Frances believes she has found a ticket to paradise when a wealthy couple hires her for the summer as their mother’s helper at their lakefront summer home in Maine. Best of all, she gets to spend the summer with Forrest Emerson, her father's charismatic childhood friend who escaped their neighborhood when he married into money. But below the glittering surface of Lake Catherine, nothing is what it seems. When Forrest’s wife, Regina, pulls Frances into her private obsession, the girl finds herself witness to the intimate secrets of adult lives. As the summer heat builds, so do the tensions within Wonderland’s walls. By Labor Day, a death will shatter the seemingly perfect family, leaving Frances to question everything she thought she knew about privilege, power and the price of belonging.

Fred and Thea Morgan-Lane coauthor the wildly successful Death Takes a Holiday series, and they’ve been invited to the Italian castle where it all began for a mystery conference celebrating their first novel, Death Takes the Castle. But 20 years and 20 books after they met, Thea wants out. Shortly after their arrival at the beautiful Castellarosa, a shocking death takes place when the wrong person drinks a cocktail meant for Thea. Could someone be trying to kill her? When a second death occurs, a disturbing pattern emerges. These deaths aren’t random --- they’re following the murders in Death Takes the Castle exactly. In order to save the day --- and maybe even their marriage --- the unhappy couple will have to work together to figure out who is using their book as a blueprint for a killing spree.

The Shadow Step: One taken simultaneously by a pair of dancers facing the same direction, one of them behind and slightly shifted leftwards ("in the shadow"). A perfectly executed shadow step demonstrates synchronized elegance. It showcases a couple in near telepathic harmony with one another. It normally does not end with someone stone-dead in a lake. DS Declan Miller is a magnet for strange cases, but an innocent man confessing to the crime? That’s a first. Things rapidly escalate when the murder that isn’t really a murder attracts the unwanted attention of a drug Queenpin, a deranged ex-squaddie, and a lovesick gangland enforcer. And when a real murder follows --- and a student is kidnapped --- all evidence points back to the same innocent man.

A disgraced intel officer anxious to redeem herself after a disastrous mission, January Holte vows to uncover the identity of a traitor who is selling her agency's secrets. The few clues she's found have led her to a sleepy river town: Lethey, Texas --- and to Bill Connors, the one man who might know the truth. July Whitlock, a rookie bodyguard, searches for his one and only client, who has suddenly disappeared. He follows a trail to Lethey to find his missing protectee: Bill Connors. But Bill's friends and enemies in Lethey have secrets of their own. And as January and July ask questions no one wants to answer, they find a tangled web of murder, greed and ambition --- one that will kill anyone who tries to unravel its mysteries.

A strange voice from inside the woods, repeating a child’s counting rhyme. A body discovered in the water. Thirty years later, a woman begins receiving a string of anonymous text messages, repeating that same rhyme. Then she disappears. On Valentine’s Day, detectives Naia Thulin and Mark Hess are searching to find the missing woman. But when they uncover links to a decades-old cold case, their investigation takes a terrifying turn. A violent killer is on the loose. Can Hess and Thulin catch them before they strike again?

Maggie Wise will take your eyes. When Malcolm was growing up, the local kids made up that chant about his mother, claiming she was a witch. He and his siblings did their best to ignore it. Now, Maggie is dying, and those same siblings have left Malcolm and his sister-in-law, Violet, to hold a vigil at her bedside. A dark figure waits and watches from beneath the willow tree across the street. Hundreds of miles away, an ancient evil stirs in its burrow under a farmer’s cornfield. Across the country, other buried things begin to dream in anticipation of Maggie’s demise. On her deathbed, the old woman elicits a promise from Malcolm: When she dies, he and Violet must return her body to her birthplace. From the moment she takes her last breath, there are forces trying to stop Malcolm from fulfilling that promise.

After a shocking accident, Silas Tucker’s legendary football career is suddenly over. Humbled but never defeated, he returns to his backwoods hometown, Cross Rivers, North Carolina, where his father was murdered. He goes back to what’s left of his family and their small, struggling farm. He reunites with his best friend in the world --- Taylor McCarter Webb, who is now married. Then Silas is pulled into a deadly battle with the Southern Mafia who control drugs, trafficking and murder. As the suspense crescendos, Silas follows one rule for survival: you don’t ride these country roads alone, or in the dead of night.

1981. In Harlem, Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. But when the banks won’t give his beloved wife, Elizabeth, a loan for her new travel agency, Carney gambles on one last heist. 1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and aching bones. 1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin, Freddie. Now, 20 years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.

For the first time in print comes a collection of five short stories in Linda Castillo’s Edgar Award-winning Kate Burkholder series: “The Pact,” “Disappeared,” “Blood Moon,” “Hallowed Ground” and “Dark Storm Rising.” In “Dark Path,” a brand-new story, an Amish couple disappears while en route to town. They recently had been threatened by their granddaughter’s troubled boyfriend --- and heavy weather is moving in. Kate rushes toward their remote farm, but a dog on the road causes her to crash into a ravine, where she discovers a shattered buggy. Together, she and her new canine friend must find the couple before it's too late.

When Nicola Fischer’s father is arrested for the murder of five women --- including her best friend --- the entire world watches it unfold on “To Catch a Killer,” the hit true-crime TV show hosted by Greer Woods. Overnight, Nicola becomes a pariah. And to make matters worse, Greer --- once a budding friend and fellow child of a serial killer --- hasn’t returned a single call since the show aired. Then comes an unexpected invitation to the Death Row Club, a secret retreat for the adult children of serial killers, founded by none other than Greer herself. Desperate for answers and human connection, Nicola agrees to go. But when a mysterious girl arrives, claiming her father is a killer too, the club’s fragile peace is shattered, unraveling the buried secrets at its core. By morning, the girl has vanished. By afternoon, one of the club members is dead.