Latest Reviews
A strange voice from inside the woods, repeating a child’s counting rhyme. A body discovered in the water. Thirty years later, a woman begins receiving a string of anonymous text messages, repeating that same rhyme. Then she disappears. On Valentine’s Day, detectives Naia Thulin and Mark Hess are searching to find the missing woman. But when they uncover links to a decades-old cold case, their investigation takes a terrifying turn. A violent killer is on the loose. Can Hess and Thulin catch them before they strike again?
Maggie Wise will take your eyes. When Malcolm was growing up, the local kids made up that chant about his mother, claiming she was a witch. He and his siblings did their best to ignore it. Now, Maggie is dying, and those same siblings have left Malcolm and his sister-in-law, Violet, to hold a vigil at her bedside. A dark figure waits and watches from beneath the willow tree across the street. Hundreds of miles away, an ancient evil stirs in its burrow under a farmer’s cornfield. Across the country, other buried things begin to dream in anticipation of Maggie’s demise. On her deathbed, the old woman elicits a promise from Malcolm: When she dies, he and Violet must return her body to her birthplace. From the moment she takes her last breath, there are forces trying to stop Malcolm from fulfilling that promise.
When Judith Stanley shares the photos she has taken with Paul Sorenson, her new photography instructor, she's unprepared to hear his astonished praise. She has an uncanny eye, he says, and should consider publication. He could help. Except Judith has no interest in sharing her work. Still, emboldened by Paul’s encouragement, she ventures out beyond her quiet neighborhood to the city in search of increasingly striking images. When she starts to notice the dark shape of a man in the corner of her self-portraits, Judith is certain he's an attacker from her past. Perhaps it would appease the man if she were to put her camera down and give up her private passion. But she can't. Until one night when the man finally emerges from the shadows, and Judith’s story suddenly and irrevocably becomes his own.
It’s the summer of 1967, and the counterculture revolution is in full swing in San Francisco. Winnie Hartley is determined to use poetry to capture the ever-shifting world around her. Meanwhile, Winnie’s sister, Miranda, throws herself into running the family business, Hartley Vineyard. But change is in the air, and each sister will make choices that set their lives hurtling down paths neither would have imagined. Fifty years later, Dawn Hartley stays as far as possible from her family’s famous vineyard, until a work assignment requires her to research the bestselling Vineland novels penned by a famously anonymous author. Determined to discover the identity of this mysterious writer, Dawn embarks on a soul-searching journey to uncover her family’s secrets, even as she’s keeping a big one of her own.
Teenage best friends Jackie and Kayla can sell anything. Alongside their fathers, they work at a pawn shop in Cherry Beach, Florida, handling everything from luxury jewelry to chainsaws and more. When the girls learn that Kayla’s family can’t afford a private school opportunity that Jackie’s can, Jackie becomes distraught about losing her best friend. With their sharp minds but youthful lack of foresight, they scheme a way to embezzle money from the pawn shop. As the hot Florida summer unfolds, the girls steal thousands of dollars from the shop. But when their heist is discovered, Jackie is faced with a situation that no amount of negotiating or charisma can fix.
People are “popping.” Disappearing, one by one, into thin air. In a world where prospects for survival are increasingly grim, hopelessness prevails, political rifts widen, and doomsday predictions flourish. Harvey Ellis works the night shift for the Bureau of Depopulation Affairs, an ad hoc federal agency meant to contain and catalog the crisis. His job is to investigate claims of Absence, and, if validated, issue a standard government stipend to boost morale. Still recovering from losses of his own, Harvey is content in his routine --- until his life is shaken by an unexpected assignment from the central office. A woman long thought Absent has reappeared in her hometown of Dawnville, Kansas, claiming she’s been to the other side and back. But is her wild and irresistible account true?
Emma, a struggling American artist in Paris, meets Stella Swanson, the widow of one of the most notorious art dealers in the business. She becomes both a player and a pawn in a family battle to protect their empire and conceal its crimes. In the late 1800s, young widow Jo van Gogh inherits hundreds of paintings from her brother-in-law, Vincent, that the art world deems worthless. Determined to prove their genius, she becomes consumed by Vincent’s legacy. As her devotion deepens, a vanished painting and a thwarted love affair leave her unsure who she can trust and how much of herself she’s willing to lose in the process. The lives of these two women converge as Emma uncovers the Swanson family’s darkest secrets and agrees to mastermind a daring heist inside the Musée d’Orsay.
For more than three decades, Paul Skalnik roamed the Gulf Coast lying about who he was. He passed himself off as a fighter pilot, a high-rolling oilman, a criminal defense attorney, an undercover agent, and a terminal cancer patient. In these guises, he married nine women --- some at the same time. When Skalnik got caught, he would run a different con. Locked up with other men awaiting trial, he claimed they confessed their crimes to him. In 1985, Jim Dailey, a down-on-his-luck Vietnam veteran, was implicated in the murder of a 14-year-old girl and landed in the Pinellas County Jail with Skalnik. No forensic evidence or motive linked Dailey to the killing, but Skalnik’s account of his "confession" helped put Dailey on death row. More than three decades later, another man took responsibility for the killing, but Skalnik refused to recant his testimony.
Lou Campanelli runs a rehab center. When one of his patients, a homeless veteran, is charged with first-degree murder, he needs his old friend, defense lawyer Andy Carpenter, to help. The man whom Jason Maddox is accused of stabbing to death is none other than billionaire Paul Vincent, an eccentric businessman and inventor. Bickert dedicated a great portion of his life to philanthropy, with a soft spot for dog-related causes. This led him to befriend Jason, a physicist and war hero, whose life fell apart to the point where he ended up on the streets with his dog, just trying to survive. But why would Jason possibly have wanted to kill him? Once again, Andy is enmeshed in a puzzling, twisty case. But in order to reunite a man and his dog, Andy will have to untangle it all.
For the first time in print comes a collection of five short stories in Linda Castillo’s Edgar Award-winning Kate Burkholder series: “The Pact,” “Disappeared,” “Blood Moon,” “Hallowed Ground” and “Dark Storm Rising.” In “Dark Path,” a brand-new story, an Amish couple disappears while en route to town. They recently had been threatened by their granddaughter’s troubled boyfriend --- and heavy weather is moving in. Kate rushes toward their remote farm, but a dog on the road causes her to crash into a ravine, where she discovers a shattered buggy. Together, she and her new canine friend must find the couple before it's too late.
