Showing results for "the girls" in Crime Fiction

In the remote forests of Stillwater, Minnesota, you can scream for days and no one will hear you. So when the bodies of two 15-year-old girls are discovered frozen in the snow, Special Agent Nikki Hunt is sure the killer is local: Someone knew where to hide the girls and thought they would never be found. Though Nikki hasn’t been home in 20 years, she knows she must take over the case.

Detectives Laura Baxter and Jack Holt are members of the elite Las Vegas Metro PD, one of the toughest and most respected law enforcement agencies in the United States. In the middle of a city with two million residents and 43 million annual visitors, they’re hunting for a killer. When a beautiful, young girl is killed in the high-roller Pleasure Pit of the exclusive Scala Casino, the news reverberates for hours among the ritzy clientele. Before taking the stage where she found her death, Crystal was last seen boarding an unmarked helicopter for a late-night flight.

Where her daughter had played Gretel in front of a cheering audience, only two faint stage lights remained. The theater was deserted and eerily silent; the only sound she could hear was her own heart, pounding in a frenzy against her chest. She rushed outside and stopped sharply at the top of the stairs, stunned, her blood turned to icicles. Darkness had fallen, thick and filled with ocean mist, lampposts like ghosts sprinkling yellow haloes in the sky. Paige was gone. They’d taken her little girl.

Caught in the enigmatic web of an unusual case, Special Agent Tess Winnett races against the ticking clock. A suspected serial killer is on the loose hunting prey in the depths of the Everglades. Several women have vanished from the Miami coast, leaving only echoes of their existence. The clues to their fates? Locked away in the tortured mind of one survivor, TV celebrity Kiana Bayliss.

How do you stop a killer no one believes exists? DS Kat Ballantyne wants to know why a perfect girl like Rosie Duggan would jump to her death from a multistorey car park. Everyone is saying she took her own life. But Kat is unconvinced. Girls like Rosie—bright, popular, well adjusted, and with her whole life ahead of her—don’t fall from tall buildings. Unless someone pushes them.

Minnesota, 1977. For the teens of one close-knit community, summer means late-night swimming parties at the quarry, the county fair, and venturing into the tunnels beneath the city. But for two best friends, it’s not all fun and games. Heather and Brenda have a secret. Something they saw in the dark. Something they can’t forget. They’ve decided to never tell a soul. But their vow is tested when their friend disappears—the second girl to vanish in a week. And yet the authorities are reluctant to investigate.

When FBI forensic toxicologist Miles Sterling makes a harrowing discovery—that a dozen unsolved deaths over the past decade each correspond to an element on the periodic table—he must race to follow the trail and find the mastermind behind these murders—and stop him before he strikes again…

FBI Agent Ella Dark has studied serial killers from the time she could read, devastated by the murder of her own father, and has gained an encyclopedic knowledge of murderers. In a twisted homage to history's deadliest game of hide and seek, victims are discovered at unreachable crime scenes, echoing legendary killers' trademarks. FBI Agent Ella Dark delves into her encyclopedic knowledge of the macabre to stop a murderer intent on eclipsing the past's most cunning predators.

Grace Murphy doesn’t seem like the type of woman who’d have a man cable-tied to a chair, slowly dying in her house. She keeps to herself and goes through life relatively unnoticed, working as a barista and caring for her sister, providing her with wholesome meals and a clean home—things they never had as children.

The body of the beautiful English girl is discovered months later - dumped behind the back of a department store. But who was the stranger she let into the safety of her home? As Detective Rachel Prince pieces together the mystery surrounding Phoebe’s death, another young, blonde girl is found brutally murdered and abandoned in the grounds of an old theatre. In the most dangerous case of her career, Rachel must track down the faceless individual to stop the body count rising.

A teacher goes missing under suspicious circumstances and a man is murdered at a local reservoir. For Detective Robyn Carter, there's no obvious link between the cases. But as she starts to delve into them, her investigations lead her to Abigail, perfect wife and mother to beautiful little Izzy. What was Abigail's connection to the victims? And why is she receiving threatening messages from an anonymous number?

Former social worker Elle Castillo is the host of a popular true-crime podcast that tackles cold cases of missing children in her hometown. After four seasons of successful investigations, Elle decides to tackle her white whale: the Countdown Killer, or TCK. Twenty years ago, TCK established a pattern of taking and ritualistically murdering girls, each a year younger than the last. No one’s ever known why - why he stopped abruptly with his 11-year-old victim, or why he followed the ritual at all.

She bites her nails as she steals a glance at the stranger in the pickup truck beside her. She trusted him when he offered her a ride, but now, as he turns onto a deserted road leading into a dark pine forest, she knows she’s made a huge mistake. Special agent Beth Katz races through the dense Montana woodland toward a small, isolated cabin. She’s investigating the disappearance of her partner Dax Styles’s sister who went missing as she walked home from school, and Beth finally has a solid lead.

When a local girl goes missing and another one turns up dead, Spenser finds clues that connect to a grim reminder of another fatal mistake in her past. Years ago, Spenser was kicked off a task force dedicated to bringing down a notorious human trafficking network. She made a mistake that cost a woman her life. Unexpectedly she finds evidence linking to the network in her area, and she’s forced to confront her past when she calls the woman who’d been her superior on the task force—the woman who’d fired her.

After her mother’s death and a life filled with twists and turns, Gabriela Nolan moves to Juniper Springs hoping for a fresh start. A new job, a new town, and a new lease on life. But when an armed heist shocks the town to its core, Gabriela’s world is flipped once more. Now, she’s thrust into madness and a mystery that defies all logic To make matters worse, Gabriela is asked to help identify the robbers, placing a dangerous target directly on her back.

It’s been a year since Willow Avery vanished without a trace during a family outing. One moment, she was walking with her siblings through a crowded fairground; the next, she was gone. Despite the authorities giving up, Belle and her brother, Jackson, refuse to stop searching, determined to uncover what happened to Willow.

When the body of a vulnerable teenage girl is found on a remote farm in the Maryland hills, Private Investigator Lucy Kendall knows her past has come back to haunt her. Lucy’s sister died when she was a young girl, and the dead teenager looks exactly like her—her dark hair dyed blonde, her wrists slashed.

When a woman disappears from Forest Pines campsite, Detective Morgan Brookes scrambles a search party. Sara Fletcher has never missed a lunch date with her best friend, and when Morgan finds a large rip in Sara’s tent, she knows that something terrible must have happened. About to lose hope after hours combing through the acres of dense forest, the excited bark of a tracker dog leads Morgan to female remains, partially covered by leaves and dirt - but the bones don’t belong to Sara.

When single mother Maríanna disappears from her home, leaving an apologetic note on the kitchen table, everyone assumes that she's taken her own life...until her body is found in the Grábrók lava fields seven months later, clearly the victim of murder. Her neglected 15-year-old daughter, Hekla, has been placed in foster care, but is her perfect new life hiding something sinister?

My name is Lucy Townsend. I was born on Friday the 13th, and I was the 13th girl living in the big house. Unlucky for some. But I was the fortunate one. I escaped. The only one who made it out alive. And now, 20 years after that fateful night, the secrets of the past and what happened in that house are pulling me back. I might not be so lucky this time.