Showing results by publisher "HarperAudio" in Suspense

When Jennifer Brady returns to Northern Arizona University for her sophomore year, she quickly becomes a big sister to her new roommate, Beth Rankin, a brilliant yet sheltered 16-year-old freshman. For a homeschooled Beth, college is her first taste of both freedom and unfettered access to the internet, and Jenny is concerned that she is too naive and rebellious for her own good. Her worries are well-founded because one day Beth vanishes, prompting Jenny to alert campus authorities, local police, and her mom, Sheriff Joanna Brady - who calls in a favor.

Julia Rodriguez and her teenage daughter, Beatriz, escaped bloodthirsty gangs, random violence, and Julia's abusive husband back in El Salvador. Arriving in Miami, mother and daughter struggled to carve their own piece of the American dream. While life in the States is hard, it is safer, until Julia rejects her boss' unwanted sexual advances. Suddenly - thanks to an "anonymous" tip to US immigration authorities - she is arrested, locked in detention with criminals, and slated for deportation. Attorney Jack Swyteck's only viable legal move to save her is asylum.

When a teenage girl goes missing, Nicola Miller fears for her own daughter. Not for Abby's mental health or safety, but that she might have had something to do with it. She worries her daughter is a killer. Just like her. Nicola has never told the truth about what happened with Abby's father. But now as the search for Cara continues, Nicola, risks her secret coming to light. And she's not the only one with something to hide. Her mother, Joyce, and her daughter also have secrets of their own.

Feared and disliked for both her poison pen and her ice queen persona, bicoastal gossip columnist Amanda Dart finds the tables have turned. The unwitting victim of an anonymous gossipmonger who is faxing to national opinion makers an outrageous scandal sheet revealing the details of her ongoing indiscretions with a nationally known takeover artist, Amanda enlists the help of New York lawyer and investigator Stone Barrington to learn the identity of the faxer. Everybody is a suspect in the world of tabloid journalism.

In the dead of night, a faceless enemy hacks into the Smithsonian Institution's network of servers, but it is only the first strike masking a larger attack. To rescue a biologist trapped in the National Museum of Natural History and to discover the true intent behind an assault that grows bolder and bloodier by the minute, Sigma Force must unleash its most headstrong operative - Joe Kowalski - to do what he does best: lay waste to anything between him and his goal.

Dr. Catherine Young is on a mission to find a man who has vanished into thin air. Walking into a high-tech hideaway bearing an essential message to Tom "Mac" McEnroe, Team Leader of the betrayed Ghost Ops force, is the most dangerous thing she has ever done. The soldier she encounters is frightening and suspicious, but her senses reveal the man underneath: tough, honorable, and so breathtakingly masculine Catherine feels weak in his presence.... But to surrender to Mac's passionate desires would put her life in dire jeopardy.

Forensic anthropologist Bill Brockton has spent 25 years solving brutal murders - but none so horrific and merciless as his latest case: A ravaged set of skeletal remains is found scattered in the woods of nearby Cook County. They are all that is left of a victim who had been chained, hand and foot, to a tree on a remote mountainside. The bones tell Brockton and his longtime graduate assistant, Miranda, that the victim was a young male under the age of thirty. As they dig deeper to establish his identity, they uncover warning signs that long-simmering hatred is about to explode.

The newly inaugurated president, Joseph Gardner, pledged to start pulling U.S. forces out of Iraq on his first day of office .Meanwhile, the former president, Kevin Martindale, and retired Air Force lieutenant-general Patrick McLanahan have left government behind for the lucrative world of military contracting. Their firm, Scion Aviation International, has been hired to take over aerial patrols in northern Iraq....

The transporting stories in this year’s The Best American Mystery and Suspense are populated by those who exist on the fringe of our society and want more than what life has dealt them: A haunted veteran turned career criminal is on the run. An injured fighter turned bouncer seeks vengeance for his lost love. An assassin on his last job finds himself questioning his life choices and breaks all the rules to understand his final victim.

Driven by a compulsion that challenges his self-control, the man calling himself Charles Milton prowls the rodeo circuit, hunting young women. He chooses those he believes are the most vulnerable, wandering alone and distracted, before he strikes. For years, he has been meticulous in his methods, abducting, murdering, and disposing his victims while leaving no evidence of his crimes—or their identities—behind. Indigenous women have become his target of choice, knowing law enforcement’s history of ignoring their disappearances.

Reformed cat burglar Clea Rice has witnessed enough crime to put her on the straight and narrow. But little does she suspect that her search for justice will land her in the arms of a wealthy English gentleman.

As a child, Alice was stolen from her backyard in a tiny Indiana community, but against the odds, her policeman father tracked her down within 24 hours and rescued her from harm. In the aftermath of the crime, her family decided to move to Chicago and close the door on that horrible day. Yet Alice hasn’t forgotten. She devotes her spare time volunteering for a website called The Doe Pages scrolling through pages upon pages of unidentified people, searching for clues that could help reunite families with their missing loved ones.

On a transatlantic flight, the two black sheep of Sigma Force - Seichan and Kowalski - must set aside their mutual dislike as a mysterious fiery force knocks their aircraft out of the sky. This unlikely duo must use every skill, weapon, and bit of ingenuity to survive a night on a remote volcanic island, where their only refuge is the haunted, bat-plagued grounds of a seemingly deserted resort. But something horrific awaits the two, something born of the latest science but rooted in our basest human instincts.

LAPD lieutenant detective Decker and his wife, Rina, have willingly welcomed fifteen-year-old Gabriel Whitman into their home. While the enigmatic teen seems to be adapting easily, Decker knows only too well the secrets adolescents keep - witnessed by the tragic suicide of another teen, Gregory Hesse, a student at Bell and Wakefield, one of the city’s most exclusive prep schools. Gregory’s mother refuses to believe her son shot himself and convinces Decker to look deeper. What he finds disturbs him. The gun used in the tragedy was stolen....

The troubling message from Serena Charters' late grandmother appears in a package containing four pages of a centuries-old illuminated manuscript - a strange inheritance that hides many secrets...and has already cost many lives. Seeking answers, Serena turns to Erik North of Rarities Unlimited, a reclusive manuscript appraiser with a passion for the past. Without warning they are thrust together into the center of a lethal firestorm that rages between two worlds - one long dead yet living on in an ancient text, the other chillingly alive and fraught with peril.

Terry Scarborough is a legal scholar and provocateur who craves headline-making celebrity, but with his latest book he may have gone too far. In it he resurrects forgotten language in the U.S. Constitution - and hints at a missing letter of Thomas Jefferson's - that threatens to divide the nation.

It begins at the airport, where Jack is waiting to meet his old high school buddy, Keith Ingraham, a high-powered banker based in Hong Kong, coming to Miami for his young daughter's surgery. But their long-awaited reunion is abruptly derailed when the police arrest Keith's wife, Isabelle, in the terminal, accusing her of conspiring to kill the man who raped her in college. Jack quickly agrees to represent Isa but soon discovers that to see justice done, he must separate truth from lies.

When Joanna Brady's daughter, Jenny, stumbles across the body of her high school principal, Debra Highsmith, in the desert, the Cochise County sheriff's personal and professional worlds collide. Though she's tried to protect her children from the dangers of the grown-up world, the search for justice leads straight to her own door and forces her to face the possibility that her beloved daughter may be less perfect than she seems. Yet the deeper Joanna digs, the more complications she uncovers....

In his introduction, guest editor S. A. Cosby observes that writing short stories is “a special skill that combines brevity with wit and cleverness and the hint of the existential malaise that imbues crime fiction with its gravitas.” The stories in this collection overflow with gravitas in the most unexpected ways: a cryptic note left on a windshield, a murder for hire meets a game of Mouse Trap, a swipe right on a dating app goes horribly wrong.

From its opening scene, when hero cop Brian Remy wakes up to find he's shot himself in the head, novelist Jess Walter takes us on a harrowing tour of a city and a country shuddering through the aftershocks of a devastating terrorist attack. As the smoke slowly clears, Remy finds that his memory is skipping, lurching between moments of lucidity and days when he doesn't seem to be living his own life at all.