Showing results by narrator "Lorelei King" in All Categories

'I have sinned.' The words are scrawled in blood at the most shocking murder scene forensic pathologist Maura Isles and Detective Jane Rizzoli have ever witnessed. The victim, a young woman, has been entirely drained of blood and horrifically dismembered. When there's a second murder, the police uncover a link to a secret society known as the Mephisto Club. Their mission is a terrifying one - to find the true source of evil on earth. But has evil already found them?

Mercy Thompson’s world just got a whole lot bigger... A collection of all-new and previously published short stories featuring Mercy Thompson, “one of the best heroines in the urban fantasy genre today” (Fiction Vixen Book Reviews), and the characters she calls friends...

Ann Rule was working on the biggest story of her career, tracking the trail of victims left by a brutal serial killer. Little did this future best-selling author know that the savage slayer she was hunting was the young man she counted among her closest friends. Everyone's picture of a natural winner, Ted Bundy was a bright, charming, and handsome man with a promising future as an attorney. But on January 24, 1989 Bundy was executed for the murders of three young women - and had confessed to taking the lives of at least thirty-five more women from coast to coast.

Under cover of night in Richmond, Virginia, a human monster strikes, leaving a gruesome trail of stranglings that has paralysed the city. Medical examiner Kay Scarpetta suspects the worst: a deliberate campaign by a brilliant serial killer whose signature offers precious few clues. With an unerring eye, she calls on the latest advances in forensic research to unmask the madman.

At 8pm on 21st January, 28-year-old Charlie Grant believes she is going to be murdered, and she wants Boston's top homicide detective, D.D. Warren, to handle her death investigation. Confronting D.D. at her latest crime scene, Charlie lays her cards on the table. For each of the last two years, one of her childhood friends has been murdered, leaving Charlie as the only one of three friends to remain alive.

It is the week before Christmas. The effects of the credit crunch have prompted Dr Kay Scarpetta to offer her services pro bono to New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. But in no time at all, her increased visibility precipitates a string of dramatic and unsettling events. She is asked live on the air about the sensational case of Hannah Starr, who has vanished and is presumed dead.

Bounty hunter Stephanie Plum has been on all kinds of crime scenes, but this is definitely a first. Her fleeing target has left behind a truck loaded with ice cream and a dead body - frozen solid and covered in chocolate and chopped pecans. As fate would have it, Stephanie's mentor and occasional employer, Ranger, needs her to go undercover at the ice cream factory to find out who's killing employees and sabotaging the business.

Being a mechanic is hard work. Mercy Thompson, for instance, just spent the last couple of months trying to evade the murderous queen of the local vampire seethe, and now the leader of the werewolf pack - who's maybe more than just a friend - has asked for her help. A book of fae secrets has come to light and they're all about to find out how implacable - and dangerous - the fae can be. OK, so maybe her troubles have nothing to do with the job. But she sure could use a holiday....

In the supernatural realms, there are creatures who belong to winter. I am not one of them. But like the coyote I can become at will, I am adaptable. My name is Mercy Thompson Hauptman, and my mate, Adam, is the werewolf who leads the Columbia Basin Pack, the pack charged with keeping the people who live and work in the Tri-Cities of Washington State safe. It's a hard job, and it doesn't leave much room for side quests. Which is why when I needed to travel to Montana to help my brother, I intended to go by myself. But I'm not alone anymore.

Stephanie Plum feels her career as a bounty hunter has run its course. Time to find a job her mother can tell her friends about without making the sign of the cross. So she quits. But trouble follows Stephanie, in the form of a maniac returned from the grave for the sole purpose of putting her six feet under. Stephanie realises that her old job may be the solution rather than the problem after all. So she takes an office position working for Ranger, the sexiest bounty hunter on two continents.

It's a night just like any other in the Conister home - but then Paul heads upstairs and never comes back. When his wife, Maggie, goes to see where he is, she can't find him. His phone and wallet are by the bed. The windows are locked from the inside. Paul has vanished. Missing persons investigator David Raker is an expert in locating the lost. So when he's hired by Maggie, he knows that in every disappearance - however impossible it seems - there's an answer. What he doesn't know yet is that his search for Paul Conister will become linked to three other mysteries.

Under the microscope, the outer bone surface is a moonscape of craters…‘Preliminary diagnosis?’‘Deformity of the bone. Maybe. Cortical destruction on a metacarpal. Maybe. Localised infection? Systemic disease process? Postmortem destruction, either purposeful or natural? A combination of the above? I don’t have a diagnosis…’

Car mechanic Mercy Thompson has always known there was something different about her, and not just the way she can make a VW engine sit up and beg. Mercy is a shape-shifter, a talent she inherited from her long-gone father. And she's never known any others of her kind. Until now. As Mercy comes to terms with this new information, an evil is stirring in the depths of the Columbia River. Something deadly is coming, facts are thin on the ground and Mercy feels ill at ease. However, her father's people may know more.

When Lucy Brennan, a Miami Beach personal fitness trainer, disarms a gunman chasing two frightened homeless men, the police and the breaking-news cameras are not far behind and, within hours, Lucy is a media hero. The solitary eye-witness is the depressed and overweight Lena Sorensen, who becomes obsessed with Lucy and signs up as her client - though she seems more interested in the trainer’s body than her own. When the two women find themselves more closely aligned, and can’t stop thinking about the sex lives of Siamese twins, the real problems start....

An underground chamber is exposed in a seedy, dilapidated house with sagging trim and peeling paint…In the dark cellar, a ritualistic display is revealed. A human skull rests on a cauldron, surrounded by slain chickens and bizarre figurines. Beads and antlers dangle overhead. Called to the scene is forensic anthropologist Dr Temperance Brennan. Bony architecture suggests that the skull is that of a young, black female.

The vampire Wulfe is missing. Since he's deadly, possibly insane and his current idea of 'fun' is stalking Mercy, some may see it as no great loss. But when he disappears, the Tri-Cities pack is blamed. The mistress of the vampire seethe informs Mercy that the pack must produce Wulfe to prove their innocence, or the loose alliance between the local vampires and werewolves is over. So Mercy goes out to find her stalker—and discovers more than just Wulfe have disappeared.

I am Mercedes Athena Thompson Hauptman. My only 'superpowers' are that I turn into a 35-pound coyote and fix Volkswagens. But I have friends in odd places and a pack of werewolves at my back. It looks like I'm going to need them. Centuries ago, the fae dwelt in Underhill. When they were cast out, they left behind their great castles, troves of magical artefacts...and their prisoners. Without the fae to mind them, those creatures roamed freely through Underhill wreaking havoc. Only the deadliest survived....

On her quest to find out exactly what happened to her former deputy chief, Jack Fielding, murdered six months before, Scarpetta drives to the Georgia Prison for Women to meet a convicted sex offender and the mother of a vicious and diabolically brilliant killer. Against the advice of her FBI criminal intelligence agent husband, Benton Wesley, Scarpetta is determined to hear this woman out.

It should have been an ordinary birth, the start of an ordinary happy family. But the night Dr David Henry delivers his wife's twins is a night that will haunt five lives for ever.

Grandma Mazur has decided to get married again - this time to a local gangster named Jimmy Rosolli. If Stephanie has her doubts about this marriage, she doesn't have to worry for long, because the groom drops dead of a heart attack 45 minutes after saying, 'I do.' A sad day for Grandma Mazur turns into something far more dangerous when Jimmy's former 'business partners' are convinced that his new widow is keeping the keys to a financial windfall all to herself.