Thriller Fiction

Nellie Cavendish has very good reasons to seek out her roots-and not only because she has no memory of her mother, and hardly knew the father who left her upbringing to paid caregivers. In the eight years since her 21st birthday, very odd things have begun to happen. Crows gather near her wherever she goes, electronics short out when she touches them, and when she's upset, really upset, it storms. At first, she chalked up the unusual happenings to coincidence, but that explanation doesn't begin to cover the vivid nightmares that torment her.

This novel by Carl Hiaasen, author of Tourist Season and Native Tongue, begins as most thrillers do, with a killing. But this is no everyday, hum-drum, garden variety killing. Our hero, Nick Stranahan, a 42-year-old private investigator who has killed five men and been married five times, skewers his attacker's aorta with the razor-sharp bill of a stuffed marlin.

For eight strangers in a Los Angeles hostel, even the other side of the world isn’t far enough. The craving for a new identity and the desire to start again is something they have in common. But they discover that it doesn't matter where you are or who you are - if you can't lay the past to rest, fate and coincidence have a way of catching up with you.

The world is on the brink of crisis. The Cold War is playing out once more on the global stage. And governments will do whatever it takes to stay at the top. To those who don't really know her, Kate Henderson's life must seem perfectly ordinary. But she is in fact a senior MI6 officer, who right now is nursing the political equivalent of a nuclear bomb. Kate's most recent mission has yielded the startling intelligence that the British Prime Minister has cancer - and that one of the leading candidates to replace him may be a Russian agent of influence.

Silo 42 has a secret. There are 50 Silos in total. None know the others exist. They live in isolation, under the illusion they are the only humans still alive on Earth, protected by their sophisticated underground micro-universe for centuries, while they wait for the harsh outside conditions and aftermath of the Great War to subside. However, life in Silo 42 is more sustainable than the others. Energy resources have been updated. Creativity, freedom, and transparency have created the conditions for its people to thrive. All positive indicators for Silo health. But that was never the true ...

As the hurricane batters the house and the waters rise, Callum is found hanging from an ancient oak, murdered in the same way as the notorious villain in his most popular book. Cut off from the outside world, the guests soon realize that the murderer might strike again, and everyone at the plantation could either be the next victim or the killer.

The town of Jewel Bay, Montana - known as a Food Lovers' Village - is obsessed with homegrown and homemade Montana fare. So when Erin Murphy takes over her family's century-old general store, she turns it into a boutique market filled with local delicacies. But Erin's freshly booming business might go rotten when a former employee turns up dead.

Until now, Odessa Jones's inherited ability to read emotions and foretell danger has protected her. But second sight didn't warn her she would soon be a widow - and about to lose her home and the catering business she's worked so hard to build. The only things keeping Dessa going are her love for baking and her sometimes-mellow cat, Juniper. Unfortunately, putting her life back together means taking a gig at an all-kinds-of-shady real estate firm run by volatile owner Charlie Risko. Until Charlie is brutally killed - and Dessa's bullied coworker is arrested for murder.

Across the world, the United States recalls troops to combat civil unrest after the biggest economic meltdown in history. Marine Sergeant Ronaldo Salvatore’s platoon comes home to a powder keg that could ignite a civil war. While some see the coming collapse as the end, others see opportunity. Fleeing Naples after rival crime lords decimated his family, Don Antonio Moretti settles in Los Angeles to rebuild his criminal empire. But he is far from alone in his ambitions.

A woman is found naked, badly beaten and barely alive in the New Mexico mountains. The shocking discovery plunges Albuquerque Detective Alyssa Wyatt into a case that will test her to the limit. It appears that Callie McCormick is the latest plaything of a shadowy psychopath that leaves a long shadow on the streets of New Mexico - an individual linked to a string of deaths but leaving no evidence. But when Alyssa makes a breakthrough that just might reveal the killer, she unknowingly puts herself in the crosshairs of a brutal maniac - one with an old score to settle.

Three apparently unrelated art thefts in three separate cities have more in common than anyone imagines. As a renowned art investigator, a police inspector, and a Scotland Yard inspector take up their separate investigations, a trail of bizarre clues and intellectual puzzles reveals forgeries, over-paintings, and double-crosses in an ever-deepening conspiracy.

In the peace and tranquility of the woods at Pinehills on a Saturday afternoon, a mobile phone begins to ring. The phone belongs to DC Smith, and it isn't unusual that the call is from Kings Lake Central police station; what is unusual is the fact that he seems to be the subject of an investigation rather than taking part in one. What can the links be between a prisoner's violent death in another county, the disappearance of two teenagers, and the highest profile case in Kings Lake for many years?

Sharing lodging in the sleepy English village of Walmsley Parva has eased some of the financial strain on the two old school chums, but money is still tight in these years following the Great War. So when the local vicar - and pigeon-racing club president - approaches them with a private inquiry opportunity, the ladies accept. There's been a spot of bother: The treasurer has absconded with the club's funds and several prized birds. But when they visit the man's loft, they find their elusive quarry lying in white feathers and a pool of crimson blood - the only witnesses cooing mournfully.

Jonathan Stride and Serena Dial are both investigating high-profile murders in Las Vegas. A celebrity is assassinated during a fling with a prostitute, and a young boy is killed in a brutal hit-and-run incident. When the cases converge, Jonathan and Serena find themselves racing the clock against a determined serial killer and searching for a connection to the unsolved murder of a showgirl years earlier.

In Friends in High Places, Commissario Guido Brunetti is visited by a young bureaucrat investigating the lack of approval for the construction of Brunetti's apartment years before. What began as a red-tape headache ends in murder when the bureaucrat is later found dead after a mysterious fall from a scaffold. Brunetti starts an investigation that will take him into the unfamiliar and dangerous areas of drug abuse and loan-sharking, and will reveal, once again, what a difference it makes in Venice to have friends in high places.

A taut thriller about two rural Minnesota towns locked in a deadly feud - and a teenage girl caught in the crossfire. In affluent Barron, a powerful and secretive scientific research corporation enriches its residents, while downriver in blue-collar St. Croix, victims of that company’s carcinogenic waste struggle to survive. The bad blood between the communities escalates into open warfare when the beautiful Ashlynn, daughter of the corporation’s president, is found shot dead - and a St. Croix girl, Olivia Hawk, is accused of the crime.

Meet the Banks sisters - Simone, Bunny, Tallhya, and Ginger. They feel like they are finally in the clear in connection with the recent bank robberies - until their mother shows up demanding her share at gunpoint. She threatens to snitch them out if they don't come correct. The situation becomes a bloody mess, and now two sisters must band together to cover up the unthinkable actions of one of their own. As if that isn't enough, Pastor Cassius Street hits them with another major blow.

In the summer after his junior year of high school, Jonathan Stride fell in love with Cindy Starr, the girl who would become his wife. But that same summer, Cindy's sister, Laura, was brutally murdered. The police suspected a vagrant of committing the crime, but Stride and Cindy were both convinced that the killer was someone close to Laura. Thirty years later, Laura's best friend, Tish Verdure, returns to Duluth to write a book about Laura's death.

It was a dream come true. Susan loved all things Scottish. So, when the opportunity presented itself, there was no question in her mind that she would go on the archaeological dig in the Highlands.

A drop, in spook parlance, is the passing on of secret information. It's also what happens just before you hit the ground. Old spooks carry the memory of tradecraft in their bones, and when Solomon Dortmund sees an envelope being passed from one pair of hands to another in a Marylebone cafe, he knows he's witnessed more than an innocent encounter. But in relaying his suspicions to John Bachelor, who babysits retired spies like Solly for MI5, he sets in motion a train of events that will alter lives.