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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.

Jen Dunne is forty-two and getting married for the second time, but that doesn't mean she can't go all out for her bachelorette weekend. She's booked three days of super-exclusive luxury accommodation on a remote Scottish island for herself and six other women. There's Jen's tennis coach and a fellow tennis-playing fashionista; a famous pop star and that pop star's estranged ex-bandmate; plus Jen's future sister-in-law and the sister of her first husband.The helicopter won't be back for seventy-hours and they have the island all to themselves-or so they think. As the cocktails flow, old grudges begin to emerge and tempers to fray. Then one of the women goes missing. The others receive a threatening message urging one of them to confess a terrible secret. But whose secret is it? Each woman has a darkness in her past she's reluctant to admit. But they'll all have to come clean if they want to make it off the island alive.

In a nightmare scenario, Frank Townsend has an apparently minor accident on his way home but he arrives to find his wife gone and doesn't recognize his apartment. He had gone to work on a normal day but didn't return for more than three years. Suffering from amnesia, he has to rediscover who he is, where he has been, and what he has done. A curtain has fallen to cut off all memories of his life.First among the memories he wants to recover is whether he has committed the murder of which he has been accused. A mysterious stranger with a gun has been following him while he attempts to simultaneously understand what has happened in his past while doing all he can to extricate himself from a seemingly hopeless situation and regain his reputation. He does not yet know that he is in great jeopardy and there is no one he can trust to rescue him from the abyss.The Black Curtain is the second of Cornell Woolrich's celebrated "black" books, following The Bride Wore Black, which established his reputation as America's greatest noir writer. It was adapted into film as the classic Street of Chance, starring Burgess Meredith and Claire Trevor.

Debonaire Philo Vance is often called to help solve particularly difficult cases by his friend District Attorney Markham but the brutal murder of a Broadway vamp has him stumped. Based on the victim of a real-life front-page murder, Margaret Odell-known as the "Canary" because of a part she had played in "an elaborate ornithological ballet in the Follies"-is found strangled in her apartment.The problem is that it would have been impossible for anyone to have gained access to her rooms without being seen by the building's telephone operator, who was in easy and constant sight of her door for the entire night on which she met her end.The police perform a thorough search of her apartment to ensure that no one could have been hiding in her room and that there is no entrance beyond the one under constant surveillance. Vance performs a similar search confirming that the murder seems to be impossible-until he discovers a key clue that unlocks the mystery.S.S. Van Dine, the first important and wildly successful mystery writer to launch the Golden Age of the detective novel in America, has produced a masterpiece with one of the most extraordinary locked room puzzles ever created.

Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr. was only fourteen when he first became entangled with serial rapist and murderer Dean Corll in 1971. Fellow Houston, Texas, teenager David Brooks had already been ensnared by the charming older man, bribed with cash to help lure boys to Corll's home. When Henley unwittingly entered the trap, Corll evidently sensed he'd be of more use as a second accomplice than another victim. He baited Henley with the same deal he'd given Brooks: $200 for each boy they could bring him.Henley didn't understand the full extent of what he had signed up for at first. But once he started, Corll convinced him that he had crossed the line of no return and had to not only procure boys but help kill them and dispose of the bodies, as well. When Henley first took a life, he lost his moral base. He felt doomed. By the time he was seventeen, he'd helped with multiple murders and believed he'd be killed, too. But on August 8, 1973, he picked up a gun and shot Corll. When he turned himself in, Henley showed police where he and Brooks had buried Corll's victims in mass graves. Twenty-eight bodies were recovered-most of them boys from Henley's neighborhood-making this the worst case of serial murder in America at the time. The case reveals gross failures in the way cops handled parents' pleas to look for their missing sons and how law enforcement possibly protected a larger conspiracy.The Serial Killer's Apprentice tells the story of Corll and his accomplices in its fullest form to date. It also explores the concept of "mur-dar" (the predator's instinct for exploitable kids), current neuroscience about adolescent brain vulnerabilities, the role of compartmentalization, the dynamic of a murder apprenticeship, and how tales like Henley's can aid with early intervention. Despite his youth and cooperation, Henley went to trial and received six life sentences. He's now sixty-five and has a sense of perspective about how adult predators can turn formerly good kids into criminals. Unexpectedly, he's willing to talk. This book is his warning and the story of the unspeakable evil and sorrow that befell Houston in the early 1970s.

The police force of Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, doesn't see a ton of action. With jobs and industry moving away from the small city outside Pittsburgh, Detective Ruggiero "Rugs" Carlucci's greatest adversaries are his negligent vacation-prone fellow officers and an older divorcee who has a habit of dancing naked on her back porch when she stops taking her medication. Retirement is on the horizon for Rugs, and the Vietnam vet is counting the days until he can move on from the job.But Rocksburg isn't going to let Rugs drift off to retirement without a fight. Before he can neatly wrap up his career, Rugs will face a mad shooter, a vengeful city councilman, and, most perilously, his own mother.With a supporting cast of characters painted through uproarious profanity and heart-wrenching confessions, Another Day's Pain is a bold and darkly funny novel about crime and the damaged souls it leaves behind.

1995: In the wake of the Rwandan genocide, 24-year-old spy Lachlan Kite and his girlfriend, Martha Raine, are sent to Senegal on the trail of a hunted war criminal. The mission threatens to spiral out of control, forcing Kite to make choices which will have devastating consequences not only for his career at top-secret intelligence agency BOX 88, but also for his relationship with Martha.2023: Eric Appiah, an old friend from Kite's days at school and an off-the-record BOX 88 asset, makes contact with explosive information about what happened all those years ago in West Africa. When tragedy strikes, Kite must use all the resources at his disposal to protect Martha from a criminal network with links to international terror.Charles Cumming once again straddles two timelines to create a high-tension thriller in this latest Lachlan Kite novel.