Peter Abrahams
Oblivion. Morrow, 2005.
PI Nick Petrov takes the case of missing teenager Amanda Rummel even though he quickly realizes that the girl's mother is being less than forthright with him. Soon enough, Petrov learns that Liza Rummel doesn't even have a daughter and that the missing girl's real mother was violently murdered years earlier.

Will Christopher Baer
Kiss Me, Judas. Viking, 1998.
Just after ex-cop Phineas Poe is released from a psychiatric hospital, he is lured into bed by a beautiful and menacing woman who calls herself Jude. He wakes up in a hotel-room bathtub packed with ice and his missing a kidney. He pursues the mysterious Jude and is plunged into an edgy, drug-blurred underworld. Followed by Penny Dreadful (2000) and Hell’s Half Acre (2004).

Elizabeth Benedict
The Practice of Deceit. HM, 2005.
A particularly nasty divorce pits Eric Lavender against his ex-wife, a manipulative lawyer who will stop at nothing to conceal her own sordid past and destroy his credibility.

William Bernhardt
Dark Eye. Ballantine, 2005.
A consultant for the Las Vegas police, psychologist Susan Pulaski is called in to assist in the investigation into a brutal murder case, the death of a young woman who had been buried alive.

Martin Booth
A Very Private Gentleman. T. Dunne, 2004.
To most of the locals in his small Italian village, an artist known as Signor “Farfalla,” because he paints butterflies, leads a double life constructing guns for assassins. He looks forward to “retiring” from his clandestine job, but his past is about to catch up with him.

John Case
The Murder Artist. Ballantine, 2004.
Separated from his wife, and struggling not to become a stranger to his six-year-old twin sons, TV news correspondent Alex Callahan is faced with a parent’s worst nightmare when the boys vanish without a trace at a countryside Renaissance Fair. With the trail growing cold and feeling that time is running out, Alex uses use his own relentless investigative skills to rescue his children from the shadowy figure dubbed The Piper.

Mary Higgins Clark
Daddy's Little Girl. S&S, 2002.
When Atlanta investigative journalist Ellie Cavanaugh learns that the rich kid who killed her older sister years ago is up for parole, she returns home to speak out against him and uncovers clues that Westerfield may have committed another murder.

Melissa Clark
Find Courtney. Bridge Works, 2004.
Fanoy gets a glimpse of the good life when she moves into the lavish Miami Beach apartment of fellow college student, Courtney Armorault. When Courtney vanishes after going out for a jog, Fanoy is less concerned about her roomie than in assuming her life-style. Then Courtney’s father shows up and things really get complicated.

Harlan Coban
Just One Look. Dutton, 2004.
When Grace Lawson picks up a newly developed set of family photographs, she finds a picture from at least twenty years ago. In the photo are five people, for of whom she has never seen before and one who very much resembles her husband. Though he denies that he is the man in the photo, Jack drives away later on that night without an explanation, taking the photograph with him, leaving Grace with unanswered questions that threaten her marriage and everything she knows. By the same author: Tell No One (2001); Gone for Good (2002); No Second Chance (2003); The Innocent (2005).

Thomas H. Cook
Peril. Bantam, 2004.
Terrified of the future and haunted by the past, Sara Labriola decides to make herself disappear. She leaves her life behind and reinvents herself in New York City. But her dream of a happy ending is about to become a nightmare when her mobster father-in-law decides to make her pay for abandoning his son.

John Connolly
Every Dead Thing. S&S, 1999.
Haunted by the murders of his wife and daughter, NYPD detective Charlie Parker searches for the killer who devastated his family. Followed by: Dark Hollow (2001); The Killing Kind (2002); The White Road (2003); The Black Angel (2005).

Blake Crouch
Desert Places. Minotaur, 2004.
Andrew Thomas is a successful writer of suspense thrillers, living the dream at his lake house in the piedmont of North Carolina. One afternoon in late spring, he receives a bizarre letter informing him that there is a dead woman's body buried on his property, covered in his blood, and murdered by the paring knife that has gone missing from his kitchen. He soon finds himself face to face with his long-lost, murderous twin brother.

Locked Doors. Minotaur, 2005.
In hiding for seven years after being framed for a series of horrific murders committed by his psychotic brother, Andrew Thomas must risk discovery when his former girlfriend, Karen Prescott, becomes part of a nightmarish new series of crimes.

Lisa Gardner
Alone. Bantam, 2005.
When police sniper, Bobby Dodge, shoots and kills a man supposedly threatening his wife and son, the dead man's parents are convinced their manipulative daughter-in-law engineered the entire "hostage" situation.

Tim Green
Exact Revenge. Warner, 2005.
Once a promising political candidate, Raymond White’s future was suddenly derailed when he is framed and convicted of murder. Sentenced to solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison, Raymond methodically plots his revenge against those who schemed to ruin his career and take away his life. Now, after spending 18 years behind bars, Raymond makes his escape and is ready to finally put his plan into action. A thriller with echoes of The Fugitive and The Count of Monte Cristo.

Kay Hooper
Hunting Fear. Bantam, 2004.
Agent Lucas Jordan locates missing people by using his extrasensory abilities for Noah Bishop's FBI Special Crimes Unit of precognitive profilers. Called in on what appear to be a series of ordinary kidnappings, Lucas soon realizes that the situation is far more deadly than anything he's ever faced before. Because a brilliant, twisted madman is out to win a sick game, matching his wits against the best hunter he can find: Lucas.

Paul Jaskunas
Hidden. Free Press, 2004.
Six years Maggie Wilson identified her husband as the man who nearly killed her, she is told that another inmate has confessed to the crime and that her ex-husband will be freed. The shock plunges Maggie into memories of her stormy marriage and abuse. And as the story of the born-again convict competes with hers, Maggie pores through trial transcripts, old journals, and photo albums, trying fruitlessly to remember exactly what happened.

Alex Kava
One False Move. Mira, 2004.
After Jared Barnett is released from death row on a technicality, he hooks up with his sister, Melanie Starks, and her son, Charlie. He convinces them to assist him in a bank robbery. But nothing goes according to plan. On the run the three refuge in a remote cabin in the Platte River State Park, taking its occupant, Andrew Kane, a writer who's shut himself away to finish his latest novel hostage. Only then does Melanie learn that six people were killed in the failed robbery.

Jack Kerley
The Hundredth Man. Dutton, 2004.
In Mobile, Al, homicide detective Carson Ryder, and his partner, Harry Nautilus, are assigned to a unit that investigates murders displaying psychopathological tendencies. Their first case involves a killer who beheads his victims and leaves cryptic messages carved on their bodies. Followed by: The Death Collectors (2005).

Dean R. Koontz
Velocity. Bantam, 2005.
A bartender’s life spirals into a nightmare when he discovers a note on his windshield threatening to kill one of two different victims depending upon whether he takes the note to the police or withholds it. He dismisses it as a sick joke, until a murder occurs and he receives another note… By the same author: By the Light of the Moon (2002); The Face (2003).

Danny Leigh
Monsters of Gramercy Park. Bloomsbury, 2005.
Celebrated crime novelist Lizbeth Greene--whose inspiration has run dry--seeks out a gang lord just removed from five years of solitary confinement, convinced that writing a book about him could revive her ailing career. She gradually becomes drawn into his sinister world, and the two engage in a complex game of attraction and rejection: Lizbeth needs Wilson to kick-start her career; Wilson needs Lizbeth to sway an upcoming appeals case and keep him from returning to solitary confinement.

Margaret Leroy
The River House. LB, 2005.
While in the arms of her married lover in an abandoned boathouse, Ginnie Holmes spies a suspicious man lurking about. When a woman is found dead, she is convinced the man was the murderer, but if she comes forward with what she knows, her affair will be revealed and her family destroyed.

Robert Ludlum
The Amber Warning. St. Martin’s, 2005.
On a restricted island off the coast of Virginia, is a little-known and never-visited psychiatric facility where the government houses former intelligence employees whose psychiatric states pose a danger to national security. But there's one difference between agent Hal Ambler and the other patients. He isn't crazy. With the help of a sympathetic nurse, Hal manages to clear his mind of the drug-induced haze and then pulls off a daring escape. Now he's out to discover who stashed him here and why. But the world he returns to isn't the one he remembers. Friends and longtime associates don't remember him, there are no official records of Hal Ambler, and, when he first sees himself in the mirror, the face that looks back at him is not the one he knows as his own.

Patricia MacDonald
The Girl Next Door. Atria, 2004.
Of the three Avery siblings, only Nina has never stopped believing in the innocence of their father, now paroled after serving 15 years for the stabbing death of his wife. Duncan Avery wishes to repair his relationship with his sons, who want nothing to do with him. Then, another act of violence occurs, and Nina, no longer certain if she can trust her family, her neighbors, or her old friends, finds she can rely only on herself and a surprising new ally in her life as she searches for the truth behind crimes past and present.

Mark Nykanen
The Bone Parade. Hyperion, 2004.
Artist Ashley Stassler has been wildly praised for a series of bronze sculptures that group families together, depicting them in moments of excruciating physical and emotional pain, but no one has a clue as to how he creates such authentic, gruesome, seemingly tortured human representations.By the same author: Hush (1998).

Ridley Pearson
Cut and Run. Hyperion, 2005.
Six years ago agent Roland Larson fell in love with Hope Stevens, a protected witness whose testimony had put away prominent members of the Romero crime family. Although they had planned to escape from both the government and the mob, Hope ran off, taking with her the daughter Larson never knew they had. Now the Romeros have stolen the master witness protection list from the Justice Department, and Larson is put back on Hope's trail, matching wits with a brutally ingenious henchman who has kidnapped Hope and Larson's daughter in his ruthless quest to destroy Hope.

Douglas J. Preston
Dance of Death. Warner, 2005.
FBI Special Agent Pendergast is pitted against his most personal foe: His brother, Diogenes, has planned a horrendous crime and is framing him for a series of terrible murders.

Bill Pronzini
The Alias Man. Walker, 2004.
He seduces, charms, takes them for all they have, and vanishes. But when his three most recent victims find one another and discover his involvement in an even more profitable and deadly scheme, they band together to carry out their hunger for justice.

Michael Robotham
Suspect. Doubleday, 2005.
Psychiatrist Joe O'Loughlin’s world crumbles when he diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and while assisting the police in solving the brutal murder of a woman he subsequently recognizes as a former patient who accused him of sexual assault, he becomes the prime suspect.

John Saul
Perfect Nightmare. Ballantine, 2005.
Kate Marshall faces the ultimate nightmare when her daughter, Lindsay, vanishes from her bedroom during the night, and it becomes clear that a deadly menace is stalking her middle-class Long Island community. By the same author: The Manhattan Hunt Club (2001).

Quinton Skinner
Amnesia Nights. Ballantine, 2004.
John Wright sees people he thinks he knows, but they’re only strangers. He hasn't’t seen his fiancée, Iris, in over three years, since he fled their LA apartment one night after a fit of rage that may or may not have left her dead. While living off a small fortune he stole from Iris’s wealthy, manipulative father, John bides his time and waits for the police to find him and charge him with his lover’s murder—though he isn’t sure if he killed her, or if she’s really dead. Then one day Iris returns. But is she real, or just a cruel figment of his addled brain?

Stephen J. Spignesi
Dialogues. Bantam, 2005.
What drove Tory Troy to murder six of her colleagues at the animal shelter in which they worked? Petite, brainy, and gifted with a sharp sense of humor, she is the most improbable of cold-blooded killers. It is up to Dr. Baraku Bexley to determine whether Tory is mentally competent to stand trial, exploring her complicated background and her unusual convictions.