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Nadeeka is certain Jamie is having an affair. She knows the tell-tale signs. She's been here before. When Jamie claims to be at work late, she knows he's lying. He's with another woman, and she's determined to catch him in the act. But when Nadeeka arrives home to confront him, Jamie can't explain himself. The house has become a crime scene...Jamie is dead.
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Josie Boots messed up. Really badly. So she returns to her small hometown of Burnville to care for her ailing grandmother. It's been twenty-five years since an unspeakable crime rocked Burnville. Twenty-five years since her grandmother's trial. Twenty-two years since her mother's death. Six years since Josie was called the "bad seed." Two months since she proved them right. Josie just can't catch a break. Maybe, finally, she can find peace in Burnville. But then a stranger shows up, promising to tell Josie all about her family's dark past. When Josie goes to meet him, a brutal crime happens right in front of her eyes. Josie was born out of secrets, and they all start clawing their way to the surface. They say history repeats itself, except this time, the past isn't repeating, it's hunting her. And it might be deadly...
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#2 in the Wonderland Series
Twenty-five years ago in Seaside, Washington, a charming drifter named Sam met three inseparable teenage girls at the local amusement park. Days later, one of them was found dead, her body surfacing in a flooded cranberry bog not far from where she was murdered. Barb and Nicolette were shocked to learn that the man they all met at Wonderland was the Carnival Killer. After he's arrested for the murders of five young women – one of whom was their best friend, Lorelei – Nicolette moved to the city to pursue her dreams of being famous. Barb stayed behind in Seaside, eventually becoming a reporter for the local paper. Their past safely behind them, they've both moved on with their lives. But when the Carnival Killer recants his confession and a new body washes ashore on the eve of Wonderland's grand reopening, the secrets that Barb and Nicolette have worked so hard to bury begin to resurface, threatening to destroy everything in their carefully constructed lives.
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Every family has secrets, but when Reece visits his parents' house, he's shocked to find them in bed, dead. At first glance it looks like a murder-suicide perpetrated by his father, but on closer inspection there's clearly more to the story. For starters, inconsistencies in the crime scene suggest his dad may not have shot himself. As Reece, shaken by his horrifying discovery, awaits questioning from the police, his phone lights up with a call. It's the last person he ever would have expected to hear from. Reeling from the day's events, Reece finds himself questioning everything he thought he knew about his parents—and whether he and his own family are in danger now. While the authorities work to untangle the baffling crime scene, Reece is pulled into a web of secrets linked to the unscrupulous pharma company his father worked for years ago. In order to protect the people he loves most, he'll have to dig deep into his own past to understand who his parents were, what they did, and who they hurt—before he ends up paying for their sins.
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It's the holidays, and photographer Brooklyn Locke is bound for Italy with her husband, Trey, and their two children. But when Trey vanishes from the airport, missing their connecting flight, their impromptu vacation—and life as she knows it—begins to unravel. Desperate to find her husband, Brooklyn accepts help from a stranger on the same flight, Eden Barrow. But Eden soon makes a shocking claim. She is the sister of Trey's first wife, and ten years ago he was the main suspect in her murder. Struggling to comprehend these accusations, fate delivers one more blow: a violent accident that leaves Brooklyn fighting for her life. With nowhere else to turn, Brooklyn leans on Eden for support. But each kindness feels too rehearsed, feeding her doubts about Eden's motives and Trey's true past. Brooklyn has her own dark history she'd rather forget and confronts an unsettling possibility. Her life is not what it seems, and the truth is a trap—laid by someone waiting for the perfect time to strike.
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Aspiring writer Savannah's scheme to meet superstar horror novelist Bennett Bryson turns out better than she ever imagined: not only does her charming and handsome literary idol offer to read her work, he is instantly smitten with her. After a whirlwind romance, Savannah says "yes" to marriage, and the two settle into Bennett's secluded upstate home. But just as Savannah thinks she has it made, cracks appear in her perfect new life. Bennett's behavior becomes dark and controlling: he criticizes Savannah's writing, dictates her permitted activities, and spends most of his time locked in his office, forbidding her from entering. And everywhere, Savannah cannot escape the shadow of Bennett's first wife, the free-spirited and passionate artist Poppy, who died in a tragic accident, but who seems still to be Savannah's rival for Bennett's affection. Then comes an enigmatic warning: Bennett is not who he seems. The women that came before Savannah have disappeared. And Savannah could be next. Isolated and unsure whom to trust, Savannah tries to piece together the mystery of the man she married, and the woman he married first. But Savannah has no idea what her husband is really hiding. And someone out there knows Savannah has secrets of her own. As these two writers will learn the hard way—past really is prologue.
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#2 in the North Falls Series
1601 Iris Drive looks like any other house on the quiet, residential street. But rumors are rampant about the Vickery family, and what goes on behind closed doors. When gunshots ring out, Sheriff Emmy Clifton and her sister, ex-federal agent Jude Archer, discover a devastating crime scene. Allison Vickery has been murdered in her own kitchen, and her teenage daughter is bleeding upstairs, left for dead. Everyone thinks they know what happened. But secrets are buried everywhere in this small town. And it's up to Emmy Clifton to uncover the truth...
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In 1926, five women disappeared from a remote island in Vermont. Now, one hundred years later, it's happening again. Struggling actress Marin Keane is shocked when she lands a role in a major motion picture about the unsolved mystery of New Avalon, an island on sprawling Lake Faraday in Vermont. She's even more surprised when she learns that the role requires a weeklong research trip to that very spot. Because New Avalon isn't your ordinary island. A century ago, it was a commune for spiritual mediums—until they all vanished in 1926. The only trace of them was five dresses hanging from the branches of an old oak tree in the middle of the island, one for each missing woman. Some locals say they simply left. Others think they were murdered. But the prevailing opinion, thanks to a diary left behind by one of the vanished, a young woman named Daisy Rue, is that a séance gone wrong conjured something supernatural that took them all one by one. Not long after arriving, Marin and her castmates, including legendary actress Violet Wright and white-hot director Ronan Peters, begin to realize all is not right with New Avalon. They hear strange noises in the night and notice mysterious symbols left behind by the island's previous occupants. And after a sudden health emergency leaves Marin, Ronan, and the other actors stranded on the island, the disappearances begin again. Is it the work of someone trying to derail the movie? Or is the island's alleged supernatural past catching up with the present? As fear and suspicion mount, Marin turns to Daisy's diary, hoping it holds the key to figuring out what really happened to the women of New Avalon—and how to keep the island's terrible history from repeating itself.
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Jill and Ted adore their New York brownstone the way others adore their children. They have carefully, expensively, made every inch of it their own. It reflects who they are, their status and tastes. With the grand mahogany staircase and state-of-the-art kitchen, it is the stuff of glossy magazines and real-estate dreams. It is their sanctuary. So when Ted's inheritance runs out and he makes a bad investment, they panic. How can they protect their beloved home and enviable lifestyle? The answer is obvious. Or at least, it is obvious to Jill and Ted. The death of one wealthy family member—from whom they stand to inherit millions—could solve all their problems. Together, they will get away with murder. As long as they trust each other. As long as neither makes a mistake. As long as there are no surprises...
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Siblings Allison and Luke have been through a lot together. They've always stood by each other. They'd do anything for each other. Or so it seems. When Allison's husband, Finley, is murdered, the investigation threatens to expose the siblings' darkest secrets. An illicit affair. A decades-old accident. A stunning deception. How do these events explain Finley's death? How far will Allison and Luke go to keep their secrets buried? And can the siblings even trust one another anymore? As the investigation winds tighter and past and present collide, the most shocking betrayal might lie a little too close to home...
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For crime reporter Syeeda McKay, obsession is part of the job—and no story has ever consumed her like that of the Phantom Slayer. This serial killer has targeted sex workers in South Los Angeles for nearly twenty years. She named him. She's tracked him. And only she can bring justice to these victims the city has ignored. The latest: a minister's daughter—a far cry from the usual pattern and impossible to ignore. Overnight, the case explodes, and so does Sy's life. Someone's watching her. Following her. Anticipating her every move. And then come the emails from someone claiming to be the Slayer himself, offering details only the killer could know. She's made him famous—and this is the Slayer's way of saying thank you. But he's not done. As her investigation gets closer to exposing the truth, Sy realizes that she's more connected to the Slayer than she knew—and that he's been waiting for her all along.
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Just outside Washington, DC, sits Eastbrook, Bethesda—a leafy suburb with top schools, pristine landscapes, and perfect neighbors. It's not the kind of place where nannies are killed during robberies gone wrong. And in this picture-perfect neighborhood, someone is desperate to plaster over the cracks in that façade. A year after the unsolved neighborhood murder, Caren, nearing fifty and staring down an empty nest, has one too many drinks at a graduation party and blacks out on her way home. At least, that's what everyone says happened. Caren suspects she was drugged by someone. But who? When Caren teams up with a new neighbor who is obsessed with figuring out who murdered his best friend, they start to uncover what Eastbrook has tried to forget. But in a place where appearances are everything, their search for the truth means not only shattering carefully curated perfection — but putting themselves squarely in the crosshairs of a killer.
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Jane Trevally, newly divorced and feeling a little lost, agrees to accompany a man she doesn't know to his house in the darkest corner of Hampstead Heath. She's offered a drink, goes in, and then - a scream and the sound of something falling upstairs - Jane senses she's in a bad place. She runs. Twenty five years later, Jane finds herself outside the same house, this time to return a small white dog who's been found near her home in the country; a dog whose owner has just been reported missing. A fleeting glimpse of a haunted looking woman through the window sends Jane on a mission to uncover the house's secrets - secrets more terrifying than she could have ever imagined, especially when she realises it could have been her. . .
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After eleven years, Nicole Baxter and her husband Truman's marriage is beginning to fracture. Suddenly, during a scuba diving accident near Catalina Island, Truman is gone. No body. No signs of foul play. Presumed dead. Clinging to the hope that Truman might still be alive, Nicole is devastated, in denial, and struggling with insomnia, as well as guilt over the secrets she kept from the man she loved—a pregnancy, a miscarriage, and an incautious fling with an attentive neighbor. Then come the strange occurrences putting Nicole further on edge. The scent of Truman's cologne. The wet footprints in the house. The cryptic texts from his phone. And the message written on her bathroom mirror: I'll luv u 4ever. Nicole has never felt so alone, isolated, and paranoid. If she's losing her mind, then why does it seem so real? If it's real, how is that possible? As Nicole's grip on reality slips away, the answers are becoming a matter of life and death.
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Naomi was living the quintessential love story. Boy meets girl. They fall in love, get married, buy a dream house, start a family... Then—he kicks her out, hires the city's best divorce lawyers, drains their accounts, and takes up with a 20-something. It's a brutal end to the story. Naomi should accept defeat: move into a dingy apartment, get back into the workforce, and piece together the shattered remains of her life. Except, why should she? Instead, Naomi fixates on her husband's new girlfriend. What begins as cynical curiosity soon twists into obsession—and then into something far darker. As Naomi uncovers secrets she never imagined, she realizes her own life may be in danger. But if it keeps her perfect family intact, isn't it worth it?
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#2 in the Haven Series
Private investigator Sonny Rush, the newest resident of Haven, California, knows that this fogbound coastal hamlet is every bit as dangerous as her hometown of Los Angeles. And when teenager and repeat runaway Honor Butler shows up at Sonny's door with terror in her eyes, Sonny is immediately pulled into a new case that lands close to home. Desperate, hungry, and in need of someone she can trust, Honor tells Sonny a horrifying story about where she's been—and what she's been forced to do. Then, hours later, the forest near Sonny's cottage yields the remains of a missing day laborer, a man whose wife has been searching for answers for months. Soon, coincidence sharpens into conspiracy. As Sonny digs deeper, the threads of these cases twist together into something horrifying: a ruthless network preying on the vulnerable, protected by the very people meant to uphold the law. With every step closer to revealing Haven's corruption, Sonny risks pulling the lives of her loved ones into the cross fire—and exposing the shadows of her own past. Because in this town, loyalty can be fatal, and survival means deciding who you're willing to betray.
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Every May 1st, a serial killer stalks a small town. Every year he comes for them . . . On May 1, 1992, Jules Delaney and Quinn Riley hardly know each other. Jules is high school queen bee in a small Midwestern town when she survives a brutal attack by the elusive May Day Killer—a predator who strikes every May 1st and then vanishes without a trace. Quinn, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, is arrested the same night after trying to break up a fight and nearly killing someone. By morning, their lives are forever connected. A year later, Jules is haunted by trauma and guilt, tormented by one question: Why was she spared? Quinn is newly released from juvenile detention and returns home to devastating news—the unsolved murder of his mother. Over the next decade, their lives are revisited on a single day each year: May 1st. As the years pass, secrets surface, lies unravel, and the paths of Jules and Quinn draw closer together. Two mysteries edge toward the truth—what really happened the night Jules was attacked, and who murdered Quinn's mother? All the while, the May Day Killer is still out there. And the clock is racing toward another anniversary.
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The morning after a glamorous, luxury wedding, best friends Siobhan and Grace go to wake their twenty-four-year-old daughters. Opening the door to their shared room, they find a smashed lamp, an abandoned phone and blood on the carpet. Over the next few days, the truth unravels, testing Siobhan and Grace's friendship to its limits. As secrets and lies begin to come to light, they realise that the girls were not best friends. In fact, they weren't really friends at all. And now, it looks like one of them is dead. And one of them is a killer. But whose daughter is guilty of murder?
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There is nothing that Simone won't do for her daughter, Lucy. The two have always been close, and with Lucy about to leave home for university, they depart the UK for a vacation to Texas to spend some quality time together. But when Simone awakens on their first morning in the desert, Lucy is gone, missing from their rental cabin. In her place is a cell phone, and a voice on the other line issues a shocking ransom demand. Don't tell the police. Come to this location. And be prepared to do a deal... Though Simone's husband urges her to bring in the authorities for help, she knows she can't take any chances. The kidnappers might kill Lucy if she tells anyone. No mother would take that risk. Instead, that night, she drives to the isolated meet-up. What she finds there changes everything. The mysterious kidnapper doesn't want money. They want Simone to do something. The unthinkable. A catastrophic chain of events is set in motion, with chilling consequences that extend beyond Simone and her family. What follows is a heart-pounding journey through the small towns and punishing deserts of remote Texas, in which Simone's courage—and morality—is pushed to the brink as she discovers what it truly means to be a mother.
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When Leila Reynolds is handed her first murder case, she's shocked by the victim: a well-known, well-respected judge, whose death sent shockwaves through the legal community. She's also incredulous—she's nowhere near experienced enough to handle such a high-profile assignment—but the defendant is insistent: he wants her, and only her, to represent him. Except he's refusing to talk. And if that wasn't complicated enough, Leila soon learns her opponent is the most ruthless prosecutor she's ever known: her husband. It's an impossible situation, yet Leila is determined to sway the jury—until she's blindsided once again by a shadowy figure from her past. Suddenly, Leila finds herself fighting not only for her client and marriage, but also to keep her own secrets buried. And if she has to rewrite the rules to win, so be it.
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Behind the manicured lawns and guarded gates of Crestmore Estates lies a neighborhood built on secrets. Five years ago, three residents vanished without a trace. No bodies. No answers. Just rumors, whispered around the country club. Now, when human remains surface on the golf course, old suspicions rematerialize—and the spotlight falls on the women left behind. Andrea Kendal knows what people think—that her brilliant surgeon husband had something to do with his first wife's bloody disappearance. Sara Batcher has spent years defending herself against accusations that she killed her husband. And Katie Morrow, the community's youngest trophy wife, can't escape the suspicious shadows cast by her husband's ex-wife. As the investigation circles closer, the wives find themselves bound together by fear, betrayal, and the ghosts of the missing. In a neighborhood where appearances are everything, each must decide what she'll sacrifice to protect her carefully constructed life—before someone else decides to shatter them all.
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Those lucky enough to live in the elite lakefront community of Cloverhill Lakes are drawn to it for its safety and top-notch school district. The moms meet for coffee at the park while their kids play, they're heavily involved in the PTA, and the summers are filled with chardonnay, brunch, sundresses, and backyard bonfires. But everything changes when Regan Hoffman's car explodes at the annual Labor Day party. The wrong person is killed, but it was meant for her. As the carefully crafted walls of her community begin to crumble, Regan tries to keep it together—something made infinitely harder when she sees her dead husband...alive. When a Cloverhill Lakes resident suddenly goes missing, dark secrets begin to surface from underneath the idyllic veneer of their beautiful community—and the truth threatens to destroy them all as Regan finds herself in a fight for her life.
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Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie's followers—all 8 million of them—don't know won't hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They're sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn't simply living the good life, she's living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it. Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn't hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they're all familiar, but something's off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she's expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.
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Since a violent confrontation tore apart a family five years ago, brothers and fellow cops Russell and Evan haven't spoken a word to each other. When they're both assigned to the murder of a young journalist in the tiny town of Redbelly Crossing, their paths are forced to cross again. This was supposed to be the week Russell could repair things with his teenage daughter, and instead, he has to drag her on a murderous ride into the middle of snake-infested nowhere. For Evan, this case is exactly what he needed: a high-profile investigation that will give him the chance to rebuild his career after a terrible mistake that nearly ended it. Then a dark discovery leaves Evan with only one way out: to bury the truth Russell is so determined to uncover.
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Hannah is having an incredible spring break. A week at a resort in Mexico with her best friend Emmy and her family is perfect for de-stressing from senior year, even if it's awkward being around Emmy's older brother, Jackson, who she's had a crush on for as long as she can remember. Still, the beach is gorgeous. So is the guy they meet in the surf. Except Hannah is now the third wheel in Emmy's vacation romance. Eager to impress Emmy, her wealthy new boyfriend charters a private sailboat to make the most of their last day in paradise, and Hannah and Jackson are invited along. As the clouds roll in and the skies darken, their boat is the only one leaving the marina. And the further they get into open water, the more unsettled Hannah becomes. A storm is brewing onboard that's as deadly as the one racing toward them. Forget surviving graduation. Who will make it back to land alive?
