Showing results for "life" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Detective Sam Helsdown hasn’t seen his daughter Zoe in two years and he’s excited and more than a little nervous to be at the airport picking her up for a visit. She’s 10 years old and has flown on her own for the first time. Flight BA631 from Athens has already landed and soon a trickle of people begins entering Arrivals. Among them is a little girl who runs towards him, head down, and throws herself into his arms saying ‘Daddy!’. But then he looks at her properly. This is not Zoe. This is not his daughter.

College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same. Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran-and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.

"In the summer of 1991 I was a normal kid. I did normal things. I had friends and a mother who loved me. I was just like you. Until the day my life was stolen. For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I was an object for someone to use and abuse. For eighteen years I was not allowed to speak my own name. I became a mother and was forced to be a sister. For eighteen years I survived an impossible situation. On August 26, 2009, I took my name back. My name is Jaycee Lee Dugard. I dont think of myself as a victim. I survived...."

Who is Audrey Hoedemaker? It's a question her sister Maureen has heard more times than she can count, and she doesn't know what the short answer would be. Little sister, troubled teen, backpacker, musical theatre coach, con artist, childcare worker. Murderer. A tragic, traumatic childhood casts a long shadow on the Hoedemaker sisters. Maureen has worked hard to move beyond the violence of the past and build a good, honest life for herself. Audrey, however, just can't seem to do the same, careening from one state of chaos to another.

The four spies at the center of this story were part of a ragtag unit known as the Arab Section, conceived during World War II by British spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage and assassinations, the unit consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel's existence in the balance during the War of Independence, our spies went undercover in Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a kiosk....

After traveling through time in Shadow of Night, the second book in Deborah Harkness's enchant­ing series, historian and witch Diana Bishop and vampire scientist Matthew Clairmont return to the present to face new crises and old enemies. At Matthew's ancestral home in France they reunite with their families - with one heart-breaking exception.

Ten years ago, Izzy Stone's mother fatally shot her father while he slept. Devastated by her mother's apparent insanity, Izzy, now 17, refuses to visit her in prison. But her new foster parents, employees at the local museum, have enlisted Izzy's help in cataloguing items at a long-shuttered state asylum. There, amid piles of abandoned belongings, Izzy discovers a stack of unopened letters, a decades-old journal, and a window into her own past.

Former Chicago police officer and Outfit associate Fred Pascente is the man who links Tony Spilotro, one of Chicago's most notorious mob figures, to William Hanhardt, chief of detectives in the Chicago Police Department. Pascente and Spilotro grew up together on Chicago's Near West Side, and as young toughs they were rousted and shaken down by Hanhardt.

Subscribe to Crime X+ today. Andrew Rule is one of Australia's most prolific journalists and authors. In Life and Crimes, the True Crime Australia and Sunday Herald Sun columnist shines a light on the dark corners of Australian life, from the story behind the biggest mysteries, to the characters of yesterday and the crims of today. Produced by Jonty Burton.

He’s spent months watching my every move. Stalking me from the shadows, waiting for the right moment. When he strikes, I’m not ready. I’m surrounded by strangers, and far from anyone who might have cared, or at the very least, noticed if I suddenly disappeared.

In a crumbling world plagued by natural disasters, collapsing infrastructure, and mass panic, bizarre billboards and advertisements appear throughout town: 'Charles Krantz. Thirty-nine great years. Thanks, Chuck!' Marty Anderson, a schoolteacher, becomes obsessed with these messages as the world, inexplicably linked to Chuck's life, seems to be approaching its end. Told in three acts, presented in reverse order, The Life of Chuck explores one man's past.

The only magic Emma Hart believes in is caffeine and the power of the dryer to lose one sock per load. A chance encounter lands her in Spellbound, a town where supernaturals have been cursed to remain for centuries - probably not the best time for Emma to discover that she's actually a witch. Between the recent murder of the town's public defender, a goblin accused of theft, remedial witch classes, and the attention of one smoking hot vampire, Emma struggles to navigate this unfamiliar terrain without losing her mind...or her life.

The British Secret Service has been cloaked in secrecy and shrouded in myth since it was created 100 years ago. Our understanding of what it is to be a spy has been largely defined by the fictional worlds of James Bond and John le Carre. MI6 provides a unique and unprecedented insight into this secret world and the reality that lies behind the fiction.

Why would a man escape from prison the day before he's due to be released? Audie Palmer has spent a decade in prison for an armed robbery in which four people died, including two of the gang. Seven million dollars has never been recovered and everybody believes that Audie knows where the money is. For 10 years he has been beaten, stabbed, throttled and threatened almost daily by prison guards, inmates and criminal gangs, who all want to answer this same question, but suddenly Audie vanishes, the day before he's due to be released.

Aaron Decker's life changes one December morning when his wife, Allison, is killed. Haunted by her absence - and her ghost - Aaron goes through her belongings, where he finds a receipt for a motel room in another part of the country. Piloted by grief and an increasing sense of curiosity, Aaron embarks on a journey to discover what Allison had been doing in the weeks prior to her death.

Newly promoted Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison has elbowed her way into the Area Major Incident Pool, or AMIP, an elite team investigating non-domestic murders. With her new position, she hopes things will change: the rampant sexism, the snide remarks, the undermining. Then she gets her first assignment: a five-year-old cold case of a missing teenager no one else has any interest in investigating, and an assumed suicide Tennison suspects is, in fact, murder. But as Tennison gathers the crucial evidence to secure arrests, her new colleagues watch like vultures circling prey.

Invisible tells the story of the investigation into the missing person’s case of a Northern Arapaho woman named Jade Wagon who disappeared in January 2020.

The discovery of a dead body in the woods on Thanksgiving Weekend brings Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his colleagues from the Surete du Quebec to a small village in the Eastern Townships. Gamache cannot understand why anyone would want to deliberately kill well-loved artist Jane Neal, especially any of the residents of Three Pines - a place so free from crime it doesn't even have its own police force.

They are the most violent, blood-thirsty, and vicious of criminals. While hunting for them, FBI profilers call these monsters UNSUBS, short for "unknown subjects of ongoing investigations". At any given time, in the United States there are more than 50 serial killers at large, preying on vulnerable, unsuspecting victims. Until yesterday, no one knew Florida had another serial killer on the loose. Special Agent Tess Winnett calls this particularly elusive one the "Taker of Lives".

On a freezing winter morning, fishermen pull a body from the sea. It is quickly discovered that the dead man was the prime suspect in a decade-old investigation, when a prominent civil servant disappeared without trace. DCI Karen Pirie was the last detective to review the file and is drawn into a sinister world of betrayal and dark secrets. But Karen is already grappling with another case, one with even more questions and fewer answers. A skeleton has been discovered in an abandoned camper van and all clues point to a killer who never faced justice - a killer who is still out there.