Small Town Crime

The first body should have been a warning. The second, a cry for help. By the third, Deputy Sue Calhoun knows a killer is hunting in Willow Creek—and she's running out of time. Then he arrives. Pastor Will Hayes has eyes that see straight through her defenses and a smile that makes her forget she's sworn off charming men. When he takes her hand during Sunday service, Sue feels something she thought was dead—hope. But as she falls deeper under his spell, the bodies keep piling up, and a horrifying pattern emerges. Is he the salvation her broken heart desperately needs—or the predator ...

"I can explain." That's what everyone says when they're caught breaking the law. City Council Commissioner Sloane Bishop is a murderer. I don't think she meant to kill her abusive ex. But when I walk through the door, he's breathing his last. I was on my way to do the job myself; too bad she beat me to it. Now the cops want to know what happened. They're sniffing around and asking questions. Sloane has a choice: marry me or go to prison. After all, they can't make your husband testify against you... It's a spousal privilege marriage of convenience. Filthy Sinner is the third book in The ...

New sheriff Bree Taggert is called to a shooting in a campground shuttered for the winter. But she arrives to find a perplexing crime. There is no shooter, no victim, and no blood. No one but Bree believes the sole witness, Alyssa, a homeless teenager who insists she saw her friend shot. Bree calls in former deputy Matt Flynn and his K-9 to track the killer and search for Alyssa’s friend. They discover the battered corpse of a missing university student under the ice in Grey Lake - but it’s not the victim they were looking for.

Magpie Beach is a quiet seaside town – full of small-town prejudices and small-town cliques. Meg, Rosemary and Lily are all outsiders. Meg and Lily because they came to Magpie Beach to escape their former lives, Rosemary because her upbringing was the subject of much local gossip and upturned noses. The three women come together as friends, partly because their homes are so close together on the outskirts of town – and partly because their neighbors treat them with such suspicion. When Jessie Else goes missing – it's easy to see why this small band of outcasts are first on the list of suspect.

The presumption was murder. Everyone assumed they knew the killer… …but what if they were wrong about the crime? It was the most beautiful house on the lake. When a girl’s remains are found on the property, Bill Miller seems to know something. For ten years, there had been whispers about what happened to the girl. What was he hiding? Her case wasn’t Luca’s priority. Between his sick wife and The Park Shore Murder, his plate was full. The press was all over it and he needed to find out who murdered the innocent woman relaxing in her backyard. Worth millions, but without any known ...

Part human comedy and part mystery, Lies the Mushroom Pickers Told is an enthralling, masterful story about what holds a village together and what keeps people apart. When journalist Patrick Bracken returns to Gohen, the Irish village where he was born, he knows the eyes of the townspeople are on him. He has come home to investigate two deaths that happened decades earlier when he was a child, deaths that were ruled accidental.

When trouble walks in, there’s no choice but to hold on tight for the ride. Two years before, Shaw Woodward watched the love of his life walk down the aisle to another man. Since then, life has kicked him in the balls and lifted him up several times. Just so happens he’s on the downward dip of that cycle right now. After a difficult mission in the Ranger Ops unit, he’s struggled to keep his focus, and his captain is forcing him to seek help. He just never expected to walk into the shrink’s office to find the woman he loved seated behind the desk in sexy secretary glasses with her ...

The betrayal of those closest burns most of all.... Hoping for a fresh start, an English family moves to the remote Shetland islands, eager to give their autistic son a better life. But when a young nanny's body is found hanging in the barn beside their home, rumors of her affair with the husband spread like wildfire. As suspicion and resentment of the family blazes in the community, Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez is called in to investigate. He knows it will mean his boss, Willow Reeves, returning to run the investigation, and confronting their complex relationship.

When Tiffany, Rosie and Nanna go to a silent meditation retreat, they don’t expect much excitement… … until the meditation teacher, “Master Zenon,” is found murdered. Roped into investigating, the trio uncover a host of unexpected secrets. From a scammer pretending to be enlightened, to a student with a dark connection to the meditation guru, to a guest pretending to be someone they’re not… But who, among all these retreat guests, hated Master Zenon enough to kill him? Praise for A.R. Winters: "The perfect balance of being lighthearted, but still a serious page-turning mystery...

Blue Bonet, a well-known watercolorist in the Texas Hill Country, looks forward to a peaceful summer of painting. She has a backlog of commissions to complete and believes her lakeside studio ideal for the task. However, her small hometown of Magnolia Bluff has an astonishing number of murders, and this summer is no different. When a woman is killed in City Park the lazy small-town cops are quick to suspect an easy roundup: Fergus, the town drunk. Blue and her best friend, Gloria, take on Fergus’s defense drawing the ire of nosy bodies who want Fergus tarred and feathered. Along with ...

The thrilling sequel to the Amazon Top 50 Bestseller! Curtis Mackley thought he had escaped Blind River, but the past is never truly gone. . . FBI Agent Curtis Mackley survived Blind River, but he hasn’t managed to put it behind him just yet. When Curtis and his Partner, Frankie Lassiter, are assigned to investigate the suicide of a revered 4-star general, they are thrust into a mission will take them deep into a mystery spanning twenty years and an organization with power that Curtis and Frankie can barely fathom. Meanwhile, a reporter from Blind River is about to get a book published ...

Beartown is a small town in a large Swedish forest. For most of the year it is under a thick blanket of snow, experiencing the kind of cold and dark that brings people closer together - or pulls them apart. Its isolation means that Beartown has been slowly shrinking with each passing year. But now the town is on the verge of an astonishing revival. A bright new future is just around the corner. Until the day it is all put in jeopardy by a single, brutal act. It divides the town into those who think it should be hushed up and forgotten, and those who'll risk the future to see justice done.

Whether in Truman Capote’s detailed murder of the Clutter family or Ted Bundy’s small-town charm, criminals have always roamed rural America and towns worldwide. Featuring murder stories, criminal case studies, and more, The Best New True Crime Stories: Small Towns contains all-new accounts from writers of true crime, crime journalism, and crime fiction. And these entries are not based on a true story - they are true stories. Edited by acclaimed author and anthologist Mitzi Szereto, the stories in this volume span the globe.

Weaver and fiber artist Edith “Pen” Meyer knew her friend Sandy Merritt’s relationship with a married man was wrong. She had even urged Sandy to take out a restraining order against Kenneth Carpenter. Which was why her call to Sandy on February 23, 2005, seemed to come from out of the blue. During it, she told Sandy to drop the restraining order and get back together with Ken. Pen was never seen again. One man stood to gain from Pen’s disappearance: Ken Carpenter. But evidence was bleak: no blood, no DNA, no body. Until detectives found notes hidden....

Wayne Sharp newer expected his life to turn like that... Dishonorably discharged, he tries to build his life from the beginning in Clayton, New Mexico. He never expected to be attracted so deeply to the woman in trouble, in trouble beyond hope... Trying to help her, he becomes involved in the dark secrets of the town. The deeper Wayne got, the crazier it became. Can he eventually free up himself and start to live a normal life? Book 5 of the Dishonorably Discharged Series.

As kids, Amelia and Kylee were found unharmed in their upstairs bedroom the night their teenage cousin Grace, who was babysitting them, vanished from the farmhouse in Beaumont, Missouri, leaving blood all over the kitchen. Scrappy and driven, Grace, the first in their family to go to college instead of getting married and working at the meatpacking plant, had been on the verge of escaping their dead-end town. Her disappearance is a warning to any local girl who dared hope for better.

No one should die on their birthday! It should be one of life’s rules. Super-rich John Newberry, the most hated man in Nettleton Top, is murdered at his own lavish birthday party but no one hears or sees anything. How can that happen in a mansion overflowing with guests? Unless they each have something to hide? Can the mystery be solved? The clues are there… if you can find them. Local society columnist and amateur detective, Nettie Pidgeon is on the case. Can she discover who the killer is before they strike again? Helping her along is her granddaughter Libby, who runs the Mrs. ...

I thought there was no way to escape my arranged marriage to a crime boss. Until my biker ex-boyfriend kidnaps me. I'm being forced to marry the heir to a criminal empire to save my family’s business. My fiance is filthy rich, diabolically ruthless, and my living nightmare. I'm trapped in hell with the devil himself. Until my ex-boyfriend appears. And kidnaps me. When I first met my ex, Jackson, he was just the boy from the wrong side of the tracks. The forbidden crush my parents forced me to stay away from. Now he’s back. With the road name Bullet on his biker cut With tattoos, ...

As Sheriff Clayton Burroughs tries to juggle fatherhood, his job, and his recovery from being shot in the confrontation that killed his two criminally inclined brothers last year, he’s doing all he can just to survive. Yet after years of carefully toeing the line between his life in law enforcement and his family, he finally has to make a choice. When a rival organization makes a first foray into Burroughs' territory, leaving a trail of bodies and a whiff of fear in its wake, Clayton is pulled back into the life he so desperately wants to leave behind.

In a tale inspired by real events, pregnant journalist Joan Harken is cautiously excited to follow her fiancé back to his Minnesota hometown. After spending a childhood on the move and chasing the screams and swirls of news-rich city life, she’s eager to settle down. Lilydale’s motto, “Come Home Forever,” couldn’t be more inviting. And yet, something is off in the picture-perfect village. The friendliness borders on intrusive. Joan can’t shake the feeling that every move she makes is being tracked. An archaic organization still seems to hold the town in thrall.