THE MURDER OF A FEDERAL AGENT... Retired detective Jon Stanton is enjoying his new life when a single call shatters his peace: one of his oldest friends, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has been murdered in a small town in Utah. Investigating a double homicide, Stanton believes he had gotten too close to the killer and paid the ultimate price. A BRUTAL SLAYING WITH NO DISCERNIBLE MOTIVES... Stanton believes the key to finding the killer is in the initial double homicide. A female victim tied to a tree and ravaged holds the answers Stanton is looking for. He flies to Utah, leaving his new fiancé, to walk into the darkness one more time. But the killer has plans of his own...

Strange things exist on the periphery of our existence, haunting us from the darkness looming beyond our firelight. Black magic, weird cults and worse things loom in the shadows. The Children of Old Leech have been with us from time immemorial. And they love us...Donald Miller, geologist and academic, has walked along the edge of a chasm for most of his nearly eighty years, leading a charmed life between endearing absent-mindedness and sanity-shattering realization. Now, all things must converge. Donald will discover the dark secrets along the edges, unearthing savage truths about his wife Michelle, their adult twins, and all he knows and trusts. For Donald is about to stumble on the secret......of The Croning.From Laird Barron, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of The Imago Sequence and Occultation, comes The Croning, a debut novel of cosmic horror.

First World War espionage was a fascinating and dangerous affair, spawning widespread paranoia in its clandestine wake. The hysteria of the age, stoked by those within the British establishment who sought to manipulate popular panic, meant there was no shortage of suspects. Exaggerated claims were rife: some 80,000 Germans were supposedly hidden all over Britain, just waiting for an impending (and imagined) invasion. No one could be trusted... Against this backdrop, as head of Scotland Yard's Criminal Investigation Department, it was Basil Thomson's responsibility to hunt, arrest and interrogate the potential German spies identified by the nascent British intelligence services. Thomson's story is an extraordinary compendium of sleuthing and secrets from a real-life Sherlock Holmes, following the trails of the many specimens he tracked, including the famous dancer, courtesan and spy, Mata Hari. Yet his activities gained him enemies, as did his criticism of British intelligence,...

The Vermont Bureau of Investigation (VBI) has been pulled onto three cases at the same time; meanwhile, VBI head Joe Gunther has to take time off to care for his ailing mother. Those cases are now in the hands of the individual investigators. Sammie Martens is assigned a murder case. The victim is a young woman, the roommate of the daughter of Medical Examiner Beverly Hillstrom. A recent transplant from Albany, New York, Sammie must find out what put a hit man on the trail of this seemingly innocent young woman. Lester Spinney takes over a famous cold case, a double murder where a state trooper and a motorist were killed in an exchange of gunfire. Or so it has seemed for years. When Lester is told that the motorist's fingerprints were planted on the gun he's supposed to have fired, it opens the question—who really killed the state trooper? Willy Kunkle's case starts with a child's discovery of three teeth on a railroad track, leading eventually to a...

The Second Book of the Acclaimed Rowland Sinclair Mysteries, the Historical Crime Series The luxury liner, RMS Aquitania, embodies all that is gracious and refined, in a world gripped crisis and doubt. But elegant atmosphere on board is charged with tension. Civility remains... but how long will the peace hold when people start to die? After months abroad, Rowland Sinclair and his companions begin their journey home on the ship. The heroes dine with a suffragette, a Bishop and a retired World Prophet. The Church encounters less orthodox religion in the Aquitania's chandeliered ballroom, where men of God rub shoulders with mystics in dinner suits. Gentill's razor-sharp voice draws these wonderfully diverse characters, and as the pressure rises, so too does a foreboding sense of intrigue. As the bodies pile up, and Rowland unwittingly finds himself at the centre of it all again, can he unravel the mystery and stop these heinous crimes before he and his...

Admired by John Carey, Erich Hobsbawm and Terry Eagleton, this "deeply reflective, extraordinarily wide-ranging meditation on language" attempts to look at the historical relationship between language, writing and knowledge. For the linguist and for the general public

It’s hard to recognize the devil when his hand is on your shoulder. That’s because a psychopath is just a person before he becomes a headline….Psychopaths have preferences for Starbucks or Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, denim or linen, Dickens or…well, you get the point. Ex-FBI agent Brigid Quinn has seen more than her share of psychopaths. She is ready to put all that behind her, building a new life in Tucson with a husband, friends, and some nice quiet work as a private investigator. Sure, she could still kill a man half her age, but she now gets her martial arts practice by teaching self-defense at a women's shelter. But sometimes it isn't that simple. When her sister-in-law dies, Brigid take in her seventeen-year-old niece, Gemma Kate. There has always been something unsettling about Gemma-Kate, but family is family. Which is fine, until Gemma-Kate starts taking an unhealthy interest in dissecting the local wildlife. Meanwhile, Brigid agrees to help a local couple by investigating the death of their son—which also turns out not to be that simple. Her house isn't the sanctuary it used to be, and new dangers—including murder—seem to lurk everywhere. Brigid starts to wonder if there is anyone she can trust, or if the devil has simply moved closer to home. Becky Masterman's Fear the Darkness is the masterful follow-up to the Edgar Award and CWA Gold Dagger finalist Rage Against the Dying.Review"Electrifying...another strong display of the author's ingenuity. Ms. Masterman once again shows herself to be an expert manipulator of readers expectations."—Janet Maslin, The New York Times, on *Fear the Darkness *“Tough, cunning Brigid Quinn will certainly appeal to thriller readers who favor a female perspective, but her unwavering determination to fight for even the ugliest forms of justice will also draw in fans of Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane.” —Booklist on Fear the DarknessPraise for Rage Against the Dying"Pulse-quickening...scorching...invigorating." —Janet Maslin, *The New York Times "When the nominations are made for the best crime-novel debut of the year, we should be hearing [Masterman's] name again." —The Washington Post "One of the most memorable FBI agents since Clarice Starling." —Publishers Weekly* (starred, Pick of the Week) "Wow. An absolute pleasure. Chilling, smart...and what a voice." —Gillian Flynn, author of *Gone Girl "Masterman lives up to her name in this masterly combination of compelling character and plot." —Library Journal *(starred) About the AuthorBECKY MASTERMAN is the acquisitions editor for a press specializing in medical textbooks for forensic examiners and law enforcement. She grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and received her MA in creative writing from Florida Atlantic University. Becky lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband. Suzanne Toren has over 30 years of experience in recording.  She won the American Foundation for the Blind's Scourby Award for Narrator of the Year in 1988, and AudioFile magazine named her the 2009 Best Voice in Nonfiction & Culture.  She is also the recipient of multiple Earphones Awards. Her many credits include works by Jane Smiley, Margaret Weis, Jerry Spinelli, Barbara Kingsolver, and Cynthia Rylant. AudioFile also raves, “Toren brings a distinguishing warmth and power to her narrations. Her talents extend to both fiction and nonfiction, and in her recording career of 30-plus years she has given listeners heart-wrenching memoirs, lively history, engaging light fiction, and involving mysteries.” Toren also performs on and off-Broadway and in regional theatres.

A fantastic historical novel by the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Set in France during the reign of Louis XIV, the story follows Amory de Catinat, a Huguenot (Protestant) guardsman of the king during a time when France, then predominantly Catholic, became more and more difficult for Protestants, resulting in the Edict of Nates being revoked and the Huguenots being deported to America.

Winner of a Northern Writers AwardThese are the last days of Raoul Moat.Moat was the fugitive Geordie bodybuilder-mechanic who became notorious one hot July week when, after killing his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend, shooting her in the stomach, and blinding a policeman, he disappeared into the woods of Northumberland, evading discovery for seven days—even after TV tracker Ray Mears was employed by the police to find him. Eventually, cornered by the police, Moat shot himself.Andrew Hankinson, a journalist from Newcastle, re-tells Moat's story using Moat's words, and those of the state services which engaged with him, bringing the reader disarmingly close at all times to the mind of Moat. It is a reading experience unrelieved by authorial distance or expert interpretation. The narrative Hankinson has woven is entirely compelling, even if Moat's weaknesses are never far from sight, requiring the reader to work out where they should stand.