Serial Killer Thrillers Fiction

John Wayne Cleaver is dangerous, and he knows it. He's obsessed with serial killers, but really doesn't want to become one. So for his own sake, and the safety of those around him, he lives by rigid rules he's written for himself, practicing normal life as if it were a private religion that could save him from damnation. Dead bodies are normal to John. They don't demand or expect the empathy he's unable to offer. Perhaps that's what gives him the objectivity to recognize that there's something different about the body the police have just found behind the Wash-n-Dry Laundromat - and to appreciate what that difference means.

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. Then another family is butchered, and another. As Emily fits the puzzle pieces together, she makes a chilling discovery: The killer is coming after her and her daughter....

Jonathan Stride and Serena Dial are both investigating high-profile murders in Las Vegas. A celebrity is assassinated during a fling with a prostitute, and a young boy is killed in a brutal hit-and-run incident. When the cases converge, Jonathan and Serena find themselves racing the clock against a determined serial killer and searching for a connection to the unsolved murder of a showgirl years earlier.

Hazel and Fox are an ordinary married couple with a baby. Except for one small thing: they're murderers. Well, they used to be. They had it all. An enviable London lifestyle, five-star travels, and plenty of bad men to rid from the world. Then Hazel got pregnant. Now, they’re just another mom-and-dad-and-baby. They gave up vigilante justice for life in the suburbs: arranged play dates instead of body disposals, diapers over daggers, mommy conversations instead of the sweet seduction right before a kill. And Hazel finds her new life terribly dull.

In 1985, Edward Shank famously gunned down the Beacon Hill Butcher, ending the serial killer’s reign of terror over the city of Seattle. But now in his eighties, Edward’s action-packed glory days are long behind him. The decorated former Seattle police chief has given up his high-maintenance Victorian home to his grandson Matt for a quiet life at the nearby Sweetbay Village Retirement Residence, where mac-n-cheese Wednesdays have become the highlight of his week.

The lights are on at the Singleton vacation home on Lopez Island, Washington, illuminating the horror within. The family is found dead, and the police's main suspect - the property caretaker - has disappeared. In her secluded vineyard home two hours away, Laura Gretchell is on edge. Her husband is out of town on business, and the children are understandably shaken. Laura tries to tell herself there's no reason to fear. Then the door handle rattles, and the real terror begins.

The site of the old campus bungalow where two girls were brutally slain is now a flower patch covered with chrysanthemums. It's been 50 years since the Immaculate Conception Murders. Three more students and a teacher were killed in a sickening spree that many have forgotten. But there is one person who knows every twisted detail... Hannah O'Rourke and her volatile half-sister, Eden, have little in common except a parent. Yet they've ended up at the same small college outside Chicago, sharing a bungalow with another girl.

Recently ghosted and sick of watching her friends fade into the suburbs, thirty-something Hannah finds community in a true-crime forum that’s on a mission to solve the murders of four women in Atlanta. After William, a handsome lawyer, is arrested for the killings, Hannah begins writing him letters. It’s the perfect outlet for her pent-up frustration and rage. The exercise empowers her, and even feels healthy at first. Until William writes back.

The first book in the best-selling series that has garnered over a million fans across the globe. Retired homicide detective Thomas Prescott is reluctant to read the bestselling true-crime thriller, Eight in October. After all, it was his case, and he doesn’t need to be reminded of the gruesome details. The book dubbed the serial killer, Tristen Grayer, The MAINEiac. Grayer is allegedly dead, but only Prescott knows the truth: Grayer is alive and lurking in the shadows.

The bodies are found in towns and cities around Puget Sound. The young women who are the victims had nothing in common - except the agony of their final moments. But somebody carefully chose them to stalk, capture, and torture...a depraved killer whose cunning is matched only by the depth of his bloodlust. But the dying has only just begun. And the next victim will be the most shocking of all....

After getting canned from the Seattle PD, brilliant, wisecracking Thomas Prescott follows his sister Lacy to Philadelphia, where she swims on the Drexel University team. While Thomas’s slapstick antics mask a keen analytic mind, it’s his nose for trouble that leads him again and again into dicey situations. The ex–homicide detective is not long in Philly before getting caught up in two high-powered criminal cases. Thomas stumbles into a crime scene amid the Occupy Philadelphia protests. Activist Brooke Wexley has been strangled within sight of city hall.

Everyone has secrets.... The beautiful young judge. The hardworking waitress. The handsome college student. Some are meant to be kept.... The victims are all different, but they will all have one gruesome detail in common. But others can kill.... A clever serial killer is stalking the streets of Seattle. Searching for this next victim. Creating a monument of madness that will be built victim by victim, piece by piece, bone by bone....

In 1919, Kathryn Wombacher finds a lonely-hearts ad placed by one Walter Andrew: "Would be pleased to correspond with a refined young lady or widow. Object, matrimony.” Kathryn and Walter fall in love and marry within weeks. What Kathryn doesn’t know...is that her new husband is really James “Bluebeard” Watson, a notorious West Coast serial killer who catfished and married 22 women, murdering 10.

When Matt Ballard was starting out his career, three boys were murdered in the same area, the remote and bleak Gibbet Fen. When the main suspect was killed in a hit-and-run, the killings stopped. But Matt was not satisfied that the real murderer had been caught. Over 25 years later, Matt gets a photo in an unmarked envelope. It's of the Gibbet Fen crime scene. And the picture was taken before the murder took place. More photos arrive, relating to the historic murders, as well as intimate pictures of Matt's very secret private life.

Three bodies, three different towns. Each victim was a sorority girl - pretty, privileged, and brutally murdered. There are no fingerprints, no clues. He is scrupulously careful, craving those exquisite seconds when the light fades from his victim's eyes. But the rush never lasts, and the killing won't stop - not until one special woman has been made to suffer....

Three Chicago women have been found strangled, embalmed, and posed as if still alive. Doubting the findings of the local PD’s profiler, the FBI calls on forensic psychologist Zoe Bentley to investigate. Zoe quickly gets off on the wrong foot with her new partner, Special Agent Tatum Gray. Zoe’s a hunter, intense and focused; Tatum’s a smug maverick with little respect for the rules.

Midlands police chase a serial killer who inflicts death by the new urban weapon of choice. Given the targets seem enveloped in love affairs and deceitful liaisons, Chief Inspector Gavin Roscoe suspects a motive of jealousy and revenge. But as the number of victims increases, the connection between them wears thin. Is it really a broken heart holding the crossbow? And if it's not some crazed Cupid, who has their finger on the trigger? Plucky Detective Sergeant Sunita Roy doesn't think they are looking in the right places. Yet without evidence, her theory won't hold water.

A known serial killer is once again taking lives in Chicago. Bodies drained of blood are being strewn across the city. For former Tampa homicide sergeant, Hank Rawlings, tracking down the man responsible for the killings becomes his first assignment at his new position, agent in the FBI's homicide division of the serial crimes unit. Almost before the ink dries on the new job's acceptance papers, Hank finds himself in Chicago, knee-deep in an investigation with a mounting body count.

Despite a childhood in the care system, Anna Price has beaten the odds and built for herself the perfect life, complete with beautiful seaside home, devoted husband and a job she loves. Then a policeman appears at Anna’s door: her estranged brother Henry is a wanted serial killer, and the police need Anna’s help to catch him before he strikes again. When an envelope turns up on her doorstep, Anna suddenly finds herself caught in a sick game. One that she remembers all too well from childhood – one that, this time, she must win at all costs.

When the body of a young woman is found in her own backyard, a week after her disappearance, evidence leads investigators to a chilling conclusion. She is not the first victim of a serial killer no one knew existed. She most definitely is not the last. FBI Special Agent Tess Winnett joins the local detectives assigned to the case and searches for answers in the intriguing investigation that offers a plethora of forensic evidence, yet no viable leads. When another body is found, the search intensifies, and details about the killer's unusual signature emerge.