Sinister and serial

What drives a small town in 1929 New England to lynch a man? Nick DeCosta embodied the immigrant success story. Arriving penniless from Sicily, he became a successful NYC restaurateur. Prohibition is when Nick comes into his own. He earns a fortune as a moonshiner, but cuts into his wife's family business. They go after Nick's son, then Nick goes after them, setting in motion a terrible train of events. Three days later Nick’s body hangs over a smoldering fire, the noose still around his neck.

Back in Georgia in 1939, twelve-year-old Joseph Vaughan hears of the brutal assault and murder of a young girl, the first of a series of killings that will take ten lives in the subsequent decade. Compelled by fear and duty, Joseph and his friends establish The Guardians, a group of children determined to protect the people of Augusta Falls against the evil in their midst. But the murderer evades them, and they watch helplessly as one child after another is taken from their ranks. The small community is devastated by the crimes, and even when the killings cease, a shadow of fear will follow Joseph Vaughan always. It will be another fifty years before the final chapter unfolds, and Joseph confronts the nightmare that has overshadowed his life.

"Notorious serial killer the Upright Man has escaped from a supermax prison. The FBI have no idea how it happened, or where to start looking. Ex-CIA agent Ward Hopkins suspects the Straw Men, a shadowy conspiracy of killers with a macabre agenda. -Back cover.

Det. Sgt. Logan MacRae, back from a lengthy convalescence caused by a crazed suspect's knife attack, is plunged straightaway into the investigation of a brutally murdered child. To make matters worse, the victim's family learns of the death from a reporter before the police have a chance to inform them. Angered and embarrassed by the press leak, Logan, aided by WPC Jackie Watson, vows to expose the source within the precinct. Enter Colin Miller, flashy journalist, who befriends Logan, causing suspicious stares from Logan's superiors. More children go missing, and soon the populace of Aberdeen is screaming for blood. Further inciting the rabble, a notorious defense attorney earns acquittal for a habitual child molester. As a result, a hapless, ruined scholar-turned-street sweeper becomes a scapegoat for the chilling fear that grips the community. Logan must eliminate the distractions caused by the sensational publicity and summon his barely restored strength to anticipate the killer's next move.

Seventeen years after the brutal double murder of her parents, Morgan Winter finds her life in turmoil when she discovers that the wrong person was convicted for the crime, and realizes that the true killer has been silently watching her all along.

After a scandalous affair costs him his job in Houston, Cason Statler--Gulf War veteran and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist--returns home to the small east Texas town of Camp Rapture. Cason is a wreck. He drinks too much, he's stalking his ex-girlfriend, and he's wallowing in envy of his successful older brother. To get back on his feet, he takes a job at the local paper, and when he stumbles across his predecessor's notes on a cold case murder file, he thinks he's found the thing that'll keep him out of trouble. No such luck. The further he digs into the case, the more certain he is that the unsolved crime is connected to a series of eerie, inexplicable events that have recently occurred in town. And he knows his suspicions are right on when he finds himself dragged into a deadly game of blackmail and murder that clearly has evil as its only goal"

Just after lunch on a Tuesday in April, nine feet under water, police diver Flea Marley closes her gloved fingers around a human hand.The fact that there's no body attached is disturbing enough. Yet more disturbing is the discovery, a day later, of the matching hand. Both have been recently amputated, and the indications are that the victim was still alive when they were removed. Newly seconded to the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol, DI Jack Caffery is attempting to leave behind his failed personal life in London. Still haunted by the disappearance of his brother, he is looking for a man recently released from a high-security prison, a man who sleeps rough and walks the country roads as he relives the memories of a terrifying crime. Caffery and Flea soon establish that the hands belong to a boy who has recently disappeared. Their search for him, and for his abductor, leads them into the darkest recesses of Bristol's underworld, where drug addiction is rife, where street-kids sell themselves for a hit, and where an ancient evil lurks; an evil that feeds off the blood - and flesh - of others.

FBI agent Smoky Barrett is no stranger to the darker recesses of the human mind. But nothing could have prepared her for the day she had to watch her husband and daughter die at the hands of a serial killer. She bears the scars, mental and physical. Most people would run from work, from life, from everything associated with the pain of a shattered existence. But Smoky doesn't know how to run and when the job that has defined her life comes calling once again with the news that her best friend from high school has been brutally murdered, she finds herself back in the firing line, chasing a hidden killer who will stop at nothing to confront her... The beginning of what is a gripping series.

For two minutes she was dead. The assailant was vicious, the attack brutaland it left her lifeless until her pulse fluttered and she jolted awake. Now, a year later, detective Nan Vining is still questioning her strength, her safety, even her sanity: Can she ever again be the cop and mother she was before? And will her attacker someday return to finish the job, before she can track him down herself? Shaky but determined, Vining rejoins the Pasadena PD, only to confront a murder case that strikes close to home: A slain policewoman has been discovered beneath the Colorado Street Bridge, her body bruised, her throat slit. Even as Vining struggles to recover her standing within the department, she can't help but feel profoundly drawn to the murdered officer, Frankie Lynde and she is deeply troubled by the baffling otherworldly visions that haunt her waking hours. Are these mere fever dreams? Or could they be, as Vining' s daughter insists, messages from beyond the grave? Digging deeper into Lynde's past, Vining discovers clues that set her on the twisted trail of a killer as ruthless as he is depraveda…

When Patrick Rush, journalist, single father and failed novelist, decides to join a creative writing circle, it seems a fertile time for the imagination. In the city of Toronto, a murderer is striking at random, leaving his victims' bodies mutilated and dismembered, and taunting the police with cryptic notes. Influenced by the atmosphere of menace and fear, the group begin to read each other their own dark, unsettling tales. One, Angela, tells a mesmerising story about a child-stealer called the Sandman. Patrick, though, finds fantasy and reality becoming blurred. Is the maniac at large in fact the Sandman? What does Angela really know? And is he himself being stalked by the killer? But it is only when his own son is snatched that Patrick understands what he must do: embark on a horrifying journey into the unknown and track down the elusive figure known as the Sandman.

Sprawling beneath the statue of William Penn, Philadelphia is a city of downtrodden crack houses and upscale brownstones. Somewhere in this concrete crazy quilt, one teenage Catholic girl is writing in her diary, another is pouring her heart out to a friend, and yet another is praying. And elsewhere, an evil man wants these young women to make his macabre fantasy become reality. In a passion play all his own, he will take the girls and a whole city over the edge. Veteran cop Kevin Byrne already knows that edge he's been living on it far too long. His marriage failing, his former partner wasting away in a hospital, and his heart lost to mad fury, Byrne loves to take risks, breaking every rule in the book. Now, he and his rookie partner Jessica Balzano, the daughter of a famous Philly cop, have just caught the case of a lifetime.Someone is killing devout young women, bolting their hands together in prayer, and committing an abomination upon their otherwise perfect bodies. Byrne and Balzano spearhead the hunt for the serial killer, who in turn leads them on a methodically planned journey. Suspects appear before them like…

As winters first snow falls on Ulan Baatar, the mutilated body of a British geologist is found in the city's most expensive hotel, apparently the fourth victim of a serial killer. With political pressure to solve the crimes mounting, Negrui, ex-head of the Serious Crime Squad, is ordered back to his former role, building an uneasy working relationship with his successor and protégé, Doripalam, and with Drew McLeish, a senior British CID officer sent out to support the investigation. But the murders continue leading the officers through the disused factories of the decaying city, out on to the steppes among nomadic herdsmen and illegal gold prospectors, and down into the barren landscapes of the Gobi. And then McLeish himself is kidnapped. With political tensions mounting and time draining away, Nergui and Doripalam piece together a case that encompasses both personal tragedy and shadowy commercial interests in Mongolias vast mineral and energy reserves. And, finally, in a long-abandoned warehouse amongst the decaying Soviet-era factories of Ulan Baatar, Nergui comes face to face with the only figure who can bring the story…

As Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents Faith Mitchell and Will Trent try to connect two murders to a hit-and-run victim, Atlanta physician Sara Linton becomes more involved in the investigation- -an investigation which soon culminates in the hunt for a sadistic serial killer.