Thrillers & Suspense
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Betrayed
$12.99 Add to cartBlockbuster author Lisa Scottoline returns to the Rosato&Associates law firm with the New York Times bestseller, Betrayed, and maverick lawyer Judy Carrier takes the lead in a case that’s more personal than ever. Judy has always championed the underdog, so when Iris, the housekeeper and best friend of Judy’s beloved Aunt Barb, is found dead of an apparent heart attack, Judy begins to suspect foul play. The circumstances of the death leave Judy with more questions than answers, and never before has murder struck so close to home. In the meantime, Judy’s own life roils with emotional and professional upheaval. She doesn’t play well with her boss, Bennie Rosato, which jeopardizes her making partner at the firm. Not only that, her best friend Mary DiNunzio is planning a wedding, leaving Judy feeling left behind, as well as newly unhappy in her relationship with her live-in boyfriend Frank.Judy sets her own drama aside and begins an investigation of Iris’s murder, then discovers a shocking truth that confounds her expectations and leads her in a completely different direction. She finds herself plunged into a shadowy world of people who are so desperate that they cannot go to the police, and where others are so ruthless that they prey on vulnerability. Judy finds strength within herself to try to get justice for Iris and her aunt — but it comes at a terrible price.
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The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny
$9.99 Add to cartLonglisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence
Finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award
A Publishers Weekly Holiday Guide History Pick“A book so gripping it can scarcely be put down…. Superb.” —New York Times Book Review
“WESTWARD HO! FOR OREGON AND CALIFORNIA!”
In the eerily warm spring of 1846, George Donner placed this advertisement in a local newspaper as he and a restless caravan prepared for what they hoped would be the most rewarding journey of a lifetime. But in eagerly pursuing what would a century later become known as the “American dream,” this optimistic-yet-motley crew of emigrants was met with a chilling nightmare; in the following months, their jingoistic excitement would be replaced by desperate cries for help that would fall silent in the deadly snow-covered mountains of the Sierra Nevada.
We know these early pioneers as the Donner Party, a name that has elicited horror since the late 1840s. With The Best Land Under Heaven, Wallis has penned what critics agree is “destined to become the standard account” (Washington Post) of the notorious saga. Cutting through 160 years of myth-making, the “expert storyteller” (True West) compellingly recounts how the unlikely band of early pioneers met their fate. Interweaving information from hundreds of newly uncovered documents, Wallis illuminates how a combination of greed and recklessness led to one of America’s most calamitous and sensationalized catastrophes. The result is a “fascinating, horrifying, and inspiring” (Oklahoman) examination of the darkest side of Manifest Destiny.
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Billy Bathgate
$5.99 Add to cartTo open this book is to enter the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who is accepted into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. Like an urban Tom Sawyer, Billy takes us along on his fateful adventures as he becomes good-luck charm, apprentice, and finally protégé to one of the great murdering gangsters of the Depression-era underworld in New York City. The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that is E. L. Doctorow’s trademark comes to triumphant fruition in Billy Bathgate, a peerless coming-of-age tale and one of Doctorow’s boldest and most beloved bestsellers.
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Black Alley
$6.99 Add to cartMike Hammer is on the mend after taking two slugs in a shootout. He’s called back into the city to sit by the deathbed of an old war buddy, laid low by a mysterious gunman. With his last breath, Hammer’s friend whispers to him the secret that killed him—a secret that leads right to $89 billion of stolen Mafia money. Still recovering from his brush with death, Hammer is faced with a choice—to keep clean, or to risk his life, and the life of the woman he loves, in pursuit of the biggest payday he’s ever seen.
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Black Hills Blood Hunt
$7.49 Add to cartWhen President Theodore Roosevelt comes to Deadwood, the Greatest Western Writers of the 21st Century unite three of their most legendary heroes – Hunter Buchanon, Frank “The Last Gunfighter” Morgan, and his son, Conrad “The Loner” Morgan – from three of their most popular series for one monumental new series spin-off!
JOHNSTONE COUNTRY.
WHERE MEN LIVE BY THEIR WITS—OR DIE BY THEIR IGNORANCE.
The President has come to Deadwood—and his enemies have come out of the woodwork—in an action-packed tale of vengeance and justice from national bestselling authors William W. Johnstone and J.A. Johnstone.A HAIL OF BULLETS TO THE CHIEF
Deadwood, South Dakota. Miners flock there seeking fortunes, while cardsharps, bandits, and businessmen seek to deprive those who strike gold by means fair and foul. Legendary former lawman Seth Bullock plans to keep the peace by any means necessary—especially when his good friend, President Theodore Roosevelt, is expected in town to celebrate the anniversary of Deadwood’s founding.Delayed in Washington, the President has sent his wife and children to the boomtown ahead of his arrival. But Ambrose Neill, a former New York City policeman jailed by Roosevelt for corruption, has kidnapped the President’s daughter. Backed by a gang of trigger-happy outlaws and supported by a ruthless senator, Neill plans to politically control the Commander-in-Chief before slaughtering him.
But what Neill and his cohorts don’t realize is that Roosevelt has gathered a deadly posse of rough riders including Bullock—and the legendary father-son gunfighters Frank and Conrad Morgan—who are more likely to bring the gang to justice dead than alive . . .
Live Free. Read Hard.
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Bird Box
$13.99 Add to cartNow a Netflix film starring Sandra Bullock, Trevante Rhodes, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson, and Rosa Salazar!
Written with the narrative tension of The Road and the exquisite terror of classic Stephen King, Bird Box is a propulsive, edge-of-your-seat horror thriller, set in an apocalyptic near-future world—a masterpiece of suspense from the brilliantly imaginative Josh Malerman.
Something is out there . . .
Something terrifying that must not be seen. One glimpse and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from.
Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remain, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, she has dreamed of fleeing to a place where they might be safe. Now, that the boy and girl are four, it is time to go. But the journey ahead will be terrifying: twenty miles downriver in a rowboat—blindfolded—with nothing to rely on but her wits and the children’s trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. And something is following them. But is it man, animal, or monster?
Engulfed in darkness, surrounded by sounds both familiar and frightening, Malorie embarks on a harrowing odyssey—a trip that takes her into an unseen world and back into the past, to the companions who once saved her. Under the guidance of the stalwart Tom, a motely group of strangers banded together against the unseen terror, creating order from the chaos. But when supplies ran low, they were forced to venture outside—and confront the ultimate question: in a world gone mad, who can really be trusted?
Interweaving past and present, Josh Malerman’s breathtaking debut is a horrific and gripping snapshot of a world unraveled that will have you racing to the final page.
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Bitter Orange
$13.49 Add to cartAn NPR Best Book of the Year
“Unsettling and eerie, Bitter Orange is an ideal chiller.” —Time Magazine
From the author of Our Endless Numbered Days and Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange is a seductive psychological portrait, a keyhole into the dangers of longing and how far a woman might go to escape her past.
From the attic of Lyntons, a dilapidated English country mansion, Frances Jellico sees them—Cara first: dark and beautiful, then Peter: striking and serious. The couple is spending the summer of 1969 in the rooms below hers while Frances is researching the architecture in the surrounding gardens. But she’s distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she finds a peephole that gives her access to her neighbors’ private lives. To Frances’s surprise, Cara and Peter are keen to get to know her. It is the first occasion she has had anybody to call a friend, and before long they are spending every day together: eating lavish dinners, drinking bottle after bottle of wine, and smoking cigarettes until the ash piles up on the crumbling furniture. Frances is dazzled. But as the hot summer rolls lazily on, it becomes clear that not everything is right between Cara and Peter. The stories that Cara tells don’t quite add up, and as Frances becomes increasingly entangled in the lives of the glamorous, hedonistic couple, the boundaries between truth and lies, right and wrong, begin to blur. Amid the decadence, a small crime brings on a bigger one: a crime so terrible that it will brand their lives forever.
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The Bitterwine Oath
$10.99 Add to cartEvery fifty years, a cult claims twelve men to murder in a small Texas town. Can one girl end the cycle of violence – and save the boy who broke her heart?
“A richly woven tale of magic and murder and vengeance. This book kept me up all night! One of the best stories I’ve read all year.” – Shea Ernshaw, New York Times bestselling author of The Wicked Deep
San Solano, Texas, is a quaint town known for its charm, hospitality, and history of murder. Twice now, twelve men have been brutally killed, and no one knows who did it. A shadowy witch? A copycat killer? Or a man-hating murderess?
Eighteen-year-old Natalie Colter is sure that the rumors about her great-great-grandmother’s cult of wronged women are just gossip, but that doesn’t stop the true-crime writers and dark tourism bloggers from capitalizing on the town’s reputation. It’s an urban legend that’s hard to ignore, and it gets harder when Nat learns that the sisterhood is real. And magical. And they want her to join.
The more Nat learns of the Wardens’ supernatural history, the more she wonders about the real culprits behind the town’s ritualistic murders. Are the Wardens protecting San Solano from even darker forces? There are shadows in the woods, bones on the outskirts of town, and questions Nat needs answered.
But everything becomes more urgent when people start getting “marked” as new victims—including Levi Langford, the boy whose kiss haunted Nat for a year. With Levi in danger, doing nothing would be harder than fighting back.
Nat knows that no one is safe. Can she and the sisterhood stop the true evil from claiming their town?
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Black Angus
$1.99 Add to cartAn Ozarks rancher takes a desperate gamble in this searing novel from “one of the truly great American writers of the 20th century” (The Guardian). Bob Blanchard spent his entire inheritance on a cattle ranch in the Missouri Ozarks—but it hasn’t turned out the way he’d hoped, and he’s now being threatened with foreclosure. The cattle are sick, and the herd can’t survive, so Blanchard agrees to a reckless scheme to sell the cattle before their illness is widely known. But when a faked cattle rustling and an insurance scam goes wrong, the plan begins to crumble from the inside out. “A commanding writer of unusual delicacy and power.” —The New Yorker “A born storyteller.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder: The True Story
$12.99 Add to cartA New York Times Bestseller! For viewers of the hit Series I Am the Night and fans of the Root of Evil Podcast, the book that finally revealed the shocking identity of the Black Dahlia Killer—and the Police Corruption That Concealed It for So Long
In 1947, the brutal, sadistic murder of a beautiful young woman named Elizabeth Short led to the largest manhunt in LA history. The killer teased and taunted the police and public for weeks, but his identity stayed a mystery, and the murder remained the most tantalizing unsolved case of the last century, until this book revealed the bizarre solution.
Steve Hodel, a retired LAPD detective, took up the case, reviewing the original evidence and records as well as those of a separate grand jury investigation into a series of murders of single women in LA at the time. The prime suspect had in fact been identified, but never indicted. Why? And who was he?
In an account that will remind movie lovers of both LA Confidential and Zodiac, for the corruption it exposes and the insight it offers into a serial killer’s mind, Hodel demonstrates that there was a massive police cover-up. Even more shocking, he proves that the murderer, a true-life Jekyll and Hyde who was a highly respected member of society by day and a psychopathic killer by night, was his own father.
This edition of the book includes new findings and photographs added after the original publication, together with a new postscript by the author.
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The Black Angel
$9.99 Add to cartTo those who have been forsaken, hell has no geography. The Black Angel begins with the disappearance of a young prostitute from one of New York City’s seamiest neighborhoods. Like so many tormented souls before her, the girl’s mother is inevitably drawn to Charlie Parker’s doorstep desperate for redemption and revenge. Despite the danger that his chosen profession imposes on his wife and newborn daughter, Parker knows that the woman and her troubles cannot be ignored. As always, he is driven as much by the evil that simmers in the hidden honeycomb world as he is by the ties of friendship and blood. As Parker gets closer to the girl’s captors, he discovers that her disappearance is linked to a church of bones in Eastern Europe, to the slaughter at a French monastery in 1944, and to the myth of an object known as the Black Angel — an object considered by evil men to be beyond priceless. But the Black Angel is not a legend. It is real. It lives. It dreams. And the mystery of its existence may contain the secret of Parker’s own origins.
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Black and Blue
$13.99 Add to cartNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Intimate and illuminating and, as is true of most anything Quindlen writes, well worth the read.”—People
“A compelling and suspenseful [novel] that goes straight to the gut.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
For eighteen years Fran Benedetto kept her secret, hid her bruises. She stayed with Bobby because she wanted her son to have a father, and because, in spite of everything, she loved him. Then one night, when she saw the look on her ten-year-old son’s face, Fran finally made a choice—and ran for both their lives.Now she is starting over in a city far from home, far from Bobby. In this place she uses a name that isn’t hers, watches over her son, and tries to forget. For the woman who now calls herself Beth, every day is a chance to heal, to put together the pieces of her shattered self. And every day she waits for Bobby to catch up to her. Bobby always said he would never let her go, and despite the ingenuity of her escape, Fran Benedetto is certain of one thing: It is only a matter of time.
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The Bishop’s Pawn
$9.99 Add to cartThe Bishop’s Pawn continues renowned New York Times top 5 bestseller Steve Berry’s Cotton Malone series with another riveting, history-based thriller.
History notes that the ugly feud between J. Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King, Jr., marked by years of illegal surveillance and the accumulation of secret files, ended on April 4, 1968 when King was assassinated by James Earl Ray. But that may not have been the case.
Now, fifty years later, former Justice Department agent, Cotton Malone, must reckon with the truth of what really happened that fateful day in Memphis.
It all turns on an incident from eighteen years ago, when Malone, as a young Navy lawyer, is trying hard not to live up to his burgeoning reputation as a maverick. When Stephanie Nelle, a high-level Justice Department lawyer, enlists him to help with an investigation, he jumps at the opportunity. But he soon discovers that two opposing forces—the Justice Department and the FBI—are at war over a rare coin and a cadre of secret files containing explosive revelations about the King assassination, information that could ruin innocent lives and threaten the legacy of the civil rights movement’s greatest martyr.
Malone’s decision to see it through to the end–from the raucous bars of Mexico, to the clear waters of the Dry Tortugas, and ultimately into the halls of power within Washington D.C. itself–not only changes his own life, but the course of history.
Steve Berry always mines the lost riches of history–in The Bishop’s Pawn he imagines a gripping, provocative thriller about an American icon.
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Beware the Cuckoo: A Completely Gripping Psychological Suspense
$2.99 Add to cartTwo women. One man. A buried secret.
They were reunited at his funeral, school friends with a shared past. A past that is anything but straightforward. A past that harbours secrets. Karen has a seemingly perfect life. An adoring husband, two wonderful children and a beautiful home. She has all she has ever wanted. She also has a secret. Sandra knows Karen’s secret and her once-perfect life is rapidly unravelling. The man who meant everything to her had a dark side and her business is failing. To get her life back on track she needs to reclaim what is rightfully hers. As the past meets the present, truths are revealed as both women come to understand the true cost of betrayal…
What readers are saying about Beware The Cuckoo: “An incredibly captivating and well written debut novel.” “Well-plotted and well-paced story of intrigue.” “A dark and twisty tale that will keep you guessing until the final page.” “This is an excellent debut, gripping and well written.” “A really well-told story of deceit and love.”