Serial Killer Mystery Fiction

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged for a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims’ families, but its impact travels even further: into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes. Highway Thirteen, Fiona McFarlane’s newest collection, takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more.

Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at the campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. Both have good reasons for wanting to get away. For Charlie, it’s guilt and grief over the shocking murder of her best friend, who became the third victim of the man known as the Campus Killer. For Josh, it’s to help care for his sick father - or so he says.

The presumption was murder. Everyone assumed they knew the killer… …but what if they were wrong about the crime? It was the most beautiful house on the lake. When a girl’s remains are found on the property, Bill Miller seems to know something. For ten years, there had been whispers about what happened to the girl. What was he hiding? Her case wasn’t Luca’s priority. Between his sick wife and The Park Shore Murder, his plate was full. The press was all over it and he needed to find out who murdered the innocent woman relaxing in her backyard. Worth millions, but without any known ...

In 1865 Boston, the members of the Dante Club, poets and Harvard professors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J. T. Fields, are finishing America's first translation of The Divine Comedy and preparing to unveil Dante's remarkable visions to the New World.

FBI agent Alex Cross is on vacation with his family at Disneyland when he gets a call from the Director. A well-known actress was shot outside her home in Beverly Hills. Shortly afterward, an editor for the Los Angeles Times receives an e-mail describing the murder in vivid detail.

Mickie Lambert creates “digital scrapbooks” for clients, ensuring that precious souvenirs aren’t forgotten or lost. When her latest client, Nadia Denham, a curio shop owner, dies from an apparent suicide, Mickie honors the old woman’s last wish and begins curating her peculiar objets d’art. A music box, a hair clip, a key chain - twelve mementos in all that must have meant so much to Nadia. But these tokens mean a lot to someone else, too. Mickie has been receiving threatening messages to leave Nadia’s past alone.

Gwen Turner has made a bloody mess of her life. She recently broke up with the best man she’s ever known for reasons even she can’t admit to herself and quit a lucrative job to open her own coffee shop. To top it all off, her best friend is getting married and leaving her behind in singlehood.

When the body of a barista is found in the once-pristine Alaskan snow, Anchorage homicide detective DeHavilland Beans is gutted to recognize the young woman, Jolene. He’d bought coffee from her every morning and knew her as a bright college student working her way through school. Devastated by the murder and by the life cut short, Beans vows to find the killer. Since scavengers damaged the body, obtaining any usable evidence is impossible, even with the assistance of wildlife expert Raisa Ingalls, Beans’s ex. When the body of another woman is found, a serial killer is suspected.

He performs his profane ceremony in a wooded Minneapolis park, anointing his victims, then setting the bodies ablaze. He has already claimed three lives, and he won't stop there. Only this time there is a witness. But she isn't talking. Enter Kate Conlan, former FBI agent turned victim/witness advocate. Not even she can tell if the reluctant witness is a potential victim or something more troubling still.

It is a society that is, officially, a paradise. Superior to the decadent West, Stalin's Soviet Union is a haven for its citizens, providing for all of their needs: education, health care, security. In exchange, all that is required is their hard work, and their loyalty and faith to the Soviet State. But now a murderer is on the loose.

Psychologist Arles Shepherd treats troubled children, struggling with each case to recover from her own traumatic past, much of which she’s lost to the shadows of memory. Having just set up a new kind of treatment center in the remote Adirondack wilderness, Arles longs to heal one patient in particular: a ten-year-old boy who has never spoken a word—or so his mother, Louise, believes.

It is 1985. Detective Inspector Mungo ‘Bob’ Willis is being forced out of Avon and Somerset Police on medical grounds. His career is in tatters, his body broken, his mind shattered, and his partner—DS Lizzie Harper—dead in a sting operation gone wrong. Their last case is closed, but Bob is convinced an innocent man has been framed, leaving a serial killer cruising the A303 with impunity, free to target lone women who have broken down by the roadside late at night.

He appears in the darkness like a ghost, made of shadows and fear - the Midnight Man. He comes for the parents but leaves the children alive, tiny witnesses to unspeakable horror. The bedroom communities of Los Angeles are gripped with dread, and the attacks are escalating. Still reeling from her best friend's close call in a bombing six months ago, FBI behavioral analyst Caitlin Hendrix has come to Los Angeles to assist in the Midnight Man investigation and do what she does best - hunt a serial killer.

Nine strangers receive a list with their names on it in the mail. Nothing else, just a list of names on a single sheet of paper. None of the nine people know or have ever met the others on the list. They dismiss it as junk mail, a fluke—until very, very bad things begin happening to people on the list. First, a well-liked old man is drowned on a beach in the small town of Kennewick, Maine. Then, a father is shot in the back while running through his quiet neighborhood in suburban Massachusetts. A frightening pattern is emerging, but what do these nine people have in common?

To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the sole ambition of bringing his “art” to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires, and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his “art” to limits even Compton hadn’t previously imagined.

When new victims of the still-at-large serial killer known as the Red Reaper start to appear in London, DCI Declan Walsh and his team are placed back on the case—but everything isn't what it seems. For a start, the deaths are different, and the calling card is new. It could be a copycat, apart from one thing... They know what Declan did to the real Red Reaper a year earlier. Something only Declan and the closest members of his team keep secret. Is this the real Reaper, back to gain revenge on Declan and his family—or is this a protégé, staking his own claim to the serial killer name?

Capri Sanzio knows that when you give serial killer walking tours for a living, unexpected situations are more common than San Francisco's famous fog. So, when one of her guests claims to see a woman being attacked during a tour, Capri remains unphased. The police search the apartment in question and find no evidence of anything amiss, so they chalk it up to a false report from a true crime fanatic looking to be a part of a case. And Capri thinks they might be right, since lately her tours have been attracting even more obsessives than usual.

Texas Ranger Rory Yates protects his home state wearing a five-pointed silver badge and carrying a Sig Sauer. When a native woman disappears on the summer solstice, clues point to a cold case. Yates, a quick-draw champion, partners with expert archer Ava Cruz of the Tigua Tribal police. The investigation leads to the edges of Texas’s most unforgiving landscape, where the officers take dead aim with every shot in their arsenals.

What if Sean Courtland’s old Chevy truck had broken down somewhere else? What if he’d never met Denise Givens, a waitress at a local tavern in the Wisconsin town where he lands? Or Dan Young, another young man like Sean drifting through, having fled Minnesota for reasons unknown? Instead, together Sean and Dan pick up carpentry and plumbing work for an old man named Marion Devereaux, and Sean gets drawn into the lives of Denise and her father—and of the townspeople, all haunted by the disappearance of three young boys decades ago, in the 1970s.

Weeks before NYPD Detective Michael Bennett is to marry his longtime love, Mary Catherine, an assassin announces his presence in the city with a string of grisly murders. Each victim is a young woman. And each has been killed in a manner as precise as it was gruesome. Tasked with working alongside the FBI, Bennett and his gung-ho new partner uncover multiple cold-case homicides across the country that fit the same distinctive pattern—proving the perpetrator they seek is as experienced at ending lives as he is at evading detection.