Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Everyone knows Arno Heywood. He's been a Minneapolis TV personality for years. So when he jumps to his death from a downtown high-rise, it's a shocker--especially since he dies wearing women's clothes, a suicide in drag.

Claire Brackett spent years searching for ways to avoid the pain of her past. Following her father’s direction, she traversed the globe, seducing allies and adversaries to further his agenda. He used her as a pawn to maintain power and thwart enemies. William Brackett made one major mistake. He sent Claire on a mission to get close to FBI Agent Alex Toles. That decision would set Claire on a path that would change her life forever.

The first of the dead is wealthy Belle Dumont, who vanished from her home in the Minnesota woods only hours before she was to reveal startling news to her three grown children. The kids and Belle's lover deny any knowledge of this mysterious bombshell, but amateur sleuth Jane Lawless, Belle's old friend, suspects these charming folk of being less than forthright. In fact, Jane suspects coldhearted murder....

Jane reluctantly agrees to accompany her good friend Cordelia Thorn on a peculiar holiday trip: Cordelia's estranged sister, Broadway star Octavia Thorn, has asked them to attend her wedding. Octavia getting married is no surprise, but her candidate for hubby #4 certainly is. Roland Lester is a reclusive 83-year-old retired Hollywood director. No one can understand how the two met. When the bodies start to drop, Jane realizes it might not be love at all that brought the young diva and the aged director together, but something much deeper, and perhaps more sinister.

The shock that Minneapolis restaurateur Jane Lawless is in for when Chester Garrity, her ex-husband, returns to a city that he swore he'd never see again is nothing compared to Chester's own. After their divorce many years ago, he took off with his inheritance to travel the world, leaving Jane with enough seed money to open her first restaurant, which worked out well for Jane but less so for Chester.

After 75 years of high-minded respectability, the Amelia Gower Women's Club is in trouble. One distinguished director has been strangled. Another has taken a fatal plunge down the club's elegant staircase.

As soon as restaurateur-sleuth Jane Lawless begins investigating these murders, wheels within wheels start to turn, meshing private lives with the club's inner workings. Even Jane's new lover, Dorrie, is somehow involved in the diabolical proceedings....

Happily settled in Florida, Sonja believes she’s escaped the trap set by unscrupulous drug lords. But when her son, Tomas, is taken, she’s back to square one...and Iceland. Her lover, Agla, is awaiting sentencing for financial misconduct after the banking crash, and Sonja refuses to see her. And that’s not all...Agla owes money to some extremely powerful men, and they’ll stop at nothing to get it back. With her former nemesis, customs officer Bragi, on her side, Sonja puts her own plan into motion to bring down the drug barons and her scheming ex-husband and get Tomas back.

Moscow, 1993. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union have brought unimaginable change to Russia. With this change come new freedoms: freedom to travel abroad and to befriend Westerners, freedom to make money, and even the freedom for an underground gay scene to take root. Encouraged by the new climate of openness, twenty-one-year-old Kostya ventures out of the closet and resolves to pursue his dreams: to work in the theatre and to find love as his idol Tchaikovsky never could.

The Reid and Toles families are settling into their roles at the White House. President Candace Reid is grateful to have the counsel and support of close friends Alex and Cassidy Toles. Alex assumes a position as Deputy National Security Adviser. She searches to determine the cause of the Russian president’s death. Her brother, Jonathan Krause, continues to decrypt a data disc from a lab in Kaliningrad. And her partner, Claire Brackett, infiltrates the inner circle of a power broker in Poland. Candace juggles a complex agenda while supporting her children through life changes.

Drugs, smuggling, big money and political intrigue in Iceland rally with love, passion, murder and betrayal until the winner takes all...in the masterful, explosive conclusion to the award-winning Reykjavík Noir trilogy. The prison doors slam shut behind Agla when her sentence ends, but her lover Sonja is not there to meet her. As a group of foreign businessmen tries to draw Agla into an ingenious fraud that stretches from Iceland around the world, Agla and her former nemesis María find the stakes being raised at a terrifying speed.

Jane, a Minneapolis restaurateur, is invited to spend the week at Fothergill Inn, a Victorian house-turned B&B. Jane's old friend Leigh has spent years renovating the house and reopening it as an inn and restaurant. The inn has become so successful that people drive the 50 miles from Minneapolis just for dinner. But when Jane and her best friend, Cordelia, arrive for a week of relaxation, they find that the weekend's guests are anything but pleased, and that relaxing is the furthest thing from their minds. Broken glass litters the parking lot, dead animals turn up in the bedrooms, a bomb scare threatens the lives of the inn's guests. Then the pranks turn deadly....

Josie O'Conner travels to San Francisco in 1951 to locate her gay brother, a private dick investigating a blackmail ring targeting lesbians and gay men. Jimmy's friends claim that just before he disappeared he became a rat, informing the cops on the bar community. Josie adopts Jimmy's trousers and wingtips, battling to clear his name, halt the blackmailers, and exact justice for the many queer corpses.

Detective Inspector Carol Ashton’s promotion to chief inspector has immediately ensnared her in two assignments that hold no warning they will forever change her life. She’s inherited the pressurized case of the high-profile death of media star and wealthy philanthropist Greta Denby, who had been undergoing a controversial experimental treatment for her cancer. Carol is now also taking on the case of the investigating officer Inspector Ian Rooke, who has himself just died under baffling circumstances.

Detective Inspector Carol Ashton is back physically recovered from a gunshot wound, but emotionally shaken. She’s feeling the pressure of being out as a lesbian and constantly putting her life on the line. Can she do it again?

Darcy, a restless young artist, travels to the Soviet Union to visit his elusive half-sister, Fin. Upon his arrival in the depths of a bleak Moscow winter, Darcy is immediately embroiled in Fin's mysterious life there and also drawn to Moscow's forbidden underground, finding himself swept up in political and sexual intrigues of a nature he could never have imagined.

Ex-Chicago cop and new PI Josie Harper has been hired by an outside group to clear the name of publisher Lauren Wade, recently acquitted of the murder of her lover. That means finding the real killer, a task made more difficult by Lauren's unwillingness to cooperate and a large family problem - Lauren's parents have been kidnapped for a ransom she can no longer pay. Josie has a big challenge of her own: how to redeem herself after losing her job as a detective.

In this long-awaited new installment of the legendary Kate Delafield mystery series, Kate is forced to confront her most formidable opponent: herself. Kate Delafield is in a world of trouble. Five months into mandated retirement from the LAPD, her long term on-again off-again relationship with Aimee Grant is off again. She's become hopelessly dependent on the only substance that can drown her pain over Aimee - and the illness of her best friend. She is lost without her police career and beset by terrifying dreams.

Los Angeles, 1986. A group of right-wing Christians has put an initiative on the November ballot to allow health officials to force people with HIV into quarantine camps - and it looks like it’s going to pass. Rios, now living in LA, agrees to be counsel for a group of young activists who call themselves QUEER. QUEER claims to be committed to peaceful civil disobedience. But when one of its members is implicated in the bombing of an evangelical church that kills its pastor, Rios finds himself with a client suddenly facing the death penalty.

The first new Henry Rios novel in 20 years from six-time Lambda Literary award winner Michael Nava is a brilliantly plotted mystery that weaves together the gripping story of two gay men against the backdrop of 1980s San Francisco as the tsunami of AIDS bears down upon the city.

Winner of six Lambda Literary awards, the Henry Rios mystery series is iconic and Michael Nava has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of our best” writers. Here, Rios delves deeply into his Latino identity as he defends a young man charged with assassinating a prominent Los Angeles Latino politician. The San Francisco Chronicle hailed the novel and its author: “A beautifully conceived but gritty novel.... Nava writes the kind of small, clean, powerful novels that build in emotional power almost invisibly, leaving us breathless at the end.”