suspense fiction

"At twenty-six, Dahlia Lighthouse has a lot to learn when it comes to the real world. Raised in a secluded island mansion deep in the woods and kept isolated by her true crime-obsessed parents, she spent the last several years living on her own, but unable to move beyond her past-especially the disappearance of her twin brother Andy when they were sixteen. With her father's death, Dahlia returns to the house she has avoided for years. But the rest of the Lighthouse family arrives for the memorial, a gruesome discovery is made: buried in the reserved plot is another body-Andy's, his skill split open with an ax. Each member of the family handles the revelation in unusual ways. Her brother Charlie pours his energy into creating a family memorial museum, highlighting their research into the lives of famous murder victims; her sister Tate forges ahead with her popular dioramas portraying crime scenes; and their mother affects a cheerfully domestic facade, becoming unrecognizable as the woman who performed murder reenactments for her children. As Dahlia grapples with her own grief and horror, she realizes that her eccentric family, and the mansion itself, may hold the answers to what happened to her twin"--.

"A Black father. A white father. Two murdered sons. A quest for vengeance. Ike Randolph has been out of jail for fifteen years, with not so much as a speeding ticket in all that time. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid. The last thing he expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah's white husband, Derek. Ike had never fully accepted his son but is devastated by his loss. Derek's father Buddy Lee was almost as ashamed of Derek for being gay as Derek was ashamed his father was a criminal. Buddy Lee still has contacts in the underworld, though, and he wants to know who killed his boy. Ike and Buddy Lee, two ex-cons with little else in common other than a criminal past and a love for their dead sons, band together in their desperate desire for revenge. In their quest to do better for their sons in death than they did in life, hardened men Ike and Buddy Lee will confront their own prejudices about their sons and each other, as they rain down vengeance upon those who hurt their boys"--Provided by publisher.

Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, at the U.S. Capitol Building to deliver a lecture, is drawn into a desperate search through the hidden tunnels and temples of Washington, D.C., when his mentor Peter Solomon, a prominent Mason and philanthropist, is kidnapped and the only clue to Solomon's whereabouts lies in an ancient invitation to a long-lost world of esoteric wisdom.

When noted attorney Rayna Martin is charged with murder after her daughter's friend, Christina Haynes, drowns in a tragic accident and Christina's father, a powerful senator, wants vengeance ; blackmail and deception claim one more victim during a shocking trial.

Laurie Moran, widowed when her husband was murdered five years ago, is again dealing with murder, but this time as producer of a true-crime cold-case television show, and it is sure to be a hit, but when the filming begins it is clear that each character is hiding secrets, and what if her husband's killer, witnessed by her three-year old son Timmy, is still watching.

Maggie Holt's father bequeaths an old Victorian mansion to her after he dies--a mansion that is supposedly haunted. Maggie barely remembers when her family lived there--a mere three weeks--before they fled in the middle of the night. Her father even wrote a book about the experience, which became a best-seller. Maggie doesn't believe the house is haunted, but does want to renovate it, in order to sell it, and hopes put to rest some of the memories of the past. The house, however, has other plans.

The first Mrs. Ford was accomplished, beautiful, and exorbitantly wealthy, but now she is dead. The second Mrs. Ford is a small-town waitress who married the man with whom she had a summer romance ten years ago, and never forgot, and now is exorbitantly wealthy. The man linking these two women--one dead, the other one not yet dead--is Connor Ford, whose life is lived among the glittering Hamptons mansions. Connor's life unfolds through the eyes of the two women, his wives, who know and knew him best, and reveal the secrets of who is the real victim and villain.

Floundering novelist Patrick Hamlin comes to Hollywood hoping to oversee the adaptation of one of his novels into a movie, which, in turn, he hopes will revive his career and impress his family once again. However, once he gets to California he finds everything much worse than he imagined--environmental disasters and corporate greed abound, and it all seems to be connected to one new company peddling a brand of synthetic water. Intrigued and seeking answers, Patrick teams up with the unruly Cassidy Carter, one of the stars of his movie, to investigate what turns out to be a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Delta Dawn, a photographer no longer content just observing the perfect lives of NYC's elite citizens but wanting a piece of the pie for herself, is hired to photograph the eleventh birthday party of Natalie Straub. Using her connection to the family, Dawn becomes not only Natalie's photographer but also her nanny, befriends the mother, and ingratiates herself with the father. Slowly, Dawn finds in herself the frightening power to not only manipulate photos, but also the real world--but at a high cost.

Biologist Alex Carter is studying endangered wolverines in Montana when someone tries to run her off the road. Later, Alex reviews photographs her wildlife cameras captured of an injured man lost and wandering the wilderness. It seems she has captured evidence of some illegal operation, and now a human predator is on her trail.