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A Sham Betrothal

Jennie Goutet

Paris, 1774. A daring bargain. An unexpected love. A choice that could ruin them both.

Sophie Twisden has always played by society’s rules, but when her grandmother falls ill, leaving her vulnerable to the insufferable advances of Sheldon Cholmsley, she must take drastic action. Desperate for escape, she strikes a bold deal with Basile Gervain—a charming yet enigmatic Frenchman—agreeing to a sham betrothal to preserve her reputation and secure her passage back to London.

But pretending to be engaged is far more dangerous than she anticipated. The more time she spends with Basile, the harder it is to remember that their arrangement is nothing more than a convenient ruse. His quiet strength, his kindness, and the way he truly sees her—all of it makes her long for something impossible.

Now, with the moment of their parting drawing near, Sophie must face the painful truth: she has fallen hopelessly in love with the man who never truly meant to keep her. Will she risk everything for a chance at real happiness? Or will she walk away, forever wondering what might have been?

A clean and heartfelt Georgian-era romance perfect for fans of sweet historical love stories with a dash of drama, longing, and swoon-worthy slow-burn romance.

The Hostage

A.F. Carter

In this new thriller from the author of critically acclaimed The Yards, a cop tracks the kidnapped teenage daughter of a wealthy developer in a American Rust Belt town.

A new Nissan plant is coming to the depressed Rust Belt town of Baxter, and Captain Delia Mariola has been busy cleaning up the crime-addled city ever since the deal was announced. But when Elizabeth, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the lead bidder on the construction project, suddenly disappears, and it becomes clear that a professional kidnapping ring may be responsible, Delia realizes that the factory's influx of cash could bring with it an entirely new sort of danger.

Though Elizabeth's abduction was well-planned and bore the mark of an experienced team, her captors could not have anticipated the quick and clever brilliance of the exceptionally smart teen. From the trunk of the car where she is held, Elizabeth devised a clever trick to get cryptic messages to those who love her. The only problem is that the messages might be too cryptic even for their recipients to decipher.

If Delia has any hope of bringing the girl home unharmed, she'll have to crack the code and discover the meaning behind each message. And unless she does it fast, there may be nobody left to save...

Tough, thrilling, and filled with memorable characters, The Hostage is a gritty mystery set in the same hardscrabble town as The Yards.

Golden Age Bibliomysteries

Otto Penzler

In these classic mystery tales, literature is a matter of life or death

Of crime fiction’s many sub-genres, none is so reflexive and so intriguing as the “bibliomystery”: stories that involve crimes set, somehow, in the world of books.

In Vincent Starrett’s “A Volume of Poe,” a bookseller is murdered; in Ellery Queen’s “The Adventure of the Three R’s,” the detective tracks the disappearance of a local Missouri author; and a killer stalks the stacks of the New York Public Library in Robert L. Blochman’s “Death Walks in Marble Halls.”

With fourteen tales of bibliophilic transgression from the Golden Age of the mystery genre (the decades between the two World Wars), this volume collects stories guaranteed to entertain, featuring work from well-remembered authors such as Cornell Woolrich and Anthony Boucher and from those that are lesser-known today, such as Carolyn Wells and James Gould Cozzens.

Edgar Award-winning anthologist, editor, bookseller, and mystery scholar Otto Penzler has focused extensively on the history of the bibliomystery, and his expertise shines in this enjoyable collection—both in the selection of stories, and in the informative and illuminating introductions that accompany each one.

The Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023

Amor Towles

Amor Towles selects the best mystery short stories of the year, including tales by Andrew Child, Jeffery Deaver, and T.C. Boyle.

In his introduction to this volume, guest editor Amor Towles pays tribute to the forgotten person of the mystery story―the cadaver. “Male or female, old or young, rich or poor,” he writes, “for over a hundred years the cadaver has been accommodating, gracious, and generally on time. There is no other figure in crime who has proven to be more reliable.”

Like the cadaver, this anthology series, now in its third year of publication, is also proving reliable, bringing to readers the finest mystery/crime/suspense stories of the year from a variety of sources including mystery and general interest magazines, anthologies, online publications, and literary periodicals.

Among the treasures collected herein are Jeffery Deaver’s “Dodge,” in which a chess match between a volatile woman and a U.S. marshal takes a surprise twist; “The Landscaper’s Wife,” a suspense-filled tale by Brendan DuBois that explodes all expectation; and Kerry Hammond’s “Strangers at a Table,” which offers a darkly witty homage to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.

The collection contains well-known authors such as T.C. Boyle and up-and-comers such as Jessi Lewis; it features tales with famous crime-fighters (Jack Reacher and Sherlock Holmes) and a bonus story from the annals of mystery history by Edith Wharton. In short, these pages promise something for every reader of crime fiction, no matter the particularities of his or her taste.

The Turquoise Shop

Frances Crane

In a small arts community in mid-century New Mexico, a wealthy patron is accused of murder

In a small, artsy New Mexico town, the arrival of a wealthy stranger from back East is enough to get folks talking. Even a few years after Mona Brandon landed in Santa Maria, the rumor mill still churns with tid-bits about her money, her influence, and — when a corpse is discovered in the nearby desert that may or may not be her husband — her secret and suspicious past.

From the counter at her local jewelry and art shop, Jean Holly has a front row seat for all this gossip and more, after her acquaintance with Pat Abbott, the detective investigating the apparent murder, turns romantic. With his deductive reasoning and her local knowledge combined, they have everything they need to discover whodunnit. But will they be able to put the pieces together and solve the mystery before the killer strikes again?

With characters and a setting inspired by Mabel Dodge Luhan and the Taos art colony, The Turquoise Shop is a delightful Golden Age mystery adorned with Southwestern historical detail. It is the first novel in the popular and long-running Pat and Jean Abbott series, which charmed mid-century audiences with over twenty-five installments and which was adapted for multiple radio programs in the 40s and 50s.

The Siberia Job

Josh Haven

A Texas businessman travels to the furthest reaches of post-Soviet Russia in search of the country’s new wealth — and finds new dangers as well. Based on true events.

After the demise of the Soviet Union, the newly-established Russian government privatized its industry by issuing vouchers to all of its citizens, allowing them the chance to be shareholders in the country’s burgeoning businesses. The slips are distributed among the population and auctions are arranged where they can be exchanged for actual shares. For the country’s rural populations living in abject poverty, the vouchers appear to be little more than pieces of paper, totally separated from the far-off concept of potential future fortunes.

But for Texas businessman John Mills and his Czech companion, Petr Kovac, the seemingly-valueless chits suggest a lucrative potential, worth much more than what the current owners are willing to sell them for. They travel to the furthest, coldest reaches of the country to acquire vouchers for the country’s national oil company, Gazneft, roving from town to town with suitcases full of cash. But they quickly learn that the plan has complications — for example, the fact that the auctions at which these vouchers are traded for actual shares have been planned at the most remote, inaccessible locations possible to deter outsiders from buying in. And when the Russian mafia and the oligarchs in charge of Gazneft catch wind of their successes, the stakes become suddenly more deadly.

A thrilling adventure inspired by true events, The Siberia Job charts a course through one of the most impactful periods in recent Russian history, whose reverberations continue to be felt in the present day.

The Rising Tide

Sam Lloyd

In this "fiendishly clever novel," a woman's husband vanishes in a historic storm — and new troubles wash up in its wake (Sunday Times)

In a small fishing village on the Devon coast, Lucy Locke has built a life that anyone would envy. She and her husband, Daniel, own successful businesses and live with their two children in a picturesque home overlooking the harbor. But everything changes one morning when, following a monumental storm, the family yacht is found empty — and Lucy’s husband is nowhere in sight.

As the search for Daniel mounts, so does Lucy’s sense of dread, raised to a fever pitch when another, more terrifying revelation pushes her storybook life to the brink of total destruction. Lucy is reluctantly forced to face a harsh truth: the sea gives life, and just as quickly takes it away. And when the detective on the case uncovers suspicious details that Lucy had hoped would stay buried, she’ll have to confront the nightmarish possibility that she created her own undoing.

Beautifully rendered with evocative, atmospheric prose, The Rising Tide is at once a pulse-pounding, inescapably suspenseful thriller and a poignant tale of the power of the natural world. Its characters and settings are sure to stay with readers long after the final page—and after their heart rates finally return to normal.

The House of Love and Death

Andrew Klavan

Instant USA Today Bestseller

In the newest entry in the bestselling Cameron Winter series, the ex-spy-turned-English professor defies accepted narratives and corrupt local authorities to investigate the murder of a wealthy family in the Chicago suburbs.

Cameron Winter is known for having a sense about crime. His background as a spy trained his mind—and his body—for action, and his current role as an English professor gives him a sharp understanding of human nature. But beyond that, he was born with a "strange habit of mind"—the ability to recreate detailed crime scenes in his imagination and dissect the motives and encounters that produced them. And after reading a puzzling news story about a wealthy family killed in a small town in the Chicago suburbs, he can't resist the chance to apply this deductive power in the pursuit of justice for the victims.

Three members of the family, along with their live-in nanny, were pulled from their burning mansion, already dead from gunshot wounds. The only survivor is a young boy whose memory of the event raises more questions than answers. The police seem happy to settle on a simple explanation and arrest the most obvious suspect—but Winter knows that obvious solutions are seldom the correct ones, and all too often hide a darker truth.

While Winter’s investigation is welcomed by many who knew the victims, the lead detective makes it clear he not only wants Winters to stop looking for answers, but to stay out of his town altogether. Winter begins to understand why as he slowly uncovers crimes and unsavory behavior that had been ignored long before the killings, and in the process grows increasingly determined to find the real killer and expose the rot beneath the town’s sanitized façade. And as the inquiry brings all-too-familiar sins to the surface, he’ll have to confront his own inner demons once and for all.

Insightful and atmospheric, The House of Love and Death is a penetrating mystery with a plot that cuts straight to the dark heart of some of modern America’s most pressing issues.

First Victim

Debbie Babitt

The line between justice and revenge blurs when a judge takes the law into her own hands.

The Honorable Alice D. McKerrity is no stranger to violence. From the bench at Manhattan Supreme, she has seen the most hardened killers pass through her courtroom. But there’s something about this trial―a defendant charged with the murder of a pregnant woman―that affects her as no other case ever has. Her chaotic, stressful home life only adds to her mounting feelings of panic and fear. She’s also harboring a secret that if exposed could have far-reaching ramifications both personally and professionally. And now, unbeknownst to Alice, her daughter has begun a search for her biological father. 

As the trial progresses, Alice’s life starts to unravel. Nightmares she suffered as a girl return with a vengeance. Phantom sightings torment her. Is she being paranoid? Or are the specters real? Almost at the breaking point, she begins to doubt her own sanity. Then she makes a shocking discovery that sends her on a collision course with her past and a terror-filled night in the woods in Upstate New York. Confronted with the unspeakable, she must face a decades-buried truth as she fights for her survival against a cunning adversary that forces her to question everything she ever believed about herself . . . and tests her limits as a woman, a judge, and a mother.

Narrated from the perspectives of three women―Alice, her daughter, and Alice’s girlhood friend―First Victim is a suspenseful tale of guilt, justice, and long-awaited retribution.

The Murder Wheel

Tom Mead

Sleuthing stage magician Joseph Spector (Death and the Conjuror) returns to investigate a baffling series of impossible crimes.

“Even readers who live to match wits with canny authors and detectives are likely to be outwitted by this one.”—Kirkus

“Can you solve the Ferris wheel murder case?”

When a sensational killing rocks 1938 London, local newspaper ads offer a hefty sum to the person who can say whodunnit. A man has been shot dead at the top of a Ferris wheel, and his wife — the only other person in their carriage — insists on her innocence. But who else could have fired the deadly bullet and escaped unseen? The sheer implausibility of the claim is enough to whip the press into a frenzy and, for young and idealistic Edmund Ibbs, the lawyer representing the accused, that frenzy may be his only hope at discovering the truth of the mysterious murder.

As he digs into the case, Ibbs unwittingly enters a shadowy web of conspiracy and murder, soon finding himself implicated in not one but two other seemingly impossible crimes. First, a corpse appears out of thin air during a performance by a famed illusionist, then a second victim is mortally wounded in a locked dressing room backstage.

Edmund is in exactly the wrong place at the wrong time, attracting the suspicion of Scotland Yard inspector George Flint. His only hope at freedom comes in the form of retired stage magician Joseph Spector, a man steeped in the art of misdirection, who happens to be in the audience for the deadly show. Spector’s mastery of illusion is capable of piercing the veil of deceit, but will his deductive powers be strong enough to explain this utterly confounding series of crimes?

Featuring a puzzling plot with a brilliant and fairly clued solution, The Murder Wheel is a delightful homage to the Golden Age mystery sure to please fans of classic crime fiction; Tom Mead’s atmospheric writing and memorable, complex characters prove him to be one of the best new talents in the historical mystery of today.

The Cat Saw Murder

Dolores Hitchens

An elderly woman drugged, a young woman killed, and the cat’s the sole witness…

When Rachel Murdock and her sister Jennifer receive a call for help from their favorite niece, Lilly, in Breakers Beach, CA, they quickly hop a train from Los Angeles to see her — but not before collecting their prized cat Samantha in a picnic basket and bringing her along for the ride. Samatha, it turns out, is an heiress, the inheritor of a fortune left by a wealthy relative, and so the attempt at the cat’s life, made right after they arrive, comes as a shock. The cat survives, but unfortunately, Lilly, murdered soon thereafter, is not so lucky.

By the time the police arrive, the clues are already falling into place. The source of Lilly’s trouble is revealed to be a gambling debt incurred during an attempt to cheat at bridge, and the suspects in her slaying quickly pile up. But then another corpse is discovered, buried in the nearby sand, and it becomes clear that the killing spree concerns more than just the young lady’s personal money trouble. With the authorities distracted by lurid details, it’s up to Rachel and her furry friend to uncover the subtleties containing the solution to the puzzle.

A prototypical early “cat mystery,” written before the subgenre became a staple of cozy mystery fiction, The Cat Saw Murder is an entertaining and endlessly surprising whodunit with a focus on felines. Reissued for the first time in over half a decade, the book, written pseudonymously by the author better known for her hardboiled and suspense novels, is the first in the long-running Rachel Murdock series.

The Birthday Murder

Lange Lewis

When her husband is murdered using a method from one of her books, a screenwriter becomes the main suspect

A successful writer and a B-movie director seem like the perfect match in the Hollywood Hills and, with him working to produce her novel for an upcoming film, the pair’s recent marriage isn’t the only way that they’re connected. When the husband is found murdered on the wife’s birthday using a method of poisoning that was described in one of her books, Victoria suddenly becomes the main suspect as her new happy life comes crashing down around her.

The case appears straightforward from the outside but the LAPD investigator on the scene finds the truth to be anything but. Though all the signs point to Victoria, there’s no motive to be found. Now, to solve the mystery of whodunnit, he’ll have to dig beneath the veneer of the household and reveal its inner workings, and to understand the deadly drama that unfolded just beneath the surface.

Reprinted for the first time in over half a century, The Birthday Murder is a beautifully written and psychologically astute Golden Age mystery set in old Los Angeles. It will appeal to fans of vintage whodunnits and of standout domestic suspense authors from the era such as Dorothy B. Hughes, Charlotte Armstrong, and Margaret Millar.