Showing results by narrator "Emily Sutton Smith" in All Categories

Lee Child selects the 20 best mystery short stories of the year, including tales by Stephen King, Sara Paretsky, and many more. Under the auspices of New York City's legendary mystery fiction specialty bookstore, The Mysterious Bookshop, and aided by Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler, international best seller Lee Child has selected the 20 most suspenseful, most confounding, and most mysterious short stories from the past year, collected now in one entertaining volume.

Detective Tracy Crosswhite isn’t one to lose her cool. Until her interrogation of the taunting and malicious Erik Schmidt, a suspect in two cold case killings. Schmidt also has unnerving ties to the monster who murdered Tracy’s sister, stirring memories of the crime that shaped Tracy’s life. After a critical mistake during a shooting exercise, Tracy breaks.

Tracy Crosswhite has spent 20 years questioning the facts surrounding her sister Sarah’s disappearance and the murder trial that followed. She doesn’t believe that Edmund House - a convicted rapist and the man condemned for Sarah’s murder - is the guilty party. Motivated by the opportunity to obtain real justice, Tracy became a homicide detective with the Seattle PD and dedicated her life to tracking down killers.

A group of mountain climbers, caught in the dark, fight to survive their descent; in the British countryside, hundreds of magpies ascend into the sky, higher and higher, until they seem to vanish into the heavens; a professor and his student track a zombie horde in order to research zombie behavior; an all-girl riding school has sinister secrets; a town rails in vain against a curse inflicted upon it by its founders; and much more.

Tracy Crosswhite is reopening the investigation into Seattle’s Route 99 serial killer. After thirteen victims, he stopped hunting and the trail went cold, stirring public outrage. Now, nearly three decades after his first kill, Tracy is expected to finally bring closure to the victims’ families and redeem the Seattle PD’s reputation. Even if it means working with her nemesis, Captain Johnny Nolasco.

Teaming up with New York Times best-selling author Jeffery Deaver, Suspense Magazine offers up a nail-biting anthology titled Nothing Good Happens After Midnight. This thrilling collection consists of 13 original short stories representing the genres of suspense/thriller, mystery, sci-fi/fantasy, and more.

While investigating the hit-and-run death of a young boy, Seattle homicide detective Tracy Crosswhite makes a startling discovery: the suspect is an active-duty serviceman at a local naval base. After a key piece of case evidence goes missing, he is cleared of charges in a military court. But Tracy knows she can't turn her back on this kind of injustice.

Homicide detective Tracy Crosswhite has returned to the police force after the sensational retrial of her sister’s killer. Still scarred from that ordeal, Tracy is pulled into an investigation that threatens to end her career, if not her life. A serial killer known as the Cowboy is killing young women in cheap motels in North Seattle.

The last time homicide detective Tracy Crosswhite was in Cedar Grove, it was to see her sister's killer put behind bars. Now she's returned for a respite and the chance to put her life back in order for herself, her attorney husband, Dan, and their new daughter. But tragic memories soon prove impossible to escape. Dan is drawn into representing a local merchant whose business is jeopardized by the town's revitalization.

Eighteen-year-old Brie Melrose is just a normal girl living in Outer Haven with the rest of her kind. Growing up in an orphanage, Brie never knew her parents, and her life was always destined to be simple. One day, a routine job turns into something much more, and Brie finds herself under the watchful eye of the Savants, the highest order of the Enhanced, blessed with supreme intellect and who consider emotions to be pointless. Soon, as threats she never even knew existed begin to close in, Brie learns that her world, and the city of Haven, isn't quite what she thought it was.

In spite of a harrowing past still haunting her, Gwen Proctor is trying to move forward. Until a new assignment gives her purpose: the cold-case disappearance of a young man in Tennessee. Three years missing, no clues. Just Ruth Landry, a tortured mother in limbo. Gwen understands what it’s like to worry about your children. Gwen’s investigation unearths new suspects…and victims. As she follows each sinister lead, the implications of the mystery grow more disturbing. Because the closer Gwen gets, the closer she is to a threat that looms back home.

Waking in the hospital with zero memories after a car accident that killed her mysterious passenger and the other driver, Hannah finds herself suddenly thrust into a life she doesn't recognize. Doting husband. Two beautiful daughters. PTA meetings...it all feels foreign, and while her husband and doctors assure her she's recovering well and the memories will return, she's not so sure.

In town, they called her "Crazy Widow Dinsmore". But Elly was no stranger to their ridicule - she had been an outsider all her life, growing up in a boarded-up old house under the strict eye of her eccentric grandparents. Now she was all alone, with two little boys to raise, and a third child on the way. Will Parker drifted into Whitney, Georgia, one lazy afternoon in the summer, hoping to put his lonely past behind him. He yearned for the tenderness he had never known, the home he'd never had. All he needed was for someone to give him a chance.

The case is that of a missing girl, last seen getting into a truck with a stranger before disappearing. Gwen has a reputation for finding those who are lost, but this time something is wrong. Her instincts are off, and every clue she uncovers only raises more doubts, not just about the missing girl and the circumstances of her disappearance, but also about the fragile safety Gwen’s created for her family.

Returning from an extended leave, Detective Tracy Crosswhite finds herself reassigned to the Seattle PD’s cold case unit. As the protective mother of an infant daughter, Tracy is immediately drawn to her first file: the abduction of a five-year-old girl whose parents, embattled in a poisonous divorce, were once prime suspects. While reconstructing the days leading up to the girl’s disappearance, Tracy is brought into an active investigation with former partner Kinsington Rowe. A young woman has vanished on an isolated jogging trail in North Seattle.

Perched on the soft tar of a New York City rooftop, a mysterious sniper fires a single round from a .50 caliber rifle. Five stories below, his target collapses on the marble steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dead. Crime reporter Jane Cole needs this story badly. Suspended NYPD cop Robert Warren is desperate to clear his name. They don't trust each other, but they make the perfect team. And as Cole and Warren track the killer, they uncover a plot so ruthless it shocks the conscience, a crime so expansive it will rock the world.

When the Colonial Marines set out after their deadliest prey, the Xenomorphs, it’s what Corporal Hicks calls a bug hunt—kill or be killed. Here are fifteen all-new stories of such “close encounters,” written by many of today’s most extraordinary authors. Set during the events of all four Alien films, sending the Marines to alien worlds, to derelict space settlements, and into the nests of the universe’s most dangerous monsters, these adventures are guaranteed to send the blood racing—one way or another.

It's summer on the Jersey Shore. Children play on the beach. Husbands are off working in the city. And the surf echoes in the night. Here, in this perfect place, a serial killer has no worries in the world - except choosing the next victim. Cam Hastings has come to Long Beach Island with her teenage daughter and the hope that maybe she can save her failed marriage. Cam has never stopped loving her husband, Mike, nor has she been able to outrun her flaws and demons - a vanished mother, a lost sister, and the ugly visions she has of missing children.

Standing in the church outside of the city, Brie is still in shock. She has a brother, a twin. She isn't alone after all.... Her world is changing fast. And soon, it'll be her turn. As her powers begin to manifest and her training begins, Brie finds herself trying to juggle her changing body with her mission. A mission that she doesn't truly understand. Soon, however, the truth of what she's been tasked to do will dawn. And as another attack from the Fanatics rocks the city, Brie finds herself drawn into making a terrible choice.

Gwen Proctor escaped her serial-killer husband and saved her family. What she can’t seem to outrun is his notoriety. Or the sick internet vigilantes still seeking to avenge his crimes. For Gwen, hiding isn’t an option. Not when her only mission is to create a normal life for her kids. But now, a threatened woman has reached out. Marlene Crockett, from the remote town of Wolfhunter, is panicked for herself and her daughter. When Gwen arrives in the small, isolated rural community, Marlene is already dead - her own daughter blamed for the murder.