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On an ordinary Friday evening at his favorite Boston tavern, George Foss's comfortable, predictable life is shattered when a beautiful woman sits down at the bar, a woman who vanished without a trace twenty years ago. Liana Dector isn't just an ex-girlfriend, the first love George couldn't quite forget. She's also a dangerous enigma and quite possibly a cold-blooded killer wanted by the police. Suddenly, she's back—and she needs George's help. Ruthless men believe she stole some money ... and they will do whatever it takes to get it back. George knows Liana is trouble. But he can't say no—he never could—so he makes a choice that will plunge him into a terrifying whirlpool of lies, secrets, betrayal, and murder from which there is no sure escape.
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"I've been following her for the past few days. I know where she buys her groceries, where she has her dry cleaning done, where she works. I don't know the color of her eyes or what they look like when she's scared. But I will." One night, Mia Dennett enters a bar to meet her on-again, off-again boyfriend. But when he doesn't show, she unwisely leaves with an enigmatic stranger. At first Colin Thatcher seems like a safe one-night stand. But following Colin home will turn out to be the worst mistake of Mia's life. When Colin decides to hide Mia in a secluded cabin in rural Minnesota instead of delivering her to his employers, Mia's mother, Eve, and detective Gabe Hoffman will stop at nothing to find them. But no one could have predicted the emotional entanglements that eventually cause this family's world to shatter.
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You think you have the perfect life. You're successful. Attractive. Well liked. And you've just got married for the third time. But that's OK, because everyone's happy. Your children are happy. You're happy. And so is your new wife. But one tragic accident smashes your perfect life to pieces. Because everyone has secrets, and secrets have consequences. Some of which can be devastating.
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#1 in the Detective Elouise Norton Series
Along the ever changing border of gentrifying Los Angeles, seventeen year old Monique Darson is found dead at a condominium construction site, hanging in the closet of an unfinished unit. Homicide detective Elouise "Lou" Norton's new partner, Colin Taggert, fresh from the comparatively bucolic Colorado Springs police department, assumes it's a teenage suicide. Lou isn't buying the easy explanation. For one thing, the condo site is owned by Napoleon Crase, a self made millionaire. . .and the man who may have murdered Lou's missing sister, Tori, thirty years ago. As Lou investigates the death of Monique Darson, she uncovers undeniable links between the two cases. But her department is skeptical. Lou is convinced that when she solves Monique's case she will finally bring her lost sister home. But as she gets closer to the truth, she also gets closer to a violent killer. After all this time, can he be brought to justice. . .before Lou becomes his next victim?
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#3 in The Hollows Series
College senior Lana Granger has told so many lies about her past that the truth seems like a distant, cloudy nightmare. But she meets her match when she begins babysitting for a volatile, manipulative eleven-year-old boy. Soon after Lana takes the job, her close friend Beck mysteriously disappears. Lana instantly begins fabricating stories - to friends, to police, to herself. Why doesn't her account jibe with those of eye-witnesses? Lana will do anything to bury the truth about that night... and about her life. But someone else knows her secrets. And he's dying to tell.
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#4 in the Jason Kolarich Series
James Drinker is a bit of an oddball. A funny-looking, geeky loner, he walks into Jason Kolarich's office one day with a preemptive concern: two women have recently been murdered, seemingly by the same killer, and Drinker thinks he will be the police's main suspect. One woman was his ex-girlfriend, he says, and the other was a friend. He's the only link between the victims and he has no alibi for the night of either murder—surely the police will realize it soon. Believing he's the target of a frame-up, Drinker hires Kolarich for his defense. Something about James Drinker seems off from the start, but Kolarich doesn't give it too much thought. Until another murder occurs. And then another. And as he begins to probe his client's life and story more closely, it quickly becomes clear that nothing about James Drinker is what it seems . . . and that the target of the frame-up isn't Drinker, but Kolarich. Unable to stop a serial killer—and prove his own innocence—without breaking his sworn attorney-client privilege, Jason Kolarich must hunt for the truth about James Drinker, the series of brutal murders, and why he's been set up to take the fall. The answers will be beyond anything he could have imagined.
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Meet the picture-perfect Bird family: pragmatic Meg, dreamy Beth, and towheaded twins Rory and Rhys, one an adventurous troublemaker, the other his slighter, more sensitive counterpart. Their father is a sweet, gangly man, but it's their beautiful, free-spirited mother Lorelei who spins at the center. In those early years, Lorelei tries to freeze time by filling their simple brick house with precious mementos. Easter egg foils are her favorite. Craft supplies, too. She hangs all of the children's art, to her husband's chagrin. Then one Easter weekend, a tragedy so devastating occurs that, almost imperceptibly, it begins to tear the family apart. Years pass and the children have become adults, while Lorelei has become the county's worst hoarder. She has alienated her husband and children and has been living as a recluse. But then something happens that beckons the Bird family back to the house they grew up in—to finally understand the events of that long-ago Easter weekend and to unearth the many secrets hidden within the nooks and crannies of home.
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#8 in the Zailer & Waterhouse Mysteries Series
When Gaby's plane is delayed, she's forced to share a hotel room with a stranger: Lauren, who is terrified of her. But why is she scared of Gaby in particular? Lauren won't explain. Instead, she blurts out something about an innocent man going to prison for murder. Gaby soon suspects that Lauren's presence on her flight isn't a coincidence, because the murder victim is Francine Breary, the wife of the only man Gaby has ever truly loved. Tim Breary has confessed. He's even provided the police with evidence. The only thing he hasn't given them is a motive. He claims to have no idea why he murdered his wife...
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Mallory killed her boyfriend, Brian. She can't remember the details of that night but everyone knows it was self-defense, so she isn't charged. But Mallory still feels Brian's presence in her life. Is it all in her head? Or is it something more? In desperate need of a fresh start, Mallory is sent to Monroe, a fancy prep school where no one knows her . . . or anything about her past. But the feeling follows her, as do her secrets. Then, one of her new classmates turns up dead. As suspicion falls on Mallory, she must find a way to remember the details of both deadly nights so she can prove her innocence-to herself and others.
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#5 in the Private Series
Chris Schneider is a superstar agent at Private Berlin, Germany headquarters for the world's most powerful investigation firm. He keeps his methods secret as he tackles Private's most high-profile cases—and when Chris suddenly disappears, he becomes Private Berlin's most dangerous investigation yet. Mattie Engel is another top agent at Private Berlin, gorgeous and ruthlessly determined—and she's also Chris's ex. Mattie throws herself headfirst into finding Chris, following leads to the three people Chris was investigating when he vanished: a billionaire suspected of cheating on his wife, a soccer star accused of throwing games, and a nightclub owner with ties to the Russian mob. Any one of them would surely want Chris gone—and one of them is evil enough to want him dead.
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Originally published as The Wronged Sons (2013). When Catherine wakes up alone one morning, she thinks her husband has gone for a run before work. But Simon never makes it to the office. His running shoes are by the front door. Nothing is missing—except him. Catherine knows Simon must be in trouble. He wouldn't just leave her. He wouldn't leave the children. But Simon knows the truth—about why he left and what he's done. He knows things about his marriage that it would kill Catherine to find out. The memories she holds on to are lies. While Catherine faces a dark new reality at home, Simon's halfway around the world, alive and thriving. He's doing whatever it takes to stay one step ahead of the truth. But he can't hide forever, and when he reappears twenty-five years later, Catherine will finally learn who he is. And wish she'd stayed in the dark.
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#3 in the Bharat Series
Five thousand years ago, there came to earth a magical being called Krishna, who performed countless divine miracles for the good of mankind ... Humanity was assured that he would return in a new avatar when the world needed him in the eventual Dark Age-Kaliyug. In modern times, a poor little boy grows up believing that he is that final avatar. Except, the boy is a serial killer. In this heart-stopping tale, the arrival of a murderer who executes his gruesome and brilliantly thought-out schemes in the name of God is the first clue to a sinister conspiracy to expose an ancient secret-Krishna's priceless legacy to mankind. From the submerged remains of Dwarka and the mysterious lingam of Somnath to the icy heights of Mount Kailash, from the sand-washed ruins of Kalibangan to a Vrindavan temple destroyed by Aurangzeb, historian Ravi Mohan Saini must embark on a perilous quest to prevent a gross miscarriage of justice and discover the cryptic location of Krishna's most prized possession.
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#6 in the Will Trent Series
Will Trent is a brilliant agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Newly in love, he is beginning to put a difficult past behind him. Then a local college student goes missing, and Will is inexplicably kept off the case by his supervisor and mentor, deputy director Amanda Wagner. Will cannot fathom Amanda's motivation until the two of them literally collide in an abandoned orphanage they have both been drawn to for different reasons. Decades before, when his father was imprisoned for murder, this was Will's home. It appears that the case that launched Amanda's career forty years ago has suddenly come back to life—and it involves the long-held mystery of Will's birth and parentage. Now these two dauntless investigators will each need to face down demons from the past if they are to prevent an even greater terror from being unleashed.
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Long after anyone expected Kate to do anything with her life, she did. Using the journals left behind by her aunt and grandmother, she wrote a novel based on a very real generation-old love story that ended in tragedy. On the other side of town, Emily is about to set fire to her life. She's in a dead-end job and is involved with the wrong man; she can feel herself being drawn into darkness, with horrific consequences. With nowhere to go, she finds herself on the run. Without knowing each other, and with lives that couldn't be more different, Kate and Emily head to the same point on the map: Heart Island, an idyllic place in the middle of a lake in the Adirondacks, owned for generations by Birdie Burke's family. The harsh and unyielding Birdie is at one with this island, which has a terrifying history all its own. She, too, has consequences to face.
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#6 in the Zailer & Waterhouse Mysteries Series
It's past midnight, but Connie Bowskill can't sleep. To pass the time, she logs on to a real estate website in search of a particular house, one she is obsessed with for reasons she's too scared to even admit to herself. As she clicks through the virtual tour, she comes across a scene from a nightmare: a woman lying facedown on the living room floor in a pool of blood. But when she returns to show her husband, there is no body, no blood—just a perfectly ordinary room, with a perfectly clean beige carpet.
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On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne's fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick's clever and beautiful wife disappears. Husband-of-the-Year Nick isn't doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife's head, but passages from Amy's diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police and the media—as well as Amy's fiercely doting parents—the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he's definitely bitter—but is he really a killer?
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A successful lawyer and loving mother, Nina Bloom would do anything to protect the life she's built in New York—including lying to everyone, even her daughter, about her past. But when an innocent man is framed for murder, she knows that she can't let him pay for the real killer's crimes. Nina's secret life began 18 years ago. She had looks to die for, a handsome police officer husband, and a carefree life in Key West. When she learned she was pregnant with their first child, her happiness was almost overwhelming. But Nina's world is shattered when she unearths a terrible secret that causes her to run for her life and change her identity. Now, years later, Nina risks everything she's earned to return to Florida and confront the murderous evil she fled.
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#1 in The Hollows Series
Everybody knows everybody in The Hollows, a quaint, charming town outside of New York City. It's a place where neighbors keep an eye on one another's kids, where people say hello in the grocery store, and where high school cliques and antics are never quite forgotten. As a child, Maggie found living under the microscope of small-town life stifling. But as a wife and mother, she has happily returned to The Hollows's insular embrace. As a psychologist, her knowledge of family histories provides powerful insights into her patients' lives. So when the girlfriend of her teenage son, Rick, disappears, Maggie's intuitive gift proves useful to the case—and also dangerous. Eerie parallels soon emerge between Charlene's disappearance and the abduction of another local girl that shook the community years ago when Maggie was a teenager. The investigation has her husband, Jones, the lead detective on the case, acting strangely. Rick, already a brooding teenager, becomes even more withdrawn. In a town where the past is always present, nobody is above suspicion, not even a son in the eyes of his father. As she tries to reassure him that Rick embodies his father in all of the important ways, Maggie realizes this might be exactly what Jones fears most. Determined to uncover the truth, Maggie pursues her own leads into Charlene's disappearance and exposes a long-buried town secret—one that could destroy everything she holds dear.
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#3 in the Dublin Murder Squad Series
Back in 1985, Frank Mackey was a nineteen-year-old kid with a dream of escaping hisi family's cramped flat on Faithful Place and running away to London with his girl, Rosie Daly. But on the night they were supposed to leave, Rosie didn't show. Frank took it for granted that she'd dumped him—probably because of his alcoholic father, nutcase mother, and generally dysfunctional family. He never went home again. Neither did Rosie. Then, twenty-two years later, Rosie's suitcase shows up behind a fireplace in a derelict house on Faithful Place, and Frank, now a detective in the Dublin Undercover squad, is going home whether he likes it or not.
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It started with a beautiful woman and a challenge. As a gift for her husband, Alyssa Bradford approaches Eric Shaw to make a documentary about her father-in-law, Campbell Bradford, a 95-year-old billionaire whose past is wrapped in mystery. Eric grabs the job even though there are few clues to the man's past -- just the name of his hometown and an antique water bottle he's kept his entire life. In Bradford's hometown, Eric discovers an extraordinary history -- a glorious domed hotel where movie stars, presidents, athletes, and mobsters once mingled, and hot springs whose miraculous mineral water cured everything from insomnia to malaria. Neglected for years, the resort has been restored to its former grandeur just in time for Eric's stay. Just hours after his arrival, Eric experiences a frighteningly vivid vision. As the days pass, the frequency and intensity of his hallucinations increase and draw Eric deeper into the town's dark history. He discovers that something besides the hotel has been restored -- a long-forgotten evil that will stop at nothing to regain its lost glory.
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#2 in the Dana Cutler Series
Sarah Woodruff, on death row in Oregon for murdering her lover, John Finley, has appealed her case to the Supreme Court just when a prominent justice resigns leaving a vacancy. Then, for no apparent reason, another justice is mysteriously attacked. Dana Cutler, one of the heroes from Margolin's bestselling "Executive Privilege," is quietly called in to investigate. She looks for links between the Woodruff appeal and the ominous incidents in the justices' chambers. It eventually leads her to a shoot-out that took place years ago on a small freighter docked upriver in Shelby, Oregon, a dead crew, and illegal drugs. The only survivor on board? "John Finley." With the help of Brad Miller and Keith Evans, Dana uncovers a plot by a rogue element in the American intelligence community which includes the president's nominee to the Supreme Court. Soon the trio is thrown back into the grips of deadly danger.
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#2 in the Bharat Series
The year is 340 BC. A hunted, haunted Brahmin youth vows revenge for the gruesome murder of his beloved father. Cold, calculating, cruel and armed with a complete absence of accepted morals, he becomes the most powerful political strategist in Bharat and succeeds in uniting a ragged country against the invasion of the army of that demigod, Alexander the Great. Pitting the weak edges of both forces against each other, he pulls off a wicked and astonishing victory and succeeds in installing Chandragupta on the throne of the mighty Mauryan empire. History knows him as the brilliant strategist Chanakya. Satisfied-and a little bored-by his success as a kingmaker, through the simple summoning of his gifted mind, he recedes into the shadows to write his Arthashastra, the 'science of wealth'. But history, which exults in repeating itself, revives Chanakya two and a half millennia later, in the avatar of Gangasagar Mishra, a Brahmin teacher in smalltown India who becomes puppeteer to a host of ambitious individuals-including a certain slumchild who grows up into a beautiful and powerful woman. Modern India happens to be just as riven as ancient Bharat by class hatred, corruption and divisive politics and this landscape is Gangasagar's feasting ground. Can this wily pandit-who preys on greed, venality and sexual deviance-bring about another miracle of a united India? Will Chanakya's chant work again?
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#4 in the Grant County Series
Two armed men enter the police station in tiny Heartsdale, Georgia, and open fire. When the shooting stops, an officer is dead, Police Chief Jeffrey Tolliver is seriously wounded, and the survivors—including a class of grade-school children and medical examiner Sara Linton—are held hostage. In a tense standoff that could erupt at any moment into more bloodletting—with her ex-husband on the threshold of death—Sara must search for answers and an escape in the memories of a time at the start of their relationship when another brutal, shocking crime shattered their small-town world. Because the sins of the past have caught up with Sara and Jeffrey... with a vengeance.
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Libby Day was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered in "The Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee, Kansas." She survived—and famously testified that her fifteen-year-old brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty-five years later, the Kill Club—a secret society obsessed with notorious crimes—locates Libby and pumps her for details. They hope to discover proof that may free Ben. Libby hopes to turn a profit off her tragic history: She'll reconnect with the players from that night and report her findings to the club—for a fee. As Libby's search takes her from shabby Missouri strip clubs to abandoned Oklahoma tourist towns, the unimaginable truth emerges, and Libby finds herself right back where she started—on the run from a killer.
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#2 in the David Sloane Series
Just minutes after winning a $1.6 million wrongful-death verdict, attorney David Sloane confronts the one case that threatens to blemish his unbeaten record in the courtroom. Beverly Ford wants Sloane to sue the United States government and military in the mysterious death of her husband, James, a national guardsman killed in Iraq. While a decades-old military doctrine might make Ford's case impossible to win, Sloane, a former soldier himself, is compelled to find justice for the widow and her four children in what is certain to become the biggest challenge of his career. With little hard evidence to go on, Sloane calls on his friend, reclusive former CIA agent turned private investigator Charles Jenkins, to track down the other men serving with Ford the night he died. Alarmingly, two of the four who returned home alive didn't stay that way for long, and though the mission's wheelchairbound commander now works for a civilian contractor, he refuses to talk. The final -- and youngest -- soldier is also the most elusive, but he's their only shot at discovering the truth -- if Sloane and Jenkins can keep him alive long enough to tell it. Meanwhile, Sloane isn't the only one on a manhunt. As he propels his case into a federal courtroom, those seeking to hide the truth threaten Sloane's family, forcing his new wife Tina and stepson Jake into hiding, where they become the targets of a relentless killer. Now Sloane must race to uncover what really happened on that fatal mission, not only to bring justice to a family wronged but to keep himself and the people closest to him from becoming the next casualties.
