"When Lila Macapagal moves back home to recover from a horrible breakup, her life seems to be following all the typical rom-com tropes. She's tasked with saving her Tita Rosie's failing restaurant, and she has to deal with a group of matchmaking aunties who shower her with love and judgment. But when a notoriously nasty food critic (who happens to be her ex-boyfriend) drops dead moments after a confrontation with Lila, her life quickly swerves from a Nora Ephron romp to an Agatha Christie case. With the cops treating her like she's the one and only suspect, and the shady landlord looking to finally kick the Macapagal family out and resell the storefront, Lila's left with no choice but to conduct her own investigation. Armed with the nosy auntie network, her barista best bud, and her trusted Dachshund, Longanisa, Lila takes on this tasty, twisted case and soon finds her own neck on the chopping block..."
One family's deepest pain. Another family's darkest secret. On a hot day in 1960s Maine, six-year-old Joe watches his little sister Ruthie, sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fields, while their family, Mi'kmaq people from Nova Scotia, pick fruit. That afternoon, Ruthie vanishes without a trace. As the last person to see her, Joe will be forever haunted by grief, guilt, and the agony of imagining how his life could have been. In an affluent suburb nearby, Norma is growing up as the only child of unhappy parents. She is smart, precocious, and bursting with questions she isn't allowed to ask - questions about her missing baby photos; questions about her dark skin; questions about the strange, vivid dreams of campfires and warm embraces that return night after night. Norma senses there are things her parents aren't telling her, but it will take decades to unravel the secrets they have kept buried since she was a little girl. The Berry Pickers is an exquisitely moving story of unrelenting hope, unwavering love, and the power of family - even in the face of grief and betrayal.
A murder...A tragic accident...Or just parents behaving badly? What’s indisputable is that someone is dead.
Madeline is a force to be reckoned with. She’s funny, biting, and passionate; she remembers everything and forgives no one. Celeste is the kind of beautiful woman who makes the world stop and stare but she is paying a price for the illusion of perfection. New to town, single mom Jane is so young that another mother mistakes her for a nanny. She comes with a mysterious past and a sadness beyond her years. These three women are at different crossroads, but they will all wind up in the same shocking place.
Big Little Lies is a brilliant take on ex-husbands and second wives, mothers and daughters, schoolyard scandal, and the little lies that can turn lethal.
'I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.' Los Angeles Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wheelchair-bound General Sternwood to discover who is blackmailing him. A broken, weary old man, Sternwood just wants Marlowe to make the problem go away. However, with Sternwood's two wild, devil-may-care daughters prowling LA's seedy backstreets, Marlowe's got his work cut out. And that's before he stumbles over the first corpse.
It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It's strictly the straight-and-narrow for him -- until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly. 1973. The counter-culture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant, Pepper, Carney's endearingly violent partner in crime. It's getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook - to their regret. 1976. Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July 4th ad he can live with. ("Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!"), while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted. CROOK MANIFESTO is a darkly funny tale of a city under siege, but also a sneakily searching portrait of the meaning of family.
Christopher is 15 and lives in Swindon with his father. He has Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. He is obsessed with maths, science and Sherlock Holmes but finds it hard to understand other people. When he discovers a dead dog on a neighbour's lawn he decides to solve the mystery and write a detective thriller about it. As in all good detective stories, however, the more he unearths, the deeper the mystery gets - for both Christopher and the rest of his family.
"The start of an exciting new historical mystery series set during the Harlem Renaissance from debut author Nekesa Afia. Harlem, 1926. Young black women like Louise Lloyd are ending up dead. Following a harrowing kidnapping ordeal when she was in her teens, Louise is doing everything she can to maintain a normal life. She's succeeding, too. She spends her days working at Maggie's Cafe and her nights at the Zodiac, Harlem's hottest speakeasy. Louise's friends might say she's running from her past and the notoriety that still stalks her, but don't tell her that. When a girl turns up dead in front of the cafe, Louise is forced to confront something she's been trying to ignore-two other local black girls have been murdered over the past few weeks. After an altercation with a police officer gets her arrested, Louise is given an ultimatum: She can either help solve the case or wind up in a jail cell. Louise has no choice but to investigate and soon finds herself toe-to-toe with a murderous mastermind hell-bent on taking more lives, maybe even her own"
Sookie Stackhouse is a cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana, but she keeps to herself and doesn't date much because of her "disability" to read minds. When she meets Bill, Sookie can't hear a word he's thinking. He's the type of guy she's waited for all of her life, but he has a disability, too--he's a vampire with a bad reputation. When one of Sookie's coworkers is killed, she fears she's next.
From an award-winning author comes a genre-defying thriller about a father desperate to salvage what's left of his family--even if it means a descent into violence. Buried in debt due to his young daughter's illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel's cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. But the path to reward or ruin is never as straight as it seems. As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won't return the same.
'ARE YOU...DEAD?' OH MY GOD. I THINK HE IS. When Meddy Chan accidentally kills her blind date, she turns to her aunties for help. Their meddling set her up on the date so they kind of owe her. WELL, THAT DIDN'T QUITE GO TO PLAN. Although hiding this goddamn dead body is going to be harder than they thought especially when her family's wedding business has THE biggest wedding of the year happening right now. IT'S PRETTY BAD TIMING REALLY. It turns out the wedding venue just happens to be managed by Meddy's ex, aka the one who got away. It's the worst time to see him again, or...is it? Can Meddy finally find love and make her overbearing family happy?
"Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once. I'm not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth. Some of us are good, others are bad, and some just unfortunate. I'm Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I'd killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it's a little more complicated than that. Have I killed someone? Yes. I have. Who was it? Let's get started.
15-year-old Janie recognizes herself in a picture of a small girl on a milk carton - a child who'd been snatched from a shopping mall in New Jersey. She can't believe the couple she looked on as loving parents had kidnapped her, but then starts to piece together things that don't make sense
Who are you? What have we done to each other? These are the questions Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they weren't made by him. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone. So what really did happen to Nick's beautiful wife?
People die every year on Mount Everest. This year will be murder. Zan Jensen, on the run from her past, has landed in Kathmandu, where she works as a climbing guide for rich tourists. On the side, she and her partner, Haskell, moonlight as high-altitude graverobbers: extorting money from the families of the many dead bodies they find littering the peaks of the Himalayas to bring them down and send them home. When a body at the summit of Mount Everest shows up with a jackpot of state secrets embedded in its skin, they're put in the crosshairs of a government agency bent on recovering the body and eliminating any witnesses. It's a race to the top of the world, where Zan will fight to find salvation in the deadliest place on Earth.
Known for his looks and charm, a young man obsessed with wealth and status will stop at nothing to get what he wants. He sets his sights on a beautiful and innocent college student named Dorothy, intent on marrying her for her family’s money. But when Dorothy becomes pregnant, his careful plans start to unravel and he begins to take cold, calculating, and drastic measures.
Life Is Short and Then You Die is the Mystery Writers of America's first teen anthology, edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author Kelley Armstrong.
Adolescence is a time of “firsts.” First kiss. First love. First loss. First job. The first taste of adult responsibilities, and the first look at an independent life away from both the restrictions and the security of home.
And in this case, a very different type of “first”: murder.
This short story collection of murder mysteries adds a sinister spin to the joy and pain of firsts that have always been a major part of life, whether it be high school cliques who take the term “backstabbing” too seriously, stumbling upon a body on the way home from school, or receiving a Snapchat message that promises something deadly.
Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with ne-er do well Floyd Thursby. But when Spade's partner Miles Archer is murdered while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the mythical jewel-encrusted Falcon, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man and how far can he trust the sexy Miss Wonderley? Dashiel Hammett's noir classic is written in sharp terse prose that gives a cinematic vividness to the characters and the milieu.
Stephanie Plum is down on her luck. She's lost her job at New Jersey's most down-market lingerie store, her car's on the brink of repossession, and her apartment is fast becoming furniture-free. Enter Cousin Vinnie, a low-life who runs a bail-bond company. If Stephanie can bring in vice cop turned outlaw Joe Morelli, she stands to pick up $10,000. But tracking down a cop wanted for murder isn't easy. And suddenly Stephanie has another problem on her hands. Benito Ramirez, a prize-fighter with more menace than mentality, wants her to be his friend - and he won't take no for an answer. Soon Stephanie begins to know exactly what it feels like to be pursued - and the best person to protect her just happens to be on the run...
An eleven-year-old boy's violated corpse is found in a town park. Eyewitnesses and fingerprints point unmistakably to one of Flint City's most popular citizens. He is Terry Maitland, Little League coach, English teacher, husband, and father of two girls. Detective Ralph Anderson, whose son Maitland once coached, orders a quick and very public arrest. Maitland has an alibi, but Anderson and the district attorney soon add DNA evidence to go with the fingerprints and witnesses. Their case seems ironclad. But Maitland has an alibi, and it turns out that his story has incontrovertible evidence of its own. How can two opposing stories be true? What happens to a family when an accusation of this magnitude is delivered? When must reason or rationality be abandoned in order to explain the unexplicable? Terry Maitland seems like a nice guy, but is he wearing another face?
Rusty Sabich is a prosecuting lawyer in Chicago who enters a nightmare world when Carolyn, a beautiful attorney with whom he has been having an affair, is found raped and strangled. He stands accused of the crime. It's a supremely suspenseful and compelling courtroom drama about ambition, weakness, hypocrisy and American justice.
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. But Gamache knows that evil is lurking somewhere behind the white picket fences and that, if he watches closely enough, Three Pines will start to give up its dark secrets...
As a professional wizard, Harry Dresden knows firsthand that the “everyday” world is actually full of strange and magical things—and most of them don’t play well with humans. And those that do enjoy playing with humans far too much. He also knows he’s the best at what he does. Technically, he’s the only at what he does. But even though Harry is the only game in town, business—to put it mildly—stinks.
So when the Chicago P.D. bring him in to consult on a double homicide committed with black magic, Harry's seeing dollar signs. But where there's black magic, there's a black mage behind it. And now that mage knows Harry's name...
"Spring has sprung in Crozet, Virginia--a time for old friends to gather and bid farewell to the doldrums of winter. But a fresh chill arrives with the shocking murder of beloved University of Virginia history professor Greg "Ginger" McConnell--gunned down in broad daylight. With no discernible motive and no apparent suspects, Mary Minor "Harry" Haristeen begins nosing into the case with the help of her furry fellow sleuths"...
Charleston is bustling with shoppers looking for antiques-and, of course, Theodosia Browning's delicious teas. But when the cobblestone alleys clear, Theodosia finds the map store owner strangled to death. Many wanted her shop-but enough to kill? Most alarming, however, is Detective Tidwell's theory: that the killer mistook her for Theodosia.
It's time for China Bayles, a nonpracticing attorney whose close friend's sudden death put her on the trail of a murderer. And though the setting is Pecan Springs in the peaceful Texas hill country, China soon realizes that violence can happen anywhere.
The life of a ten-year-old black girl is shattered by two drunken and remorseless white men. The mostly white town of Clanton in Ford County, Mississippi, reacts with shock and horror at the inhuman crime—until the girl’s father acquires an assault rifle and takes justice into his own hands.
For ten days, as burning crosses and the crack of sniper fire spread through the streets of Clanton, the nation sits spellbound as defense attorney Jake Brigance struggles to save his client’s life—and then his own
'There's another body on a slab, Dallas. Dirty cop or not, he's dead, and she's responsible. She has to be shut down before she decides to clean house again.' Lieutenant Eve Dallas is about to come up against her most formidable criminal yet: Lieutenant Renee Oberman, daughter of a New York Police legend. After eighteen years on the force, Oberman is efficient, decorated - and utterly corrupt. When Eve's partner Peabody overhears a damning conversation between Oberman and one of her flunkies, Peabody, Eve and her husband Roarke are soon on the case. Together they must find the hard evidence needed to bring Oberman and all her dirty cops down - knowing all the while that she will kill anyone who gets in her way.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect.
The heroine of Marie NDiaye’s new novel is Maître Susane, a quiet middle-aged lawyer living a modest existence in Bordeaux, known to all as a consummate and unflappable professional. But when Gilles Principaux shows up at her office asking her to defend his wife, who is accused of a horrific crime, Maître Susane begins to crack.
She seems to remember having been alone with him in her youth for a significant event, one her mind obsesses over but can’t quite reconstruct. Who is this Gilles Principaux? And why would he come to her, a run-of-the-mill lawyer, for such an important trial?
A banker who has been receiving threatening notes enlists the help of the Hardy boys. Before long, the young sleuths find themselves entangled in the investigation of a notorious band of thieves.
Mystery or Crime
Complete the Mystery or Crime square by reading any title in the Mystery or Crime genres and recording the title on your BINGO card in the Mystery or Crime square.
You can use any title that you’d like, but here are some suggestions to complete the Mystery or Crime square.
Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala (I-Share Print) (Libby eBook) (Libby Audio)
The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters (I-Share Print)
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty (I-Share Print) (I-Share Audio) (Libby eBook) (Libby Audio)
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (I-Share Audio) (I-Share Print) (Libby eBook)
Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (I-Share Print) (Libby Audio)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon (I-Share Print and here) (I-Share Audio and here) (Libby eBook) (Libby Audio)
Dead Dead Girls by Nekesa Afia (I-Share Print)
Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris (I-Share Print and here) (I-Share Audio)
The Devil Takes You Home by Gabino Iglesias (I-Share)
Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutanto (I-Share Print) (Libby Audio)
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson (I-Share Audio) (Libby eBook)
The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney (I-Share Print) (I-Share Audio)
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (I-Share Print and here and here) (I-Share Audio) (Libby eBook) (Libby Audio)
High Crimes by Christopher Sebela and Ibrahim Moustafa (I-Share Print) (Libby eBook)
A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin (I-Share Print)
Life is Short and Then You Die edited by Kelley Armstrong (I-Share Print)
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiel Hammett (I-Share Print) (I-Share Audio) (Libby eBook) (Libby Audio)
One for the Money by Janet Evanovich (I-Share Print) (Libby Audio)
The Outsider by Stephen King (I-Share Print and here) (I-Share Audio) (Libby eBook) (Libby Audio)
Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow (I-Share Print) (I-Share Audio)
Still Life by Louise Penny (I-Share Print) (I-Share Audio) (Libby Audio)
Storm Front by Jim Butcher (I-Share Print and here) (Libby Audio)
Tail Gait by Rita Mae Brown and Sneaky Pie Brown (I-Share Print) (I-Share Audio)
The Teaberry Strangler by Laura Childs (I-Share Print)
Thyme of Death by Susan Wittig Albert (I-Share Print and here)
A Time to Kill by John Grisham (I-Share Print and here) (Libby eBook)
Treachery in Death by J.D. Robb (I-Share Print) (I-Share Audio) (Libby eBook)
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (I-Share Print and here) (I-Share Audio) (Libby eBook) (Libby Audio)
Vengeance is Mine by Marie NDiaye (I-Share Print) (Libby Audio)
While the Clocked Ticked (Hardy Boys 11) by Franklin W. Dixon (I-Share Print and here)