"When 13-year-old Jace Wilson witnesses a brutal murder, he's plunged into a new life, issued a false identity and hidden in a wilderness skills program for troubled teens. The plan is to get Jace off the grid while police find the two killers. The result is the start of a nightmare. The killers, known as the Blackwell Brothers, are slaughtering anyone who gets in their way in a methodical quest to reach him. Now all that remains between them and...

Kimberly Crepeaux is no good, a notorious jailhouse snitch, teen mother, and heroin addict whose petty crimes are well-known to the rural Maine community where she lives. So when she confesses to her role in the brutal murders of Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly, the daughter of a well-known local family and her sweetheart, the locals have little reason to believe her story. Not Rob Barrett, the FBI investigator and interrogator specializing in telling...

When Abby Kaplan investigates a suspicious accident that left a visiting professor dead and senior Tara Beckley a prisoner of locked-in-syndrome, she becomes a target of a mysterious hit man Tara Beckley, a senior at Hammel College in Maine, is driving a visiting professor to a conference when a horrific car accident kills the professor and leaves Tara a prisoner of locked-in syndrome. She is fully alert, but unable to move a muscle. Trapped in her...

When Arlen Wagner awakens on a train one hot Florida night and sees death's telltale sign in the eyes of his fellow passengers, he tries to warn them. Only 19-year-old Paul Brickhill believes him, and the two abandon the train, hoping to escape certain death. They continue south, but are soon stranded at the Cypress House--an isolated Gulf Coast boarding house run by the beautiful Rebecca Cady--directly in the path of an approaching hurricane. But...

"Rise the dark. These were the last words written in Lauren Novak's notebook before she was murdered in a strange Florida village. They've never meant anything to the police or to her husband, investigator Markus Novak. Now the man he believes killed her, Gardland Webb, is out of prison and draws Markus to the scene he's avoided for so long: the lonely road where his wife was shot to death beneath the cypress trees and Spanish moss in a place called...

Sometime after midnight, on a moonless October night turned harsh by a fine, windswept rain, one of the men I liked least in the world was murdered in a field near Bedford, just south of the city...The detectives went looking for suspects—people whose histories with Jefferson were adversarial and hostile. At the top of that list, they found me.

So begins A Welcome Grave, the third novel by award-winning mystery writer Michael Koryta featuring

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In the seven years since he learned that his US marshal father lead a double life as a contract killer-and committed suicide to avoid prosecution-Frank Temple III has mostly drifted through life. But when he learns that Devin Matteson, the man who lured his father into the killing game only to later give him up to the FBI, is returning to the isolated Wisconsin lake that was once sacred ground for their families, it's a homecoming Frank can't allow.

Frank

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Whisper Ridge, a multimillion-dollar architectural project that was to host a unique program for paroled murderers, was the passion of Alexandra Sanabria, the daughter of a deceased Mafia don. But the program never got off the ground. The abandoned home now remains as a strange monument to dangerous secrets, kept off the market with taxes paid by a legal trust that Sanabria established just before she and her husband left town. While the couple's

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A boy comes of age among a family of grifters in this powerful story from a New York Times–bestselling "master" (Stephen King). Never knowing a real home, Markus Novak's only constant in life is his passion for paperback westerns. The child of a family of outlaws, he moves through the West town by town with his mother and two uncles, staying in a place just long enough to run a short con and move along. After one job goes south and his mom gets...

The latest Mystery Writers of America story collection, featuring terrifying tales of encounters with strangers from some of the top bestsellers and award winners in crime fiction. It's been said that all great literature boils down to one of two stories--a man takes a journey, or a stranger comes to town. While mystery writers have been successfully using both approaches for generations, there's something undeniably alluring in the nature of a stranger:...