True Crime Mystery Thriller

In the early hours of Saturday, December 17th, 2011, Zoe Nolan, a 19-year-old Manchester University student, walked out of a party taking place in the shared accommodation where she had been living for three months. She was never seen again.

Celebrating her 45th birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her 45th birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins. A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix's children's school. Josie has been listening to Alix's podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.

When acclaimed mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers first began compiling anthologies of the best crime stories in the 1920s and ’30s, the genre was in the flush of its first golden age. While it is hard to imagine today - after every possible mystery plot has been told, retold, subverted, and played straight again by hundreds of writers over nearly a century - in Sayers’s day there were still twists that had never been seen, and machinations of crime that would shock even jaded Jazz Age fans.

Ten years ago, Katy, a promising young journalist, left her desk and was never seen again. Someone knows what happened to her. The controlling boyfriend? The inappropriate professor? The clingy colleague? When Katy went missing, it wasn’t just her devastated mother, Grace, whose life was ruined. Now, a new documentary delving into the missing person case threatens to open old wounds. As Grace gets closer to the truth, she discovers just how far people are willing to go to keep the past hidden.

July 1989, in a sleepy Michigan town, high school grad Nina Laramie heads out with her friends and is never seen alive again. Months later, her skeleton is found near a remote party spot in the forest. The ME determines Nina has been brutally raped and bludgeoned to death. Fear and anger ripple through this tight-knit community when the case goes cold. Thirty years later, Riley St. James, a Detroit PD assigned to Nina’s case, is determined to get her first big cold case win despite having a similar past to the victim.

Suburbia. Shady, tree-lined streets; well-tended lawns; and cozy homes. A nice, quiet place to grow up. Unless you are teenage Meg or her crippled sister, Susan. On a dead-end street, in the dark, damp basement of the Chandler house, Meg and Susan are left captive to the savage whims and rages of a distant aunt who is rapidly descending into madness. It is a madness that infects all three of her sons and finally the entire neighborhood. Only one troubled boy stands hesitantly between Meg and Susan and their cruel, torturous deaths.

1934 Chicago dazzles with fast action and calculating, cold-blooded meanness as private detective Nate Heller combs Chicago’s North Side looking for John Dillinger. But things take a turn for the strange when self-aggrandizing G-Man Melvin Purvis shoots down a Dillinger double in front of the Biograph Theater. Full of muscle and oozing Chicago’s tough-guy persona to the hilt, Max Allan Collins’ Nate Heller is the ultimate private investigator.

After the screen of a run-down drive-in movie theater collapses and kills four people, the daughter of one of the victims asks private investigator Cal Weaver to look into a recent break-in at her father's house. Cal discovers a hidden basement room where it's clear that salacious activities have taken place - as well as evidence of missing DVDs. But his investigation soon becomes more complicated when he realises the DVDs may contain something even more shocking.

Western Australia, 1988. After betraying the Knights motorcycle gang, 17-year-old Lee Southern flees to the city with nothing left to lose. Working as a rogue tow-truck driver in Perth, he is captured by right-wing extremists whose combination of seduction and blackmail keeps him on the wrong side of the law and under their control. As the true nature of what drives his captors unfolds, Lee becomes an unwilling participant in a breathtakingly ambitious plot - and a cold-blooded crime that will show just how much he, and everyone else, still has to lose.

Four years ago Eliza Dacey was brutally murdered. Within hours, her killer was caught. Wasn't he? So reads the opening titles of Jack Quick's new true-crime documentary. A skilled producer, Jack knows that the bigger the conspiracy, the higher the ratings. Curtis Wade, convicted of Eliza's murder on circumstantial evidence and victim of a biased police force, is the perfect subject. Millions of viewers agree. Just before the finale, Jack uncovers a minor detail that may prove Curtis guilty after all.

It seems straightforward to Attorney Nate Shepherd: a middle-aged billionaire dies while celebrating at a wedding reception. The grief-stricken family lashes out, though, blaming the billionaire’s date for his death. When the family brings all of its power to bear, the wheels of local justice threaten to overwhelm the woman. As Nate Shepherd steps in to defend her, he tries to deflect the misplaced anger that’s directed at the woman for the tragedy. But as the investigation progresses, a tangled history unravels, including unexpected ties to Nate’s own life.

When beautiful and vivacious Charlotte Salter fails to turn up to her husband Alec’s 50th birthday party, her kids are worried, but Alec is not. As the days pass and there’s still no word from Charlie, her daughter, Etty, and her sons, Niall, Paul and Ollie, all struggle to come to terms with her disappearance. How can anyone just vanish without a trace?

A US Navy commander is attacked by an unidentified Russian man while having dinner with his wife. A CIA operative travelling on a Canadian passport is intercepted and interrogated at Tehran Airport. A team of FBI officers are arrested by Indonesian police for travelling under fake passports in Jakarta. These apparently unrelated incidents point to a compromise in US government security, and Jack Ryan and his team must find out where it is coming from.

Verity is telling lies. And that's why she's about to be arrested for attempted murder. Serena has been lying for years. And that may have driven her daughter, Verity, to do something unthinkable. Poppy's lies have come back to haunt her. So will her quest for the truth hurt everyone she loves? Everyone lies. But whose lies are going to end in tragedy?

When young teacher Anna Blackwell is found dead in her home, the police think her death was suicide or a tragic accident. After all, Stonebridge is a quiet country village in the Scottish Borders, where murders just don't happen. But Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez soon arrives from faraway Shetland when his ex-wife, Sarah, asks him to look into the case. The local gossips are saying that her new husband, Tom, was having an affair with Anna. Could Tom have been involved with her death?

I was known as the traitor's daughter. When I was five years old, my father was tortured, branded with the letter Z, then beaten and left for dead. The grueling punishment for his crime was a reminder to all others who dared threaten the Russian's reign. I was the young girl left behind. A living piece of the traitorous puzzle the Russian leader tried so diligently to ignore - until I grew up. No longer could he deny how much my existence had always been intertwined with his. And in order to survive the life I was thrown into, I was forced to learn my place inside of it.

When Amy Blahn died on a London rooftop, Layla Mahoney was there. Layla was holding her. But all she can say when she’s arrested is that ‘It was Michael. Find Michael and you’ll find out everything you need to know'. The problem is, the police can’t find him—they aren’t even sure he exists. Layla knows she only has forty-eight hours to convince the police that bringing in the man she knows only as ‘Michael’ will clear her name and reveal a dangerous game affecting not just Amy and Layla, but her husband Russell and countless others.

Rookie cop Carrie Santero has always been fascinated by serial killers. As a teenager, she wrote a letter to Charles Manson in prison - and received a chilling reply. Then she came face to face with a child murderer in her small Pennsylvania town, an encounter that haunts her to this day. Now, as a detective in training, she finally has her chance to make a difference; to hunt down a psychopathic sadist who embodies the very nature of evil itself. 

Everything I've done, everything I will do, there will be no regret. The world is a vicious place for a woman. It's even crueler to the daughter of the Ceann na Conairte - discarded, married off, left powerless. But I am no ordinary daughter of the mafia. Unlike every other mafia family, my mother was Melody Callahan, Bloody Mel, the Don of the Italian Mafia, and the Don didn't raise some precious mafia princess. Bone by bone she broke me first, so no one else could - and bone by bone, I pieced myself back together.

The Cornish Scoop is a novel, but I’ll be totally honest, there’s very little I’ve had to imagine, as I have experienced the majority of the content in this book in my career as a police officer. Treavey is a Cornish police officer who is just out of his probation in 1994 and making it alone in the big wide world of policing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this very much reflects the time and locations of my own policing experience, so I will leave it up to you which parts are made up and which are true. Remember that life tends to be stranger than fiction!