Absalom “Abbie” Kearney grew up an outsider in her own hometown. Even being the adopted daughter of a revered cop couldn’t keep Abbie’s troubled past from making her a misfit in the working-class Irish American enclave of South Buffalo. And now, despite a Harvard degree and a police detective’s badge, she still struggles to earn the respect and trust of those she’s sworn to protect. But all that may change, once the killing starts.

Northern Ireland, spring 1981. Hunger strikes, riots, power cuts, a homophobic serial killer with a penchant for opera, and a young woman’s suicide that may yet turn out to be murder: on the surface, the events are unconnected, but then things—and people—aren’t always what they seem. Detective Sergeant Duffy is the man tasked with trying to get to the bottom of it all. It’s no easy job—especially when it turns out that one of the victims was involved in the IRA but was last seen discussing business with someone from the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force.

Lieutenant Abby Mullen is no stranger to crisis. As the hostage negotiation instructor for the NYPD, she deals with worst-case scenarios every day. Nothing fazes her anymore. That all changes when she gets a call from Eden Fletcher, a fellow survivor of the infamous Wilcox cult. The two haven’t spoken since the night of a tragic, fiery massacre, when their paths diverged. But now Eden needs Abby’s help: someone has kidnapped her son and is demanding a $5 million ransom. As Abby throws herself into the case, she can’t help but wonder why the kidnapper has targeted Eden.

When a 15-year-old girl fails to make it home after school, DI Heather Filson believes she’s dealing with just another teenage runaway. The girl’s grandfather, a notorious Glasgow gangster, disagrees. Convinced one of his underworld enemies has grabbed her, he’s prepared to bathe the city in blood in order to bring his princess home.

Was the biggest case of his career the worst mistake he ever made? Ten years ago, DCI Jack Logan stopped the serial child-killer dubbed "Mister Whisper", earning himself a commendation, a drinking problem, and a broken marriage in the process...When another child disappears a hundred miles north in the Highlands, Jack is sent to lead the investigation and bring the boy home. But as similarities between the two cases grow, could it be that Jack caught the wrong man all those years ago?

After the devastating loss of her husband in Iraq, Morgan Dane returns to Scarlet Falls, seeking the comfort of her hometown. Now, surrounded by family, she’s finally found peace and a promising career opportunity - until her babysitter is killed and her neighbor asks her to defend his son, Nick, who stands accused of the murder.

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, quiet Charon has had only two murders. But after years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface. Then a year to the day after Titus’s election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus’s deputies. As Titus investigates the shootings, he unearths terrible crimes.

Snow falls softly outside Molly Bradley’s home on a frigid January night. Inside, half a dozen close friends are gathered to celebrate the fortieth birthday of Molly’s psychologist husband, Jay. Candlelight gleams against dark wood, wine flows, and the house rings with laughter. Everybody loves Jay, Molly most of all. Yet next morning, Molly discovers Jay dead on the floor of his office, his throat brutally slashed.

Max Rupert has left his position as a Minneapolis homicide detective to live in solitude. Mourning the tragic death of his wife, he's also racked by guilt—he alone knows what happened to her killer. But then the former local sheriff, Lyle Voight, arrives with a desperate plea: Lyle’s daughter Sandy and his six-year-old grandson Pip have disappeared. Lyle’s certain Sandy's ex-husband Reed is behind it, but the new sheriff is refusing to investigate. When Max reluctantly looks into their disappearance, he too becomes convinced something has gone very wrong.

Investigative journalist Laura Chambers is back in her tiny hometown of Hillsborough, North Carolina, the one place she swore never to return. Fired from The Boston Globe, her career in shambles, she reluctantly takes a job with the local paper. The work is simple, unimportant, and worst of all, boring - at least until a missing girl turns up dead, the body impeccably clean, dressed to be the picture of innocence. Years earlier, 10-year-old Patty Finch left home and never made it back. But for the people of Hillsborough, Patty was just the beginning.

Keera Duggan was building a solid reputation as a Seattle prosecutor, until her romantic relationship with a senior colleague ended badly. For the competitive former chess prodigy, returning to her family’s failing criminal defense law firm to work for her father is the best shot she has. With the right moves, she hopes to restore the family’s reputation, her relationship with her father, and her career.

Tracy Crosswhite has spent 20 years questioning the facts surrounding her sister Sarah’s disappearance and the murder trial that followed. She doesn’t believe that Edmund House - a convicted rapist and the man condemned for Sarah’s murder - is the guilty party. Motivated by the opportunity to obtain real justice, Tracy became a homicide detective with the Seattle PD and dedicated her life to tracking down killers.

Flynn was only a teenager when her parents were killed in a terrible accident. Too young to lose her parents, too young to take on responsibility for her younger sister Kaiya, too young to protect Kaiya from the harshness of their new lives in the following years. Desperate to help her sister, Flynn reaches out to Willa Tomlinson, a grief counsellor renowned for helping her patients cope with profound loss. Under Willa’s influence and care, Kaiya finally seems to turn a corner, joining the climate action collective that Willa leads.

Coming from scandalous Florida treasure hunters and drug smugglers, Sloan McPherson is forging her own path, for herself and for her daughter, out from under her family’s shadow. An auxiliary officer for Lauderdale Shores PD, she’s the go-to diver for evidence recovery. Then Sloan finds a fresh kill floating in a canal - a woman whose murky history collides with Sloan’s. Their troubling ties are making Sloan less a potential witness than a suspect. And her colleagues aren’t the only ones following every move she makes. So is the killer.

Three Chicago women have been found strangled, embalmed, and posed as if still alive. Doubting the findings of the local PD’s profiler, the FBI calls on forensic psychologist Zoe Bentley to investigate. Zoe quickly gets off on the wrong foot with her new partner, Special Agent Tatum Gray. Zoe’s a hunter, intense and focused; Tatum’s a smug maverick with little respect for the rules.

He slips into their homes at night and walks silently into bedrooms where women lie sleeping, unaware of the horrors they soon will endure. The precision of the killer's methods suggests he is a deranged man of medicine, propelling the Boston newspapers and the frightened public to name him "The Surgeon". The cops' only clue rests with another surgeon, the victim of a nearly identical crime. Two years ago, Dr. Catherine Cordell fought back and killed her attacker before he could complete his assault.

When the badly decomposed body of 13-year-old Katie Pine is found, John Cardinal is vindicated. It was Cardinal who'd kept the Pine case open and Cardinal had been demoted to the burglary squad for his excessive zeal. But Katie Pine isn't the only youngster to have gone missing and Cardinal is now given the go-ahead to reopen the files on three other lost kids. When another youth is reported missing, he begins to see a pattern that screams "serial killer."

There are things in the darkness, things much worse than the tracks and abandoned pieces of equipment that trip the children up and gash at their feet and legs, things that brush silently past them, touching their faces before disappearing again....

It is three days before Christmas, and two young girls have disappeared from the local academy. This hasn't happened for 15 years, since Rouge Kendall's twin sister was murdered. The killer was found, but now Rouge, 25 and a policeman, is forced to wonder: was he really the one? Also wondering is a former classmate named Ali Cray, a forensic psychologist with scars of her own. The pattern is the same, she says: a child called out to meet a friend.

In this collection of 13 fabulously chilling stories from 13 true masters of suspense, including five New York Times best sellers and a number of Edgar Award nominees, all edited by none other than R. L. Stine, nothing is what it seems. From cannibalistic children, to an unwitting date with a vampire, to a crush on a boy who just might be a werewolf, no scary stone is left unturned. A must-have for all fans of the genre!

Rory Mackenzie is juror number seven on a high-profile murder case in her hometown of Ransom River, California. It's a place she vowed never to visit again, after leaving behind its surfeit of regret and misfortune and the specter of a troubled past that threatened to disturb the town's peaceful façade. Brilliant yet guarded, Rory has always felt like an outsider. She retreated into herself when both her career aspirations and her love affair with a childhood friend, undercover cop Seth Colder, were destroyed in a tragic accident.

Reeve LeClaire is a college student, dammit, not Daryl Wayne Flint's victim. Not anymore-not when Reeve is finally recovering a life of her own after four years of captivity. Flint is safely locked up in Olshaker Psychiatric Hospital, where he belongs. He is walking the grounds of the forensic unit, performing his strange but apparently harmless rituals. It seems that he is still suffering the effects of the head injury he suffered in the car crash that freed Reeve seven years ago. Post-concussive syndrome, they call it.

From the time he was six years old, Van Shaw was raised by his Irish immigrant grandfather, Donovan, to be a thief - to boost cars, beat security alarms, crack safes, and burglarize businesses. But at 18 Dono's namesake and protégé suddenly broke all ties to that life and the people in it. Van escaped into the military, serving as an elite army ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, after ten years of silence, Dono has asked his grandson to come home to Seattle.

Victoria McQueen has an uncanny knack for finding things: a misplaced bracelet, a missing photograph, answers to unanswerable questions. When she rides her bicycle over the rickety old covered bridge in the woods near her house, she always emerges in the places she needs to be. Vic doesn't tell anyone about her unusual ability, because she knows no one will believe her. She has trouble understanding it herself.

Someone is knocking at the door to Grace Adams' house, and he won't stop. Grace thinks she knows who it is, but when she goes to her second floor window for a look she sees a woman she doesn't recognize. The woman isn't alone for long before a man emerges from the dark of the surrounding woods, stabs her, and leaves her for dead. Trying to help, Grace goes to the woman and is shocked to find that it's her mother Leanne - a woman who abandoned her 11 years before.

Hilary and Mark Bradley are trapped in a web of suspicion. Last year, accusations of a torrid affair with a student cost Mark his teaching job and made the young couple into outcasts in their remote island town off the Lake Michigan coast. Now another teenage girl is found dead on a deserted beach... and once again, Mark faces a hostile town convinced of his guilt. Hilary Bradley is determined to prove that Mark is innocent, but she’s on a lonely, dangerous quest.

Tim Hess is a semiretired veteran cop staring at a death sentence - his own. Detective Merci Rayborn, young enough to be his daughter, is brash, impatient, and not someone from whom Hess wants to be taking orders. He certainly isn't planning on falling in love with her. Together, they must track down a psychopathic killer who's been abducting beautiful young women from the malls of Orange County.

Ellery Hathaway knows a thing or two about serial killers, but not through her police training. She's an officer in sleepy Woodbury, Massachusetts, where a bicycle theft still makes the newspapers. No one there knows she was once victim number 17 in the grisly story of serial killer Francis Michael Coben. The only victim who lived. When three people disappear from her town in three years, all around her birthday - the day she was kidnapped so long ago - Ellery fears someone knows her secret. Someone very dangerous.

Tim Rackley, a deputy U.S. marshal, watches helplessly as his daughter's killer walks free on a legal technicality. He is suddenly forced to explore his own deadly options, a quest that leads him into the welcoming fold of "The Commission".

With novels like Mystic River and Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane has dramatically altered the landscape of the crime thriller—while boldly overstepping the boundaries that have long separated mystery from literature. Now two of his sensational early novels have been combined in a single volume—two gritty and mesmerizing masterworks of suspense featuring the private eye duo of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro.