Crime Thriller Women Sleuths

One rainy night in the woods outside of Portland, Dr. Victoria Peres is called to the site of a haunting crime scene. Six beautiful young girls - all in white dresses and arranged in a perfect circle - have been left for dead. Only one girl, fighting for her life at a nearby hospital, has survived the carnage. Things get stranger still when Victoria and the police discover that the disturbing arrangement of the bodies - as meticulous as it is mysterious - is straight from the pages of a decades-old cold case.

A lifeless body. A string of secret affairs. A silent witness no one knows about. Is it textbook suicide? The NYPD thinks so. But FBI Special Agent Heather Chase has her doubts… She must get to the truth quickly before the case gets closed in a hurry. It soon becomes clear that the perpetrator is leading the investigation astray and is always one step ahead. Is someone tipping off the killer? Without a witness, Chase is about to lose this case for good… she must act fast before the killer covers all their tracks. It dawns on her that she’s been chasing crumbs left for her to follow. ...

While investigating the hit-and-run death of a young boy, Seattle homicide detective Tracy Crosswhite makes a startling discovery: the suspect is an active-duty serviceman at a local naval base. After a key piece of case evidence goes missing, he is cleared of charges in a military court. But Tracy knows she can't turn her back on this kind of injustice.

Change is coming to Sweden’s far north: its untapped natural resources are sparking a gold rush with the criminal underworld leading the charge. But it’s not the prospect of riches that brings Lisbeth Salander to the small town of Gasskas. She has been named guardian to her niece Svala, whose mother has disappeared. Two things soon become clear: Svala is a remarkably gifted teenager—and she’s being watched.

On a winding mountain road into the town of Denton, Pennsylvania, Detective Josie Quinn finds the body of a local teenage girl, Dina Hale. The sight of plum-colored bruises gathering around the girl’s neck pierces Josie’s heart, but the discovery of a second girl’s empty purse in the dirt nearby gives her a flicker of hope that one person, at least, made a lucky escape. Dina’s parents are grief-stricken as the town rallies together in a desperate search for the second girl, who waitressed with Dina. The two best friends were on their way to a shift when they were attacked.

North Devon is enjoying a rare hot summer with tourists flocking to its coastline. Detective Matthew Venn is called out to a rural crime scene at the home of a group of artists. What he finds is an elaborately staged murder - Dr. Nigel Yeo has been fatally stabbed with a shard of one of his glassblower daughter's broken vases. Dr. Yeo seems an unlikely murder victim. He's a good man, a public servant, beloved by his daughter. Matthew is unnerved, though, to find that she is a close friend of Jonathan, his husband.

Rumrunners. Secrets. Murder. In the 7th thrilling addition to the Logan McKenna Mystery series, Logan’s persistent digging is about to get her killed. Things are changing for Logan McKenna. She bought a fixer-upper with Ben on the Oregon coast and is about to meet her half-sister, Olivia, who, until last year, she didn’t know existed. But the remodel is going smoothly and Logan begins to relax and even look forward to the upcoming visit with Olivia. Before Logan gets the chance to meet her new sibling, a young woman, Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Collins, is found dead—drowned in the pool ...

Plagued by traumatic childhood memories, crime reporter Sawyer Brooks still struggles to gain control of her rage, her paranoia, and her life. Now, after finally getting promoted at work, she is forced to return home and face her past. River Rock is where she’d been abandoned by her two older sisters to suffer alone, and in silence, the unspeakable abuses of her family. It’s also where Sawyer’s best friend disappeared and two teenage girls were murdered. Three cold cases dead and buried with the rest of the town’s secrets.

It's 1998, and for years the old First Bank of Cleveland has sat abandoned, perfectly preserved, its secrets only speculated on by the outside world. Twenty years before, amid strange staff disappearances and allegations of fraud, panicked investors sold Cleveland's largest bank in the middle of the night, locking out customers and employees and thwarting a looming federal investigation. In the confusion that followed, the keys to the vault's safe-deposit boxes were lost.

An army vet and former bodyguard for the rich and famous, Jessie Mercado has faced all kinds of danger and always emerged victorious. But one thing this motorcycle-riding private investigator has never encountered before is an incarceration consultant. Preparing wealthy people to go to prison is big business. When Owen Blake of Mamertine Consulting hires Mercado to find his missing partner, her suspect list is filled with recently released white-collar criminals, a few drug kingpins, and a couple of murderers to keep things interesting.

An online video of a girl clawing at the ceiling of her own grave could be the worst thing FBI forensic psychologist Zoe Bentley has ever seen. Perhaps even more disturbing is the implication of the video’s title: “Experiment Number One.” Zoe and her partner, Special Agent Tatum Gray, work as fast as they can to find the monster behind the shocking video, but soon another one shows up online, and another girl turns up dead.

It’s not always easy to live in the hidden town of Rockton, something Detective Casey Duncan knows firsthand. Tucked away in the Yukon wilderness, the community survives - and thrives - because the residents' many secrets stay just that - secret.

Blood Orchid is the third adventure of one of Stuart Woods' most engaging characters, Chief of Police Holly Barker. This time out, Holly is trying to get her life back together after the shattering loss of her fiancé. With the help of her wily Doberman, Daisy, and her father, Ham, she throws herself back into the job with a vengeance. At a local restaurant, Holly and Ham meet a gentleman new to the area, rich and dapper developer Ed Shine, who has found an evocative name for both his favorite flower and his latest real-estate venture: the "Blood Orchid".

When true-crime writer Olivia Cruz disappears with no signs of foul play, her new boyfriend, Lincoln Sharp, suspects the worst. He knows she didn’t leave willingly and turns to attorney Morgan Dane and PI Lance Kruger to find her before it’s too late. As they dig through Olivia’s life, they are shocked to discover a connection between her current book research on two cold murder cases and the suicide of one of Morgan’s prospective clients.

When Hazel Nash was six years old, her father taught her: Mysteries need to be solved. He should know. Hazel's father is Jack Nash, the host of America's favorite conspiracy TV show, The House of Secrets. Even as a child, she loved hearing her dad's tall tales, especially the one about a leather book belonging to Benedict Arnold that was hidden in a corpse. Now, years later, Hazel wakes up in the hospital and remembers nothing, not even her own name. She's told she's been in a car accident that killed her father and injured her brother.

For FBI agent Blake Wilder, the past is inescapable. And the one lead she had, regarding the mysteries of her past, only led to dead bodies and dead ends. When Blake is assigned a new case, they find that their victim has been stuffed into a barrel — in pieces. Their search for the killer propels them onto a grim and twisted path filled with confusion and false leads. And for the first time in her career, Blake fears that she may not be able to solve this gruesome case.

It has been ten years since 21-year-old Kevin MacKenzie, Jr. ("Mac"), has been missing. A Columbia University senior, about to graduate and already enrolled in Duke University Law School, he walked out of his room in Manhattan's Upper West Side without a word to his college roommate and has never been seen again. However, he does make three ritual phone calls to his mother every year: on her birthday, on his birthday, and on Mother's Day.

It seems that the change that FBI agent Blake Wilder dreaded has been forced upon her. Still reeling from the aftermath of the shakeup, Blake packs up and attempts to adjust to her new reality. Upon arrival at the new office, the team receives an alert about escaped convicts from a prison transport traveling from Indiana. At the scene of the crime, the team finds one dead guard and a ton of bullet casings. Three inmates have escaped, and the rest of the prisoners in the transport have been rounded up.

Juniper Song knows secrets - how to keep them and how to search them out. As a girl, noir fiction was her favorite escape, and Philip Marlowe has always been her literary idol. So when her friend, Luke, asks her to investigate a possible affair between his father and a young employee, Juniper (or "Song" as her friends call her) finds an opportunity to play detective.

When a local girl falls prey to a sadistic serial killer, Nashville homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson and her lover, FBI profiler Dr. John Baldwin, find themselves in a joint investigation pursuing a vicious murderer. The Southern Strangler is slaughtering his way through the Southeast, leaving a gruesome memento at each crime scene – the prior victim’s severed hand.