Billy Summers is a man in a room with a gun. He’s a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he’ll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. But first there is one last hit. Billy is among the best snipers in the world, a decorated Iraq war vet, a Houdini when it comes to vanishing after the job is done. So what could possibly go wrong?

Thirty years ago, Wilde was found as a boy living feral in the woods, with no memory of his past. Now an adult, he still doesn't know where he comes from, and another child has gone missing. No one seems to take Naomi Pine's disappearance seriously, not even her father - with one exception. Hester Crimstein, a television criminal attorney, knows through her grandson that Naomi was relentlessly bullied at school. Hester asks Wilde - with whom she shares a tragic connection - to use his unique skills to help find Naomi.

David Burroughs was once a devoted father to his three-year-old son Matthew, living a dream life just a short drive away from the working-class suburb where he and his wife, Cheryl, first fell in love—until one fateful night when David woke suddenly to discover Matthew had been murdered while David was asleep just down the hall.

Naomi Shaw used to believe in magic. Twenty-two years ago, she and her two best friends, Cassidy and Olivia, spent the summer roaming the woods, imagining a world of ceremony and wonder. They called it the Goddess Game. The summer ended suddenly when Naomi was attacked. Miraculously, she survived her seventeen stab wounds and lived to identify the man who had hurt her. The girls’ testimony put away a serial killer, wanted for murdering six women. They were heroes.

Lieutenant Abby Mullen is no stranger to crisis. As the hostage negotiation instructor for the NYPD, she deals with worst-case scenarios every day. Nothing fazes her anymore. That all changes when she gets a call from Eden Fletcher, a fellow survivor of the infamous Wilcox cult. The two haven’t spoken since the night of a tragic, fiery massacre, when their paths diverged. But now Eden needs Abby’s help: someone has kidnapped her son and is demanding a $5 million ransom. As Abby throws herself into the case, she can’t help but wonder why the kidnapper has targeted Eden.

In the summer of 1974 a heatwave blankets Boston and Mary Pat Fennessey is trying to stay one step ahead of the bill collectors. Mary Pat has lived her entire life in the projects of “Southie,” the Irish American enclave that stubbornly adheres to tradition and stands proudly apart. One night Mary Pat’s teenage daughter Jules stays out late and doesn’t come home. That same evening, a young Black man is found dead, struck by a subway train under mysterious circumstances. Mary Pat, propelled by a desperate search for her daughter, begins turning over stones best left untouched.

When British twenty-somethings Ruth and Adam are offered the chance to spend the summer housesitting in New York, they can’t say no. Young, in love and on the cusp of professional success, they feel as if luck is finally on their side. So the moment that Eden turns up on the doorstep, drenched from a summer storm, it seems only right to share a bit of that good fortune. Beautiful and charismatic, Eden claims to be a friend of the homeowners, who told her she could stay whenever she was in New York. They know you’re not supposed to talk to strangers....

A lifeless girl slips into the river, cold and crumpled. Her body washes away with the rain. Her killer remains a mystery. Sheriff Elven Hallie has been longing for a new case that would add some excitement to his small-town life. But a dead girl wasn’t what he expected. On the last murder case he worked, he was just a deputy with an experienced Sheriff to guide him and they were looking for an outsider. This time, he’s in charge, and the killer is part of their community.

Tech millionaire Miles Cookson has more money than he can ever spend and everything he could dream of - except time. He has recently been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and there is a 50 percent chance that it can be passed on to the next generation. For Miles, this means taking a long hard look at his past. Two decades ago, a young, struggling Miles was a sperm donor. Somewhere out there, he has kids - nine of them. And they might be about to inherit both the good and the bad from him - maybe his fortune, or maybe something much worse.

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.

Growing up poor in rural Georgia, Bree Cabbat’s single mother warned her that the world was a dark and scary place. Bree rejected her mother’s fearful outlook, and life has proved her right. Marrying into a family with wealth, power, and connections, Bree has all a woman could ever dream: a loving lawyer husband, two talented young teenage daughters, a new baby boy, a gorgeous home, and every opportunity in the world. Until the day Bree awakens and sees a witch peering into her bedroom window, an old gray-haired woman all dressed in black who vanishes as quickly as she appears.

Gretch Wolgast is a bit of a dud. Just ask her. She’s a 21-year-old college dropout who has a loser job at the mall. Sure, she can lift a tennis ball with her telekinetic powers. But only three feet in the air. And she has to be sitting. Gretch is an OP, one of thousands born in Orlando, Florida, in the early 1980s who mysteriously developed the ability to move things with their minds. Unfortunately, she turned out to be the weakest of the bunch. Now, Gretch’s life is being turned upside down. She witnesses a murder and discovers a wide-ranging conspiracy.

Former Chicago cop Selena "Lena" Dane has been going through the motions at her private investigation agency for years now. But then Lena learns that she's unexpectedly pregnant just as she takes on a heartbreaking new client: Nate Christianti, a fourteen-year-old boy in search of his biological father, Jason. Jason's disappearance isn't as clear-cut as everyone had thought, and Lena will need to follow his path of destruction halfway across the country to find Nate some answers.

Santa's helpers don't always dispose of bodies, but that's what Tucker Smith is doing right now. Specifically, the body of his own Santa - one of thousands worldwide - who was just murdered in an apparent random act of violence. Now, Tucker will have to somehow manage to deliver Christmas to his assigned region while he struggles to patch things up with his family, all while training the replacement sent to him by The Organization and trying to uncover the mystery of who killed Santa. And there's only five days left until Christmas.

Rookie cop Carrie Santero has always been fascinated by serial killers. As a teenager, she wrote a letter to Charles Manson in prison - and received a chilling reply. Then she came face to face with a child murderer in her small Pennsylvania town, an encounter that haunts her to this day. Now, as a detective in training, she finally has her chance to make a difference; to hunt down a psychopathic sadist who embodies the very nature of evil itself.

Ellery Hathaway knows a thing or two about serial killers, but not through her police training. She's an officer in sleepy Woodbury, Massachusetts, where a bicycle theft still makes the newspapers. No one there knows she was once victim number 17 in the grisly story of serial killer Francis Michael Coben. The only victim who lived. When three people disappear from her town in three years, all around her birthday - the day she was kidnapped so long ago - Ellery fears someone knows her secret. Someone very dangerous.

On the surface, Chief Dove Carnahan is a true trailblazer who would do anything to protect the rural Pennsylvanian countryside where she has lived all 50 of her years. Traditional and proud of her blue-collar sensibilities, Dove is loved by her community. But beneath her badge lies a dark and self-destructive streak, fed by a secret she has kept since she was 16.

Thirty years ago, Wilde was found as a boy living feral in the woods, with no memory of his past. Now an adult, he still doesn't know where he comes from, and another child has gone missing. No one seems to take Naomi Pine's disappearance seriously, not even her father - with one exception. Hester Crimstein, a television criminal attorney, knows through her grandson that Naomi was relentlessly bullied at school. Hester asks Wilde - with whom she shares a tragic connection - to use his unique skills to help find Naomi.

It's been said that all great literature boils down to one of two stories—a man takes a journey, or a stranger comes to town. While mystery writers have been successfully using both approaches for generations, there's something undeniably alluring in the nature of a stranger: the uninvited guest, the unacquainted neighbor, the fish out of water. In the newest collection of stories by the Mystery Writers of America, each author weaves a fresh tale surrounding the eerie feeling that comes when a stranger enters our midst, featuring stories by prolific mystery writers.

Jay Brodsky is an enigma. To his fellow agents at the FBI’s cybercrimes division. To his new partner. Even to himself. For someone whose skills are beyond question, he often seems just on the edge of losing control. He seldom speaks about his family and his personal life, but he seems to be hiding something. And he has an unusual obsession with even the most obscure punk rock. So when a mysterious cyber-terrorist organization begins erasing Americans’ medical debt, Jay must put his personal issues aside to focus on an attack that threatens to destabilize the US economy.