Dark Crime Thrillers

Welcome back to your darkest nightmare. I am Death, and they've stripped away my mask of mercy. My little lamb, I will paint the streets red until you're safe in my arms again.

As a boy, Evan Smoak was taken from the orphanage he called home and inducted into a top secret Cold War programme. Trained as a lethal weapon, he and his fellow recruits were sent round the world to do the government's dirty work. But the programme was rotten to the core. And now the man responsible needs things to be nice and clean. All evidence must be destroyed. That includes Evan. To survive, Evan's going to have to take the fight to his nemesis. There's just one problem with that. Jonathan Bennett is President of the United States, and Evan isn't his only victim.

You probably already know my name. Lucy Chase, the woman who doesn’t remember murdering her best friend. Even though they couldn’t find enough evidence to charge me, I know you all think I did it. That’s OK. I realise being found wandering the streets the next day covered in her blood wasn't a great look. Believe me, I’m as frustrated as you are. I’d love to know if I’m a murderer – it’s the sort of thing you really should know about yourself, isn’t it? And now, thanks to true-crime podcast Listen for the Lie, I finally have the chance to find out.

When property developer Connor Clive Blaydon is found dead, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks and his Yorkshire team dive into the investigation. As luck would have it, someone had installed a cache of spy-cams all around his luxurious home. The team hope that they’ll find answers - and the culprit - among the video recordings. Instead of discovering Connor's murderer, however, the grainy and blurred footage reveals another crime: a brutal rape

In a secluded farm house in the Pacific Northwest, a family has been slaughtered—and a teenage son has disappeared. Single mother and cop, Emily Kenyon spearheads a dark hunt for a killer. But Emily's teenage daughter Jenna is one step ahead of her. Jenna knows the boy suspected of murdering his family and wants to help him—perhaps too much. Then within days of the first murder, another family is killed, this time in Iowa. And on the heels of this brutal slaying, another follows in Salt Lake City. Eerie similarities link the crime scenes.

Private investigator Mickey Friday knows being a werewolf comes with complications, but when a massive were-bear named Trigger is found dead, she’s drawn into a case she can’t ignore. Trigger had been working to escape the dangerous world of shifter gangs, and his death is quickly dismissed as gang violence. But Mickey suspects something far more sinister. Her search for answers leads her to a secretive werewolf fight ring—a brutal arena where power and dominance rule. The deeper Mickey digs, the clearer it becomes that this isn’t just about shifters fighting for sport. The ring is ...

Helena Lanark is an elderly woman, living in a luxurious care home. The heiress of an immense family fortune, she keeps the secret to the horror which once occurred within the Lanark family house. Jane Tennison is leading a murder investigation into the recent brutal death of a young girl, her decomposed starved body discovered in an old air raid shelter in the garden of the Lanark's now derelict house. Initially the focus is on identifying the victim, until another body is found, hidden in the walls of the shelter.

When a gambling debt puts him between a rock and a swim in the Hudson with concrete shoes, Smithy has no choice but to take the worst job imaginable. The gig - as prey in a leprechaun hunt for a bunch of Wall Street jerks - goes as badly as it sounds. He could leave it there and write it off as a harsh lesson learned, but 14 months later when Smithy comes up with a plan to take his revenge on the man behind it all, it is too good to resist.

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.

Traumatised by the death of a child in her care, top London paediatrician Claire seeks refuge on remote Selkie Island in the wilds of the Irish Sea with her husband Daniel and their baby daughter Kitty. Hidden away in Daniel’s old family home, Claire hopes to be as cut off from her guilt as she is from the mainland, but can she find peace in a place so full of its own secrets? Twenty years earlier, Daniel’s parents left the island in a boat and never made it to the mainland.

At the end of a long, dark night Detectives Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch cross paths for the very first time. Detective Renée Ballard is working the graveyard shift again and returns to Hollywood Station in the early hours only to find that an older man has snuck in and is rifling through old file cabinets. The intruder is none other than legendary LAPD detective Harry Bosch, working a cold case that has gotten under his skin. Ballard kicks him out, but eventually Bosch persuades her to help, and she relents.

The Chicago Tribune has dubbed Elmore Leonard, “the coolest, hottest writer in America.” In the same league as the legendary great ones—John D. MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain—Leonard demonstrates his remarkable mastery with Get Shorty, one of the most adored of his forty-plus novels. The basis of the hit movie starring John Travolta and Danny DeVito, Get Shorty chronicles the over-the-top, sometimes violent Hollywood misadventures of a Florida mob loan shark who chases a deadbeat client all the way to Tinseltown and decides to stick around and make movies.

The sight of a goose feather at a murder scene modeled after a children’s poem is enough to make FBI special agent Fiona Kelly's blood turn to ice. Almost two decades ago, a feather was left with her sister's body—and with every subsequent victim of the Nursery Rhyme Killer. Now he's back. Only this time, his latest gruesome murder is a message to the only one who ever got away: Fiona.

Paul can't let an incident from his past go. When he finds out a rival detective agency played a key role in it, he drags MCM Investigations into a blood feud that they can't hope to win. Soon they're faced with the prospect of the company going out of business, and Brigit going out of her damn mind. When long-buried bodies are discovered in the Wicklow Mountains, Bunny's past starts closing in on him, too.

Attacked at home by an unknown assailant, meek Lucille Stevenson should be dead, but she isn’t. She should have called the police, she should have told her family, she should have done a lot of things, but she didn’t. Because what Lucille did to her attacker went far beyond self-defense. It was cold, brutal, and vicious; and if anyone found out, her life would be over. Unfortunately, her biggest problem isn't getting rid of the body; it's that she really enjoyed killing the man and can't wait to do it again...

Professor Hans Rekke is a world authority on interrogation techniques, capable of dizzying feats of logic and observation. He was born into wealth and power and has a picture-perfect wife and daughter. But he also has a fragile psyche that falls apart under pressure. Micaela Vargas is a street-smart police officer, the daughter of Chilean political refugees, who grew up in the projects on the outskirts of Stockholm and has two brothers on the wrong side of the law. She is tenacious and uncompromising, and desperate to prove herself to her fellow cops.

Harmony Black is much more than your average FBI special agent. In addition to being a practicing witch, she's also an operative for Vigilant Lock, an off-the-books program created to battle occult threats - by any means necessary. Despite her dedication to fighting the monsters threatening society, Harmony has become deeply conflicted about her job. Her last investigation resulted in a pile of dead bodies, and she suspects the wrong people are being punished for it.

In number-one New York Times best-selling author Charlaine Harris’s "Dahlia Underground,” venerable vampire Dahlia Lynley-Chivers survives an attack by an anti-vampire terrorist group, only to show them they tried to blow up the wrong bloodsucker. Bailey Ruth Raeburn, a ghost assigned to assist humans in trouble, steps into the middle of a marital dispute with surprising twists in Carolyn Hart’s “Riding High”....

Roman Melnikov is a deadly man in an expensive suit. I know what lies beneath the façade—the scars and tattoos that hint at the man he really is. He came here to find his sister, and his search led him to my dad and his friends. We both want to take them down, and the only way to do that is together. I had no idea how dangerous it would be, or that by the end of it, we'd all be covered in blood. Loving Roman is dangerous, but I can't let him go. His path is leading him straight to hell, and it looks like I'm coming along for the ride.

Rise the dark. These were the last words written in Lauren Novak's notebook before she was murdered in a strange Florida village. They've never meant anything to the police or to her husband, investigator Markus Novak. Now the man he believes killed her is out of prison and draws Markus to the place he's avoided for so long: the lonely road where his wife was shot to death beneath the cypress trees and Spanish moss in a town called Cassadaga.