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Reviews

Reviews

by James Patterson and Howard Roughan - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Dr. Dylan Reinhart is a renowned, bestselling Ivy League expert on criminal behavior. When a copy of his book turns up at a gruesome murder scene --- along with a threatening message from the killer --- it looks like someone has been taking notes. Elizabeth Needham is the headstrong and brilliant NYPD detective in charge of the case who recruits Dylan to help investigate another souvenir left at the scene --- a playing card. Only someone with Dylan's expertise can hope to go inside the mind of a criminal and convince The Dealer to lay down his cards. But after thinking like a criminal, could Dylan become one?

by Mark Billingham - Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

DI Nicola Tanner needs Tom Thorne’s help. Her partner, Susan, has been brutally murdered, and Tanner is convinced that it was a case of mistaken identity --- that she was the real target. The murderer’s motive might have something to do with Tanner’s recent work on a string of cold-case honor killings she believes to be related. Tanner is now on compassionate leave but insists on pursuing the case off the books and knows Thorne is just the man to jump into the fire with her. He agrees but quickly finds that working in such controversial territory is dangerous in more ways than one. And when a young couple goes missing, they have a chance to investigate a case that is anything but cold.

by Haylen Beck - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

It begins with a woman fleeing through Arizona with her kids in tow, trying to escape an abusive marriage. When she's pulled over by an unsettling local sheriff, things soon go awry and she is taken into custody. But when she gets to the station, her kids are gone. And then the cops start saying they never saw any kids with her; if they're gone, she must have done something with them. Meanwhile, halfway across the country, a man hears the frenzied news reports about the missing kids, which are eerily similar to events in his own past. As the clock ticks down on the search for the lost children, he, too, is drawn into the desperate fight for their return.

by William Shaw - Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Thriller

A methodical, diligent and exceptionally bright detective, William South is an avid birdwatcher and trusted figure in his small town on the rugged Kentish coast. He also lives with the deeply buried secret that, as a child in Northern Ireland, he may have killed a man. When a fellow birdwatcher is found murdered in his remote home, South's world flips. The culprit seems to be a drifter from South's childhood; the victim was the only person connecting South to his early crime; and a troubled, vivacious new female sergeant has been relocated from London and assigned to work with South. As our hero investigates, he must work ever-harder to keep his own connections to the victim, and his past, a secret.

by Ben Coes - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

A group of some of the most powerful people in the government, the military and the private sector has begun a brutal plan to quietly take over the reins of the U.S. government. They’ve begun to remove the people who stand in their way and replace them with their own sympathizers and puppets. They’ve already taken out the Speaker of the House --- whose death was made to look like an accidental drowning --- and the president and vice president are next. Once they have their own people in place, they plan to start a bloody, brutal war on an unimaginable scale. With the Secretary of State now dead, Dewey Andreas desperately tries to unravel the plot before the conspirators succeed in killing millions of innocents.

by Lou Dobbs and James O. Born - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Adjusting to civilian life has not been easy for former Marine Derek Walsh. As he navigates a brutal job on Wall Street and a challenging romance, he wonders if he could be doing more with his life. When an inexplicable $200 million dollar money transfer is made on his computer, he is thrust into the world of international terror, and the global economy is knocked off its hinges. On the other side of the Atlantic, radical Islamists and Russian extremists have set the wheels in motion for Russia to assert its power in Europe. The US President has proven to be weak on foreign policy, the military is stretched too thin, and Vladimir Putin judges this to be the time for Russia to regain its Soviet Empire.

by Don Winslow - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Denny Malone is “the King of Manhattan North,” a highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant who has done whatever it takes to serve and protect in a city built by ambition and corruption, where no one is clean --- including Malone himself. What only a few know is that Denny Malone and his partners have stolen millions of dollars in drugs and cash in the wake of the biggest heroin bust in the city’s history. Now Malone is caught in a trap and being squeezed by the Feds, and he must walk the thin line between betraying his brothers and partners, the Job, his family, and the woman he loves, trying to survive while the city teeters on the brink of a racial conflagration that could destroy them all.

by Joseph Finder - Fiction, Suspense, Thriller

Michael Tanner accidentally picks up the wrong MacBook in an airport security line. He later discovers that the owner is a US senator and that the laptop contains top secret files. When Senator Susan Robbins realizes she’s come back with the wrong laptop, she calls her young chief of staff, Will Abbott, in a panic. Both know that the senator broke the law by uploading classified documents onto her personal computer. If those documents wind up in the wrong hands, her career in politics will be over. When Will fails to gain Tanner’s cooperation, he is forced to take measures to retrieve the laptop before a bigger security breach is revealed. Suddenly Tanner finds himself a hunted man, terrified for the safety of his family and able to trust no one.

by Donald E. Westlake - Fiction, Hard-boiled Mystery, Mystery

Two decades ago, the producers of the James Bond movies hired legendary crime novelist Donald E. Westlake to come up with a story for the next Bond film. The plot Westlake dreamed up --- about a Western businessman seeking revenge after being kicked out of Hong Kong when the island was returned to Chinese rule --- had all the elements of a classic Bond adventure, but political concerns kept it from being made. Never one to let a good story go to waste, Westlake instead wrote an original novel based on the premise --- a novel he never published while he was alive. Now, nearly a decade after Westlake’s death, Hard Case Crime is proud to give that novel its first publication ever.

by Adam Mitzner - Fiction, Mystery, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller

By day, Ella Broden works as a buttoned-up attorney on some of the city’s most grueling cases. By night, she pursues her passion for singing in the darkest clubs of Manhattan. No one knows her secret, not even her younger sister, Charlotte. But it seems she’s not the only one in the family with something to hide. When Charlotte announces she’s sold her first novel, Ella couldn’t be more thrilled…until she gets a call that her sister has gone missing. Ella starts investigating with the help of Detective Gabriel Velasquez, an old flame in the NYPD, and what she finds is shocking. If art imitates life, then Charlotte's novel may contain details of her real-life affairs. And any one of her lovers could be involved in her disappearance.