Serial Killer Thrillers Fiction

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.

FBI Special Agent Nicky Lyons is stunned when a cassette tape arrives in the mail, blasting a killer’s voice, taunting her to stop him from taking his next victim. In this killer’s diabolical game of cat and mouse, Nicky must ask herself if she one step ahead of him, or a useful pawn in his game?

As bogus corruption charges loom over her, DS Kat Ballantyne finds herself deskbound and stuck with cold cases. Her hated boss, DI Carver, has given her just one week to explain how £50,000 found its way into her bank account. If she can’t, she’ll be lucky to have a desk at all. Then a close friend calls her from a murder scene, claiming to have strangled a local gangster’s wife. Kat has no choice but to disobey orders and investigate. Despite overwhelming forensic evidence supporting her friend’s confession, something still doesn’t add up…

At 26, Dahlia Lighthouse is haunted by her upbringing. Raised in a secluded island mansion deep in the woods and kept isolated by her true crime-obsessed parents, she is unable to move beyond the disappearance of her twin brother, Andy, when they were 16. After several years away and following her father’s death, Dahlia returns to the house, where the family makes a gruesome discovery: buried in their father’s plot is another body—Andy’s, his skull split open with an ax.

Victims of a new serial killer are found with strings, tied up to look like puppets. What is the killer hinting at? Who will he strike next? But time is running out, and Maya’s sister’s life is on the line. Can she solve the case in time? Or has she finally met her match?

After continuous complaints that a poaching ring is running rampant in Northeastern Washington, Fish and Wildlife police officer Luke McCain is assigned to go undercover to infiltrate the gang. Just as Luke and his fellow officers move to finally catch the poachers red-handed, one of the crooks flees into the mountains and Luke has to hunt him down. Days later, a serial killer suspected of killing dozens of women around the Northwest escapes from custody when a Department of Corrections van crashes in the rugged North Cascades.

Adam Austin hasn't spoken to his brother in years. When they were teenagers, their sister was abducted and murdered, and their devastated family never recovered. Now Adam keeps to himself, scraping by as a bail bondsman. Kent Austin is the beloved coach of the local high school football team, a religious man and hero in the community. After years of near misses, Just before playoffs begin, the town and the team are thrown into shock when horrifically, impossibly, another teenage girl is found murdered.

When a popular mystery novelist dies suspiciously, his writing partner must untangle the author’s connection to a serial killer in award-winning John Copenhaver’s new novel set in 1950s McCarthy-era Washington, DC.

What happens when, on a perfectly ordinary evening, all the things you believed in and took for granted are turned upside down? When her husband of more than 20 years is away on one of his business trips, Darcy Anderson looks for batteries in the garage. Her toe knocks up against a box under a worktable and she discovers the stranger inside her husband. It’s a horrifying discovery, rendered with bristling intensity, and it definitively ends a good marriage.

I thought the worst part of a blackout was waking up in a strange place. Turns out waking up next to a dead woman is far worse… Memory lapses have plagued PI Dean Steele since childhood. This time when he opens his eyes, there's a woman lying nearby. A woman he doesn't recognize. As Dean tries to determine how he ended up in the woods next to a dead body, he attempts to piece together the things he remembers. But the situation takes a bewildering turn when the dead woman’s body disappears from the scene. Someone doesn't want Dean uncovering secrets, and things get even more heated when ...

Forty-two passengers. One of them is a serial killer. When Holly finds a phone with pictures of murdered women on it on the bus to Miami, she realizes that one of the passengers is a serial killer. A game of cat and mouse begins after the owner of the cell sends Holly a message saying that he wants his phone back. Holly's shocked to find out that the killer knows her name and address. She races against time as she and her fellow passenger Nick Hayden try to figure out the identity of the owner of the phone. When he murders a young woman during one of the stops, Holly fears he'll kill her ...

Three cases - two missing persons and one apparent suicide - are pushing PI Jessie Cole and crime reporter Ben Morrison closer to the edge.

When five Texas women disappear without trace, each on Saturday nights, the local authorities call in the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit. The newest member of this elite group of criminal profilers, Caitlin Hendrix, is all too familiar with hunting society's most depraved and twisted criminals. She suspects that the women were taken by a highly confident killer who convinces victims to lower their guard so he can gain power over them. But there's no evidence that any of the victims are dead - until a dog drags home a bloody strip of fabric torn from a white baby doll nightgown.

A serial killer is trolling a midwestern suburb. His tools: a hammer, a screwdriver, floral wire, a kitchen knife and, to complete his errand, a Russian nesting doll left behind as a calling card. From one grisly crime scene to the next, Detective Ernest Neville and his Russian Doll Killer task force follow. With few leads and his career on the line, Neville is driven to desperate measures to get to the core of this diabolical puzzle. Layer by layer, he’s getting closer to the final piece.

Kate O'Brien's quiet life in small-town Shelter Cove, Arkansas is shaken when her past suddenly comes roaring back to life. Four years ago, she and her twin sister were attacked by an elusive serial killer. Only Kate survived, and she's been in witness protection ever since. When new evidence arises to suggest the convicted man wasn't the murderer, she's subpoenaed to testify in the new trial. Afraid to go back into that world, Kate only agrees if Tony DeLuca, the deputy marshal who protected her during the original trial, escorts her to St. Louis.

Leo Stone is a ruthless killer or the victim of a miscarriage of justice. A year ago, he was convicted of the murder of two women and sentenced to life in prison. But now he's free, and according to him, he's innocent. DS Maeve Kerrigan and DI Josh Derwent are determined to put Stone back behind bars where he belongs, but the more Maeve finds out, the less convinced she is of his guilt. Then another woman disappears in similar circumstances. Is there a copycat killer, or have they been wrong about Stone from the start?

Six female undergrads at an elite university vanish. The media descends. The families demand action. And as Special Agent Nina Guerrera follows clue by chilling clue, she realizes she’s tracking the most cunning predator of her career. The case takes a turn for the worse, and the bizarre, when several victims are found perfectly preserved in an underground chamber of an abandoned mine. No signs of violence, no hint of how they died. Just more evidence that the killer is cruel, calculating, and a master of mind control.

Forty-eight hours until Christmas, Jessica Kane wakes up with blurred vision, ears ringing, and in excruciating pain. A gash in her head and blood running down her face, the last thing she remembers is going for a run and something or someone hitting her in the head. It doesn't take her long to realize she is trapped in an unknown, deserted town with five other strangers who share similar stories of being attacked and stranded there. Unsure why and how they got there, she knows one thing for certain, she has to find a way out.

A little more than a year after the Fixer killings, Detective Mort Grant of the Seattle PD once again has his hands full. In the last four months, seven men have been murdered in seedy pay-by-the-hour motels: first strangled, then tied with rope and set on a bed of crushed mothballs, with a red lipstick kiss planted on their foreheads. Speculation abounds that the killer is a prostitute who's turning her tricks into dead men. The press has taken to calling her Trixie.

When three bodies turn up in a landfill outside of Philadelphia, FBI profiler Violet Darger heads to Pennsylvania to investigate. Right away there's a major complication. The emaciated corpses appear to have been starved to death. Darger arrives in time for the autopsies. As she watches the withered bodies laid out on the stainless steel slabs of the morgue, their faces crusted with sandy soil, skin pulled taut around knobby cheekbones, she thinks: what kind of a person could carry out such harsh acts?