Serial Killer Mystery Fiction

A young woman falls from a vehicle speeding down a quiet road. Battered and bruised, she turns her head to the person who comes to her aid. ‘Help her’, she whispers before her eyes close. Days later, the body of another young girl is found in a shallow grave just a few miles away. The similarities between the two girls are startling, same age, same frail body, same shocking red hair.

Saturday morning, a rare day off for Detective Maddie Ives. She's about to have a relaxing shower with her boyfriend Vince when she gets the call: There's been another one... Ron and Sandy Blackman's brutalised bodies are found in the hallway of their isolated rural home. They've been stabbed multiple times; Ron's hands are tied tightly behind his back; Sandy has several fingernails ripped out. The safe has been forced open. This is the second house of horrors that Maddie and her team have been called out to in a matter of days.

They called him Leonardo - a master skilled in the art of murder. One year ago, Cincinnati was his canvas. A scalpel was his tool. And women were his works-in-progress. FBI profiler Casey McKinley was one of them, a victim of Leonardo's twisted genius. She has the scars - and the nightmares - to prove it. For Casey, a new city means a life far from the one she left behind in Cincinnati. In San Francisco she finally feels safe. Until a series of eerily familiar slayings plunges her back into Leonardo's game.

Dismembered bodies of women for hire litter the sides of the road in rural Tennessee. It has happened before, 30 years prior. Not knowing if the murders are that of a copycat or the original killer making a reappearance, Agent Hank Rawlings, along with Agent Beth Harper, is once again dispatched to the scene. With little help from the local authorities and limited resources at their disposal, Hank, Beth, and a local agent are tasked with pulling back the layers of deceit to circle closer to the man responsible.

While DI Nicola Tanner investigates the deadly spread of a dangerous new drug, Tom Thorne is handed a case that he doesn't take too seriously, until a spate of animal killings points to the work of a serial killer. When the two cases come together in a way that neither could have foreseen, both Thorne and Tanner must risk everything to catch two very different killers.

Rooker Lindström is a reluctant consultant for the Minnesota PD. He can provide a window into evil. His horrifying past gives him the edge. When the body of a woman—missing for eight years—is pulled from the lake, evil comes knocking again. This time with a note meant just for Rooker: Won’t you come out and play?

When the body of a doctor is discovered brutally murdered in local woodland, Detective Kim Stone is shocked to discover the victim is Gordon Cordell - a man linked to a previous case she worked on involving the death of a young schoolgirl. Gordon has a chequered past, but who would want him dead? As the investigation gets underway, Gordon’s son is involved in a horrific car crash which leaves him fighting for his life. Kim's sure this was no accident.

Melissa Sanderson is the perfect wife and mother. She dotes on her daughter and lives in her dream home in a quiet cul-de-sac in the suburbs. But looks can be deceiving. Something is amiss in that house - all the neighbors think so. Some say Melissa is having an affair. Others say she’s been drinking too much. Then one night, sirens wake up the whole neighborhood. Melissa Sanderson is dead.

It’s hiking season in Black Rock Falls, and the small town in Montana is flooded with visitors. But when a hiker finds a human skull on a deserted trail in the woods that surround the town, Detective Jenna Alton is called in to investigate. With no missing persons reported, Jenna has no leads. Then her team makes a shocking discovery - the body of another hiker, a young man, tied to a tree and riddled with bullets. Could the two murders be linked? As more bodies are found, Jenna and her deputy David Kane know that they must venture deep into the forest to find and face the killer.

On a cold morning a cyclist finds the brutally-slaughtered body of a woman in her car, on a remote lane leading to the long-abandoned Irish village of Kelly’s Forge. But when Detective Finnegan Beck arrives from the nearby town of Cross Beg to investigate he notices there’s a baby’s seat in the back of the car. A bottle of baby’s milk lying in the footwell. And no child. Little Róisín isn’t the first child to go missing from that same remote location though. There was another baby girl, taken more than 50 years before, who was never found.

When Penny Dahl calls the Finders Keepers detective agency hoping for help locating her missing daughter, Holly is reluctant to accept the case. Her partner, Pete, has Covid. Her (very complicated) mother has just died. And Holly is meant to be on leave. But something in Penny Dahl’s desperate voice makes it impossible for Holly to turn her down.

A struggling actor, a Brit in America without a green card, Claire needs work and money to survive. Then she gets both. But nothing like she expected. Claire agrees to become a decoy for a firm of divorce lawyers. Hired to entrap straying husbands, she must catch them on tape with their seductive propositions. Then the game changes. When the wife of one of Claire’s targets is violently murdered, the cops are sure the husband is to blame. Desperate to catch him before he kills again, they enlist Claire to lure him into a confession.

The first time the Donovan twins, Lucas and Jamie, saw a Canadian Northwest Mounted Police officer, they knew that's what they wanted to be when they grew up. Years later, Lucas Donovan, now a member of the force, is on a mission to bring a ruthless serial killer to justice. For years, Jack Emerson has eluded capture in the vast Canadian wilderness, but now Donovan has vowed that nothing on earth will stop him from seeing this man caught and punished. The oath is both personal and professional, since one of the men Emerson killed was Constable Jamie Donovan, Lucas' twin brother.

Twenty years ago, in the seaside town of Galveston, Texas, Annie Randall took her dog for a walk. The dog returned. Annie did not. When her body was found, cruelly broken and posed like a runner, there was only ever one suspect: Annie’s husband, Frank. Now he’s served his time and come home–but the locals won’t let him forget. Especially when there’s a new ‘running girl’ murder…

Hillary Greene has returned to Thames Valley Police HQ, acting as a cold-case consultant for the Crime Review Team, looking into murders which the police have never been able to solve. She wasn't sure she wanted to go back. But solving crimes is irresistible for Hillary Greene. And it doesn't hurt that her new boss is devastatingly handsome.

A series of bizarre assaults is mystifying Boston police: an unknown attacker is viciously beating random strangers and leaving a note quoting an old warning about witchcraft. History professor Alex Maple was one of the victims, and now he's gone missing. Vickie Preston is certain that someone has taken her friend for malicious purposes. She's having blood-drenched visions that seem to be staining her waking life, and the escalating attacks suggest that a dangerous cult is at work behind the scenes.

It is 1985. Detective Inspector Mungo ‘Bob’ Willis is being forced out of Avon and Somerset Police on medical grounds. His career is in tatters, his body broken, his mind shattered, and his partner—DS Lizzie Harper—dead in a sting operation gone wrong. Their last case is closed, but Bob is convinced an innocent man has been framed, leaving a serial killer cruising the A303 with impunity, free to target lone women who have broken down by the roadside late at night.

For Helen and George, the remote fixer-upper in Cornwall was supposed to be a dream home, and a way to leave behind the problems they’re both running from. But something about the place feels wrong from day one. And why does Helen have a creeping feeling she’s seen this house before?

FBI analyst Kassidy Bishop is assigned to the "'For You' Killer" task force after a series of sadistic murders bearing the same signature arise in different parts of the country. The homicides are both calculated and savage, occurring in different states, but bearing the same signature: the words "for you" scribbled at each crime scene. The case chills Kassidy, bringing back memories of her own encounter with a violent criminal five years earlier.

Twenty years ago, Dennis Danson was arrested and imprisoned for the brutal murder of a young girl. Now he's the subject of a true-crime documentary that's whipping up a frenzy online to uncover the truth and free a man who has been wrongly convicted. A thousand miles away in England, Samantha is obsessed with Dennis's case. She exchanges letters with him, and is quickly won over by his apparent charm and kindness to her. Soon she has left her old life behind to marry him and campaign for his release. When the campaign is successful and Dennis is freed, however, Sam begins to discover new details that suggest he may not be quite so innocent after all. But how do you confront your husband when you don't want to know the truth? The winner of the Daily Mail First Novel Competition, Amy Lloyd's The Innocent Wife is gripping psychological suspense from a brilliant new voice in crime fiction.