When someone rigs a cage full of skunks in the choir loft of the New Life Baptist Church, Meg Langslow must stop holiday pranksters from destroying the annual pre-Christmas concert, but when murder enters the picture, Meg must save Christmas from a vengeful killer.

"A young couple find themselves haunted by a string of gruesome murders committed along an old deserted road in this terrifying new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Cold Cases. July 1995. April and Eddie have taken a wrong turn. They're looking for the small resort town where they plan to spend their honeymoon. When they spot what appears to be a lone hitchhiker along the deserted road, they stop to help. But not long...

"Mercenary by name and by nature, Carson is a Lakota Sioux who stays to himself and never keeps women around long enough for anything emotional to develop. But working with his friend Cash Grier on a complex murder investigation provides Carson with another kind of fun--shocking Cash's sweet but traditional secretary, Carlie Blair, with tales of his latest conquests. Then Carlie lands in deep trouble. She saw something she shouldn't have, and now...

"The most common triggers for homicide are fear, rage, revenge, money, lust, and, more rarely, sheer madness. This isn't an exact science, of course. Any given murder can have multiple triggers. Sex and revenge seem to be common partners in crime. Rage, money, and revenge make for a dangerous trifecta of triggers, as well. This book offers my memories of homicide cases that I investigated or oversaw. In each case, I examine the trigger that led to...

"Utterly original and compulsively readable, a detective story about a woman who uses her uncanny ability to analyze words and speech patterns to help solve crimes. Maggie Moore--tattooed, pierced, and a bit of a mess--is a word genius, able to solve any linguistic puzzle. When she's talent-scouted from the top of her forensic linguistics class and asked to analyze harrowing notes left by a stalker-turned-rapist, she's all over it. And she succeeds....

When human remains are found by a highway near London, Cassie and Sunny are called in. Dogged work leads the team to a sixteen-year-old girl who went missing on the eve of the millennium. A close-knit group of old school friends hold the key to what happened. Is one of them capable of murder? Cassie is determined to correct the mistakes made in the original investigation no matter the personal cost.

"One night during the scorching summer of 1983, a group of teenagers go camping in the forest. The evening starts like any other--they drink, they dance, they fight, they kiss. Some of them slip off into the woods in pairs, others are left jealous and heartbroken. But in the morning, the youngest in the group, Aurora, has disappeared. Her friends claim that she was safe the last time they saw her, right before she went to sleep. An exhaustive investigation...

Detective Carl Mørck has received a bottle that holds an old and decayed message written in blood. It's a cry for help from two young brothers bound in a boathouse by the sea. After floating for years, the bottle sat forgotten, unopened, on a police department windowsill, before the seal was cracked and the gruesome message, written in Danish, was analyzed. Could it be real? Who are these boys, and why weren't they reported missing? Could they still...

"Detective Manon Bradshaw is five months pregnant and has officially given up on finding romantic love. Instead, she is in hot-pursuit of the work-life balance and parked in a cold case corridor--the price she's had to pay for a transfer back to Cambridgeshire. This is fine, she tells herself. She can devote herself to bringing up her motley collection of children--the new baby, and her adopted 12-year-old son Fly Dent. He needed a fresh start--he...

Hazel DeFord is a woman haunted by her past. While berry picking in a blackberry thicket in 1943, ten-year old Hazel momentarily turns her back on her three-year old sister Maggie and the young girl disappears. Almost seventy years later, the mystery remains unsolved, and the secret guilt Hazel carries has alienated her from her daughter Diane, who can’t understand her mother’s overprotectiveness and near paranoia. While Diane resents her mother’s...