan prays for rescue but quickly realizes she's on her own. She escapes, only to find that the horror has spread and now threatens everything she holds dear. With each passing moment, death becomes more certain. Logan returns to his childhood home and teams up with Max, an army deserter racing against the clock to save his family. When the infection outruns them, they face the real possibility that everyone they know is already dead. Or worse, undead.

Gwen Marcey has done a good job keeping the pain of her past boxed up. But as she investigates the case of a missing child in Lapwai, Idaho, details keep surfacing that are eerily similar to her childhood traumas. She doesn't believe in coincidences. So what's going on here? No one knows more about the impact of the past than the Nez Perce people of Lapwai. Gwen finds herself an unwelcome visitor to some, making her investigation even more difficult. The questions keep piling up, but answers are slow in coming - and the clock is ticking for a missing little girl.

Eleri and Donovan are back! Nightshade’s newest agents are in LA to bring down a burgeoning terrorist cell. To make matters worse, it's not just one terrorist cell, it's two. Or is it three? There is little to go on, only links between missing army munitions and a veteran named Cooper Rollins. On the surface the cells seem unrelated, each with separate perpetrators and different motives. But they are all linked by Rollins and the very disturbing passcode: “Fracture Five”.

Dr. Emma Steele is baffled when she finds herself dressed in mental health blues, tied to a stretcher, in her own ER. She was hunting for a killer. She found him. Just as he found her. He planted evidence accusing her of his crimes. She’s innocent, so she’ll be free soon. She has friends who’ll help. Twice wrong. Things can’t get any worse. They do.

So many secrets in Nespodee Springs…the biggest is revealed when Rhys and Daley track down the second half of the Pendry film and learn the secrets of the clan’s Tesla tower and the catastrophic details of the plan to bring the Visitors back to Earth. But the insidious malady known as “the horrors” remains a mystery, claiming more and more victims every day.

Alexa Glock is at a crossroads—personally and professionally. As an American working and living in New Zealand, she's come to love the place with its rugged beauty and warm, friendly people. But there's still so much she wants to learn in her field of forensic odontology, and her professional crush in Scotland has just interviewed her for a position at the University of Edinburgh. To complicate matters, she learns that the man who professes to love her had been unfaithful to his ex-wife.

Joe Rush is at an Amazon gold rush to study new forms of malaria when his best friend and partner, Eddie Nakamura, disappears. Learning that many of the sick miners have also vanished, Rush begins a search for Eddie that takes him into the heart of darkness - where he must battle for his life and where he discovers a secret that may change the world.

When the Black Death enters England through the port in Dorsetshire in June 1348, no one knows what manner of sickness it is - or how it spreads and kills so quickly. The Church cites God as the cause, and fear grips the people as they come to believe that the plague is a punishment for wickedness. But Lady Anne of Develish has her own ideas. Educated by nuns, Anne is a rarity among women, being both literate and knowledgeable. With her brutal husband absent from the manor when news of this pestilence reaches her, she looks for more sensible ways to protect her people than confession.

There is no such thing as an ending, just a new beginning. Throughout the millennia, extinction has been the norm and survival, the exception. When faced with the hour of departure, will mankind fight to survive? Not only was there a patient zero, there was also a last patient.

Across London, hospital patients are dying - in shockingly unnatural circumstances. A sadistic young woman is targeting them as they lie helpless in their beds, eking out every last sensation of pain as their lives ebb to an excruciating close. The killer is a sadist, but careful too, so the police bring in forensic psychologist Dr. Alex Madison to track down what is clearly an extraordinary and damaged mind.

Teenager Luke Mullen was last seen getting into a car with an older woman. No one can understand why he has disappeared. His father - a former police officer - knows all too well that the longer he is missing, the more likely he is to turn up dead. Then Luke's parents receive an anonymous video. It shows their son, eyes wide with terror, as a man advances towards him holding a syringe. DI Tom Thorne recognises a psychopath when he sees one. And the scene on the tape chills him to the bone - he knows that a child's life hangs in the balance and that every minute counts.

When Hurricane Katrina strikes New Orleans, forensic entomologist Nick Polchak signs up to help with the recovery effort. He is known as the Bug Man for his knowledge of insects and what they can reveal about the dead. The government's mandate is clear—rescue the living first, recover the dead later. But something is very wrong in the toxic soup-bowl of post-Katrina New Orleans. Someone is using the cover of disaster to kill . . . hiding the victims of murder in the same watery grave as the victims of Katrina.