Standalone Mysteries: Adult Core Collection

In this Core Collection you'll find mystery novels that exist as a standalone, a duology, or a trilogy. A wide range of mysteries exist on this list, from organized crime to private investigators to missing persons to murder.

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Abani, Chris

A detective on the brink of retirement and a psychiatrist with a guilty burden are brought together by a series of deaths in Las Vegas.

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Abbott, Megan E.

When a violent death rocks her close-knit gymnastics community weeks before an important competition, the mother of an Olympics hopeful works frantically to hold her family together in spite of being irresistibly drawn to the crime.

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Adams, Douglas

Quirky and bumbling private investigator Dirk Gently stumbles upon a ghost, millions of years old, wandering the earth and disturbing its people. Dirk soon discovers this phantom yearns for more than a good haunting: it is desperately trying to go back in time to prevent its own death. But this ghost was no ordinary person, and helping it save itself just might change the modern world as we know it. And not in a good way!

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Árbol, Víctor del

Gonzalo Gil is a lawyer stuck in a disaffected life, in a failed career, trying to dodge the constant manipulation of his powerful father. This monotonous existence is shaken up when he learns, after years without news of his estranged sister, Laura, that she has committed suicide in dramatic circumstances. Her death pushes the fragile balance of Gonzalo's life as both a father and husband to the limit.

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Asimov, Isaac

Detective Elijah Bailey and his robot partner R. Daneel Olivaw are sent to the Spacer world of Aurora to solve a bizarre case of roboticide.

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Atwood, Margaret

Takes readers into the life and mind of Grace Marks, one of the most notorious women of the 1840s, who is serving a life sentence for murders she claims she cannot remember.

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Auster, Paul

Moving at the breathless pace of a thriller, this uniquely stylized triology of detective novels begins with City of Glass, in which Quinn, a mystery writer, receives an ominous phone call in the middle of the night. He’s drawn into the streets of New York, onto an elusive case that’s more puzzling and more deeply-layered than anything he might have written himself.

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Ayatsuji, Yukito

The lonely, rockbound island of Tsunojima is notorious as the site of a series of bloody unsolved murders. Some even say it's haunted. One thing's for sure: it's the perfect destination for the K- University Mystery club's trip.

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Beukes, Lauren

A time-traveling serial killer is impossible to trace-- until one of his victims survives. In Depression-era Chicago, Harper Curtis finds a key to a house that opens on to other times. But it comes at a cost. He has to kill the shining girls: bright young women, burning with potential. He stalks them through their lives across different eras until, in 1989, one of his victims, Kirby Mazrachi, survives and starts hunting him back. Working with an ex-homicide reporter who is falling for her, Kirby has to unravel an impossible mystery.

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Bosco, María Angélica

In the early hours of the morning, a woman is found in the elevator of a plush apartment block on Santa Fe Road, Buenos Aires. She's young, gorgeous and dead, and it is immediately apparent that all the suspects have secrets to hide.

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Brown, Sandra

Basing her bestselling novel on the night her older sister Susan was murdered on a stormy Memorial Day eighteen years earlier, Bellamy Lyston Price, writing under a pseudonym, becomes the target of an unnamed assailant who either wants the truth about Susan's murder to remain unknown or, even more threatening, is determined to get vengeance for a man wrongfully accused and punished.

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Burnet, Graeme Macrae

The year is 1869. After a brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands, a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae is arrested for the crime. A memoir written by the accused makes it clear that he is guilty, but the police and the courts must decide what drove him to murder the local village constable. And why did he kill his other two victims? Was he insane? Or was this the act of a man in possession of his senses? Only the persuasive powers of his advocate stand between the killer and the gallows at Inverness. In this compelling and original novel, using the words of the accused, personal testimony, transcripts from the trial and newspaper reports, Graeme Macrae Burnet tells a moving story about the provisional nature of the truth, even when the facts are plain.

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Carr, Caleb

The year is 1896, and a serial killer is loose in New York City. His targets are poor young boys working as transvestite prostitutes. While the general public has little interest in the victims, Chief of Police Theodore Roosevelt wants the murderer stopped. He assembles a clandestine group of amateur detectives to track the killer.

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Carter, Stephen L.

In the peaceful New England university town of Elm Harbor, a murder threatens to unravel the thin veneer hiding the racial complications of the town's past, the hidden secrets of a prominent family, and African-American political influence in the United States.

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Chabon, Michael

In a world in which Alaska, rather than Israel, has become the homeland for the Jews following World War II, Detective Meyer Landsman and his half-Tlingit partner Berko investigate the death of a heroin-addicted chess prodigy.

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Chandler, Raymond

One of the classic detective novels that established the genre, The Big Sleep follows Philip Marlowe into an underworld of booze, violence, pornography, and sex, as he searches for the blackmailer of a millionaire's daughter.

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Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)

With his cherubic face and unworldly simplicity, his glasses and huge umbrella, Father Brown is one of the most unforgettable characters in literature.The Complete Father Brown Stories brings together all the stories featuring G. K. Chesterton’s amateur sleuth—plus two additional cases, “The Donnington Affair” and “The Mask of Midas,” that were discovered in Chesterton’s papers after his death. An introduction by Chesterton scholar Michael D. Hurley sheds new light on the beloved detective series.

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Christie, Agatha

Ten houseguests, trapped on an isolated island, are the prey of a diabolical killer. A famous nursery rhyme is framed and hung in every room of the mansion: Ten little Indian boys went out to dine; One choked his little self and then there were nine ... When they realize that murders are occurring as described in the rhyme, terror mounts. Who has choreographed this dastardly scheme? And who will be left to tell the tale?

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Clark, Mary Higgins

Nancy Harmon long ago fled the heartbreak of her first marriage, the macabre deaths of her two little children, and the shocking charges against her. She changed her name, dyed her hair, and left California for the windswept peace of Cape Cod. Now remarried, she has two more beloved children, and the terrible pain has begun to heal -- until the morning when she looks in the backyard for her little boy and girl and finds only one red mitten. She knows that the nightmare is beginning again ...

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Collins, Wilkie

The mysterious appearance of a woman dressed in all white leads to the discovery of a complicated plot involving a stolen inheritance.

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Connelly, Michael

Death is reporter Jack McEvoy's beat: his calling, his obsession. But this time, death brings McEvoy the story he never wanted to write--and the mystery he desperately needs to solve. A serial killer of unprecedented savagery and cunning is at large. His targets: homicide cops, each haunted by a murder case he couldn't crack. The killer's calling card: a quotation from the works of Edgar Allan Poe. His latest victim is McEvoy's own brother. And his last...may be McEvoy himself.

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Cox, Susan (Susan Rosemary)

When former party girl and society photographer Theophania Bogart flees to San Francisco to escape a high-profile family tragedy, a series of murders drags her unwillingly out of hiding. In no time at all she discovers she's been providing cover for a sophisticated smuggling operation, she starts to fall for an untrustworthy stranger, and she's knocked out, tied up and imprisoned. The police are sure she's lying. The smugglers are sure she knows too much. Her friends? They aren't sure what to believe. The body count is rising and Theo struggles to find the killer before she's the next victim or her new life is exposed as an elaborate fraud. 

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Doyle, Arthur Conan

A master of deductive reasoning who can solve the most difficult crimes by spotting obscure clues overlooked by others, dilettante sleuth Sherlock Holmes was the hero of sixty stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle between 1887 and 1927. He even rose from the dead after Doyle tried to dispatch him in his twenty-fourth adventure, and readers protested. Here, in one volume, are all four full-length novels and fifty-six short stories about the colourful adventures of Sherlock Holmes- every word Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ever wrote about Baker Street's most famous resident.

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Ebershoff, David

The story of Ann Eliza Young's crusade against polygamy interwines with a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah.

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Eco, Umberto

In 1327, finding his sensitive mission at an Italian abbey further complicated by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William of Baskerville turns detective.

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Erdrich, Louise

Unaware of a violent event that marked the beginning of her mixed ancestry, ambitious young Evelina Harp, a part-Ojibwe, part-white girl prone to falling hopelessly in love, learns disturbing truths from her gifted storyteller grandfather, while a sentimental judge weighs the legacy of a century-old crime as reflected by his own love life.

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Ferris, Emil

Set against the tumultuous political backdrop of late 1960s Chicago, and narrated by 10-year-old Karen Reyes, Monsters is told through a fictional graphic diary employing the iconography of B-movie horror imagery and pulp monster magazines. As the precocious Karen Reyes tries to solve the murder of her beautiful and enigmatic upstairs neighbor, Anka Silverberg, a holocaust survivor, we watch the interconnected and fascinating stories of those around her unfold.

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Flynn, Gillian

After witnessing the murder of her mother and sisters, seven-year-old Libby Day testifies against her brother Ben, but twenty-five years later she tries to profit from her tragic history and admit that her story might not have been accurate.

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French, Tana

Six months after the events of In the Woods, Detective Cassie Maddox is still trying to recover. She's transferred out of the murder squad and started a relationship with Detective Sam O'Neill, but she's too badly shaken to make a commitment to him or to her career. Then Sam calls her to the scene of his new case: a young woman found stabbed to death in a small town outside Dublin. The dead girl's ID says her name is Lexie Madison--the identity Cassie used years ago as an undercover detective--and she looks exactly like Cassie.

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Gaiman, Neil

This supernatural mystery set in the world of Sherlock Holmes and Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos features a brilliant detective and his partner as they try to solve a horrific murder. The complex investigation takes the Baker Street investigators from the slums of Whitechapel all the way to the Queen's Palace as they attempt to find the answers to this bizarre murder of cosmic horror! From the Hugo, Bram Stoker, Locus, World Fantasy, Nebula award-winning, and New York Times bestselling writer Neil Gaiman comes this graphic novel adaptation with art by Eisner award winning artist Rafael Albuquerque!

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Gardner, Danny

In 1952, after a year on the run, disgraced Chicago Police Officer Elliot Caprice wakes up in a jailhouse in St. Louis. His friends from his hometown secure his release and he returns to find the family farm in foreclosure and the man who raised him dying in a flophouse. Desperate for money, he accepts a straight job as a process server and eventually crosses paths with a powerful family from Chicago's North Shore. A captain of industry is dead, the key to his estate disappeared with the chauffeur, and soon Elliot is in up to his neck. The mixed-race son of Illinois farm country must return to the Windy City with the Chicago Police on his heels and the Syndicate at his throat.

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Griffith, Nicola

A police lieutenant with the elite "Red Dogs" until she retired at twenty-nine, Aud Torvingen is a rangy six-footer with eyes the color of cement and a tendency to hurt people who get in her way. Born in Norway into the failed marriage between a Scandinavian diplomat and an American businessman, she now makes Atlanta her home, luxuriating in the lush heat and brashness of the New South.

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Hammett, Dashiell

A treasure worth killing for. Sam Spade, a slightly shop-worn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics. A perfumed grifter named Joel Cairo, a fat man named Gutman, and Brigid O'Shaughnessy, a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. These are the ingredients of Dashiell Hammett's coolly glittering gem of detective fiction, a novel that has haunted three generations of readers.

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Hammett, Dashiell

Nick Charles searches for a wealthy inventor who is the prime suspect in a New York City murder case.

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Harper, Jane

A small town hides big secrets in The Dry. After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke's steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime. But now more than one person knows they didn't tell the truth back then, and Luke is dead. As Falk reluctantly investigates to see if there's more to Luke's death than there seems to be, long-buried mysteries resurface, as do the lies that have haunted them. 

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Heller, Peter

From the best-selling author of The Dog Stars and The Painter, a luminous, spine-tingling novel of suspense--the story of Celine, an elegant, aristocratic private eye who specializes in reuniting families, trying to make amends for a loss in her own past.

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Highsmith, Patricia

An architect is harassed on a train by a psychotic who wants to swap murders and who proceeds to carry out his part of the unconfirmed bargain.

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Horowitz, Anthony

Alan Conway is a bestselling crime writer. His editor, Susan Ryeland, has worked with him for years, and she's intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. When Susan receives Alan's latest manuscript, in which Atticus Pünd investigates a murder at Pye Hall, an English manor house, she has no reason to think it will be any different from the others. There will be dead bodies, a cast of intriguing suspects, and plenty of red herrings and clues. But the more Susan reads, the more she’s realizes that there's another story hidden in the pages of the manuscript—one of ambition, jealousy, and greed—and that soon it will lead to murder.

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Hughes, Dorothy B.

Postwar Los Angeles is a lonely place where the American Dream is showing its seamy underside—and a stranger is preying on young women. The suggestively named Dix Steele, a cynical vet with a chip on his shoulder about the opposite sex, is the LAPD's top suspect. Dix knows enough to watch his step, especially since his best friend is on the force, but when he meets the luscious Laurel Gray—a femme fatale with brains—something begins to crack. 

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James, P. D.

Pemberley is thrown into chaos after Elizabeth Bennett's disgraced sister Lydia arrives and announces that her husband Wickham has been murdered.

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Kent, Hannah

Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution. Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only Tóti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard. . . . Burial Rites evokes a dramatic existence in a distant time and place.

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Krueger, William Kent

New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. It was the Twins' debut season; the country had a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited often and took many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder. Frank was forced to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years. Forty years later, he tells the story of discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.

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Lethem, Jonathan

A walk on the wild side of Brooklyn's criminal underclass with a hero known as "The Human Freakshow," a would-be detective also answering to the name of Lionel Essrog. Essrog is a victim of Tourette's Syndrome; hapless and veering out of control, he fights himself and his disease.

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Lindsay, Joan Weigall, Lady

In 1900, a class of young women from an exclusive private school go on an excursion to the isolated Hanging Rock, deep in the Australian bush. The excursion ends in tragedy when three girls and a teacher mysteriously vanish after climbing the rock. Only one girl returns, with no memory of what has become of the others.

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Lippman, Laura

Eliza Benedict's peaceful suburban life is shattered after she is contacted by Walter Bowman, the man who kidnapped and held her hostage as a teen in 1985, and who now claims to want forgiveness while on death row.

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Locke, Attica

When the dead body of a young woman is found on the grounds of Belle Vie, the estate's manager, Caren Gray, launches her own investigation into Belle Vie's history, which leads her to a centuries old mystery involving the plantation's slave quarters--and her own past.

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Long, Dustin

A satirical crime tale follows the story of Our Heroine, a daughter of a dead legendary mystery-solver, who reluctantly takes up the investigation of her murdered close friend through the sewers and karaoke bars of Iceland, all the while endeavoring to remain out of the clutches of the inhuman Refusirkir.

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Macallister, Greer

When a notorious female illusionist uses a fire ax to saw a man in half in front of policeman Virgil Holt, the subsequent discovery of a dead body leads to an interrogation and an unbelievable, spellbinding story.

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Miéville, China

When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined.

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Modiano, Patrick

For ten years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a one-time client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files - directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century - but leads to his former life are few. Could he really be that person in a photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attache? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience.

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Moriarty, Liane

Follows three mothers, each at a crossroads, and their potential involvement in a riot at a school trivia night that leaves one parent dead in what appears to be a tragic accident, but may have been premeditated.

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Morton, Kate

Abandoned on a 1913 voyage to Australia, Nell is raised by a dock master and his wife who do not tell her until she is an adult that she is not their child, leading Nell to return to England and eventually hand down her quest for answers to her granddaughter.

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Mosley, Walter

1948, Los Angeles: The mortgage payment's coming due, so Easy Rawlins accepts the assignment of finding Daphne Monet, a blonde torch singer with a penchant for jazz and criminal black consorts. In his search through a sleazy, fearful city, he is lucky to be under the protection of the murderous Mouse who wants a piece of the action.

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Nava, Michael

Rios defends Michael Ruiz, a young man accused of murdering Gus Pe a, a powerful Los Angeles politician who had had his eye on the Mayor's office. Meanwhile, Rios must confront the collapse of his relationship with Josh Mandel, his HIV-positive lover.

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Nesbø, Jo

The author of the internationally best-selling Harry Hole series now gives us an electrifying stand-alone novel set amid Oslo's hierarchy of corruption, from which one very unusual young man is about to propel himself into a mission of brutal revenge.

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Pamuk, Orhan

A furor erupts in sixteenth-century Istanbul when the Sultan commissions the European-style illumination of a great book, and the situation worsens when one of the miniaturists vanishes mysteriously.

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Pessl, Marisha

When the daughter of a cult horror film director is found dead in an abandoned Manhattan warehouse, investigative journalist Scott McGrath, disbelieving the official suicide ruling, probes into the strange circumstances of the young woman's death.

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Picoult, Jodi

Abandoned by a grief-stricken father and accomplished-scientist mother who disappeared under mysterious circumstances, 13-year-old Jenna Metcalf approaches a disgraced psychic and a jaded detective in the hopes of finding answers.

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Poe, Edgar Allan

The story of a retired detective who is called upon to solve a perplexing pair of murders.

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Rice, Craig

Unoccupied and unsupervised while mother is working, the children of widowed crime writer Marion Carstairs find diversion wherever they can. So when the kids hear gunshots at the house next door, they jump at the chance to launch their own amateur investigation--and after all, why shouldn't they? 

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Roberts, Nora

When professional house-sitter Lila Emerson witnesses a murder/suicide from her current apartment-sitting job, life as she knows it takes a dramatic turn. Suddenly, the woman with no permanent ties finds herself almost wishing for one. . . .

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Rosen, Lev AC

In a future where the rising ocean levels have left New York twenty-one stories under water and cut off from the rest of the United States, the city survives, and Simone Pierce is one of its best private investigators. Her latest case, running surveillance on a potentially unfaithful husband, was supposed to be easy. Then her target is murdered, and the search for his killer points Simone towards a secret from the past that can't possibly be real--but that won't stop the city's most powerful men and women from trying to acquire it for themselves, with Simone caught in the middle.

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Scott, J. Todd

Chris Cherry, a newly minted sheriff's deputy in a small Texas border town, and seventeen-year-old Caleb Ross form an unlikely partnership as they investigate growing suspicions about the disappearance of Caleb's mother.

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Shapiro, Barbara A.

On March 18, 1990, thirteen works of art worth today over $500 million were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It remains the largest unsolved art heist in history, and Claire Roth, a struggling young artist, is about to discover that there's more to this crime than meets the eye.

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Slaughter, Karin

The story of estranged sisters -- Claire and Lydia -- reunited by the murder of Claire's husband, whom Lydia had accused of harassment years ago. Hidden computer files pique Claire's interest and provoke suspicion that he may have known something about the disappearance of their oldest sister, Julia, decades previously. Realistic characters, unexpected humor, poignant chapters from their father's perspective, ample suspense, and the slow healing of damaged relationships make for a tense, unsettling, and utterly compelling read.

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Sullivan, Matthew

Follows the efforts of a bookstore clerk to unravel a puzzle left behind by a patron who has committed suicide, an effort that is complicated by memories of the clerk's violent childhood.

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Swann, Leonie

On a hillsdie near the cozy Irish village of Glennkill, the members of the flock gather around their shepherd, George, whose body lies pinned to the ground with a spade. George has cared for the sheep, reading them books every night. The daily exposure to literature has made them far savvier about the workings of the human mind than your average sheep. Led by Miss Maple, the smartest sheep in Glennkill, they set out to find George's killer.

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Tartt, Donna

A transfer student from a small town in California, Richard Papen is determined to affect the ways of his Hampden College peers, and he begins his intense studies under the tutelage of eccentric Julian Morrow.

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Traver, Robert

Defense attorney Paul Biegler represents Frederick Manion, a young Army lieutenant who claims that the man he shot had raped his wife, only to discover that the case may be far more complex than he had ever imagined.

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Turow, Scott

Rusty Sabich is an up-and-comer in the county prosecutor's office. He's intelligent, hard working, dependable. And, just maybe, he's also a murderer.

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Ware, Ruth

What should be a cozy and fun-filled weekend deep in the English countryside takes a sinister turn in Ruth Ware's suspenseful, compulsive, and darkly twisted psychological thriller.

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Winters, Ben H.

When the Earth is doomed by an imminent and unavoidable asteroid collision, New Hampshire homicide detective Hank Palace considers the worth of his job in a world destined to end in six months and investigates a suspicious suicide that nobody else cares about.

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Woodrell, Daniel

Reaching her sixteenth year in the harsh Ozarks while caring for her poverty-stricken family, Ree Dolly learns that they will lose their house unless her bail-skipping father can be found and made to appear at an upcoming court date.

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Yokoyama, Hideo

The nightmare no parent could endure. The case no detective could solve. The twist no reader could predict. For five days in January 1989, the parents of a seven-year-old Tokyo schoolgirl sat and listened to the demands of their daughter's kidnapper. They would never learn his identity. They would never see their daughter again. For the fourteen years that followed, the Japanese public listened to the police's apologies. They would never forget the botched investigation that became known as Six Four. They would never forgive the authorities for their failure. For one week in late 2002, the press officer attached to the police department in question confronted an anomaly in the case. He could never imagine what he would uncover. He would never have looked if he'd known what he would find.

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Yu, Ovidia

Occasional sleuth and proprietor of Singapore's best-loved home cooking restaurant, feisty widow Rosie "Aunty" Lee helps rookie Police Commissioner Raja investigate the murder of one of her wealthy patrons by using her connections and uncanny ability to track down clues.

Summaries provided by DPL's catalog unless otherwise noted. Click on each title to view more information.