Showing results by publisher "Hodder & Stoughton" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

She's only been gone two hours. Her husband, David, was meant to be looking after their two-week-old daughter. But when Alice Fancourt walks into the nursery, her terrifying ordeal begins, for Alice insists the baby in the cot is a stranger she's never seen before. With an increasingly hostile and menacing David swearing she must either be mad or lying, how can Alice make the police believe her before it's too late?

When 15-year-old Oscar Dreyer-Hoff disappears, the police assume he's simply a runaway - a typically overlooked middle child doing what teenagers do all around the world. But his frantic family is certain that something terrible has happened.

Jeppe Kørner, on leave from the police force and nursing a broken heart, has taken refuge on the island of Bornholm for the winter. Also on the island is Esther de Laurenti, a writer working on a biography on a female anthropologist with a mysterious past and coming to terms with her own crushing sense of loneliness in the wake of a dear friend's death. When Jeppe lends a helping hand at the island's local sawmill, he begins to realize that the island may not be the peaceful refuge it appears to be.

In this world, Dr Charlotte Stone is an expert psychologist helping to catch serial killers. In the next world, Charlotte's ghostly lover - wrongly executed killer Michael Garland - is facing death yet again: the ultimate annihilation of his soul. Can Charlie prove Michael's innocence and rescue him from total oblivion?

Right now, Hunter's big problem is a missing little brother, last seen fleeing the site of a gruesome killing. Hunter needs the help of an old army buddy, a whole lot of hardware and a trip to Little Rock, Arkansas, to fix this particular problem. A brutal encounter with some very nasty criminals leaves Hunter fighting for his life. And that's before he comes up against America's most feared serial killer, 'The Harvestman' and his grisly souvenirs of death. But blood is thicker than water. And a lot of blood will be spilt....

The gruesome double murder at an Eastvale property developer's luxury home should be an open and shut case for Superintendent Banks and his team of detectives. There's a clear link to the notoriously vicious Albanian mafia, men who left the country suspiciously soon after the death. Then they find a cache of spy-cam videos hidden in the house - and Annie and Gerry's investigation pivots to the rape of a young girl that could cast the murders in an entirely different light.

Wealthy Richard Walker has just died, leaving behind his country house full of rooms packed with the detritus of a lifetime. His estranged family-bitter ex-wife Caroline, troubled teenage son Trenton, and unforgiving daughter Minna-have arrived for their inheritance. But the Walkers are not alone. Prim Alice and the cynical Sandra, long dead former residents bound to the house, linger within its claustrophobic walls.

Summer is in full swing in the picturesque Sussex countryside, and Maisie Cooper is bound for the annual Bitling Fair. Maisie expects to enjoy homemade cakes, a glass of cider and a spot of Morris dancing. But what she doesn't bargain for is the tensions running high between the villagers of East Bitling and the disagreements being stirred up by the high and mighty Lady Catherine, from the big house on the hill.

Julie Tudor is 49 and has it all: a fantastic job (well-maintained spreadsheets are the lynchpin of an efficient office), a beautiful house (some may wonder how she got the money for it, but nothing has been proved) and the man of her dreams. Sean is 25 and the love of Julie's life. The only problem is, he thinks he's in love with someone else.- But Julie has found herself in a similar situation before. And if there's one thing Julie knows, it's how to get rid of the competition...

Spring, 1967. The trail of tragedy and destruction that followed the previous winter's flood seems to have died down; Florence is beginning to recover. But Inspector Bordelli does not feel the same sense of relief - he has not had a moment's peace since his investigation of a young boy's murder went disastrously wrong. Unsettled and embittered, Bordelli resigns from the force and leaves the city. He could not continue to work as a policeman while the perpetrators of such a terrible crime were still at large.

After decades of dereliction and inner-city neglect, Barrack Street, Cork is finally being excavated. The work uncovers the skeletal remains of six men, scattered around the site, their hands and feet all bound, all clearly killed violently, but many decades, even centuries, ago. When a seventh body is found, Detective Garda Alice McCann knows immediately this one is different. It's female, for a start, and considerably more recent. Who was she? And who killed her?

Maria Weston wants to be friends with me. Maybe that had been the problem all along: Maria Weston had wanted to be friends with me, but I let her down. She's been hovering at the edge of my consciousness for all of my adult life, although I've been good at keeping her out, just a blurred shadow in the corner of my eye, almost but not quite out of sight. Maria Weston wants to be friends. But Maria Weston has been dead for more than twenty-five years.

When Fauzia's brother turns up with a dead body, her perfect life is shattered. She'll protect him to the ends of the earth, but who is he running from? Keisha knows all too well that family comes first. Reeling from rejection, she's determined to make Malton pay. And she'll hurt him in the worst way imaginable. Craig Malton is on the hunt for a violent drug lord who's wreaking havoc and destruction in Manchester. Little does he know what's coming for him.

When true-crime writer Rachel Vale and her daughter, Lucy, move into the abandoned Faraday House at the end of Lily Lane, they already know its tragic history . . . That's why they came. Rachel hopes that untangling the muddled case of the Faradays might help her solve another puzzle: her daughter. But the small Midwestern town of Granger remembers the Faradays, and the residents do not take well to strangers pulling apart their mysteries. They will do whatever it takes to protect their own.

In the 1970s London has stopped swinging, but it's not staying still. Babs thought she had all the world ahead of her. Then she got pregnant, and the father did a runner. Salvation comes in the form of a man who'll look after her. Or so she thinks. But Stan Miller is the devil in disguise...and over the next 20 years, Babs will have reason to regret she ever met him. Can she protect her family - or will he get the better of her?

Accepting the task of protecting Billie Womack is a no-brainer for ex-counterterrorist soldier Joe Hunter, but it comes with its own set of complications. Billie's husband, Richard, stole $30 million from some violent people. He apparently died in a car crash with Billie's daughter, Nicola, during a desperate attempt to elude his pursuers. But his enemies don't believe him dead. They think he escaped the plunge into the icy river that killed Nicola and has now decided to come back for the money.

Edinburgh, 1948. Welfare Officer Helen Crowther has enough on her plate between her hectic job, her complicated love life, and her growing reputation as a troublemaker. Last year's scandal did nothing to help with the disapproval she already gets as a woman in her line of work. All she wants now is to focus on doing what she loves: helping the poor of the Fountainbridge ward in the city of Edinburgh. The last thing she needs is another string of murders to distract her . . .

EVERYONE IS GRIPPED BY STEPHEN RONSON!

Sweden, 1855. 'Worst thing I ever saw...' The Minister of Justice receives a disturbing message. A massacre on one of Lapland's mountains - a priest, a law enforcement officer and a local settler have been slaughtered by one of the indigenous Sami people. The murderer is in custody; he refuses to talk. The Minister dispatches his son-in-law, a geologist, to investigate, for there is more than one reason to visit Blackåsen: it is a mountain with many secrets, a mountain that has never been mapped.

1983: Three students from a small college embark on a week-long road trip to film a documentary on roadside memorials for their American Studies class. The project starts out as a fun adventure with long stretches of empty road and nightly campfires where they begin to open up with one another. But as they venture deeper into the Appalachian backwoods, the atmosphere begins to darken. They notice more and more of the memorials feature a strange, unsettling symbol hinting at a sinister secret.