Books to Die For! Podcast

In this new collection, prolific Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine contributor David Dean brings you the Edgar Award nominated “Tomorrow’s Dead,” and eleven other short stories involving law enforcement. This master of short fiction has long entertained readers with his suspenseful stories, and for the first time ever you can read a dozen of them back to back. Tomorrow’s Dead: And Other Stories of C...

It was heaven on earth—and, some whispered, the devil’s garden. Thousands came by trains and carriages to see this new Eden, carved from hundreds of acres of wild woodland. They marveled at orchards bursting with fruit, thick herds of Ayrshire cattle and Cotswold sheep, and whizzing mills. They gaped at the people who lived in this place—especially the women, with their qu...

27 Days  is a taut and topical political thriller narrated in laconic noir fashion by veteran LA PI Nick Crane. In the spring of 2019, Nick is on the run in the Pacific Northwest, pursued by a cabal of wealthy right-wing power brokers and domestic terrorists (the Principals) led by Marguerite Ferguson and Desmond Cole. Nick has clashed with Marguerite and her crew in the past, and she wants h...

In this gripping novel about obsession, control, and self-preservation, a woman desperate to provide a new life for her sister enters a compromising arrangement with an entitled tech billionaire. Rosemary Rabourne is already struggling to pay the bills when her recently orphaned half sister, Wendy, shows up at her door. Rosemary will try anything to provide for the traumatized teenager—including o...

“Sizzling! I read the whole thing in one day, heart pounding, totally gripped by the action. Super fantastic book. I actually had to shush my kids when they tried to talk to me in the middle of it.”  Dr. Eileen Sacks, General Surgeon The hand that wields the scalpel Dr. Hope Sze launches into her general surgery rotation with Dr. Vrac, the scourge of operating room #3, also known as the death...

The chilling story of two conflicted sisters, their murdered brother, and the secrets a family hoped they’d never have to face. The murder of jazz musician and social activist Markus Peña doesn’t come as a surprise to his estranged sisters. Melinda and Emily Peña know their controversial brother had enemies. After all, even they hadn’t spoken to Markus since their mother’s funeral two years ago. W...

The casting call is murder ... Vancouver schoolmarm Frankie Ray runs away to Silver Screen Hollywood to test her conviction that an actress who lacks glamour but has talent and an enterprising attitude can make it in the movies. But when a dissolute, womanizing matinee idol turns up dead on her sofa, Frankie's career hopes shatter. She'll need all her acting chops to sleuth out the murderer and cl...

A sixteen-year-old girl, Olivia, who feels guilty about her younger brother's death. Her mother, Evelyn, a glamorous artist. Travis, the charismatic owner of the Pink Fancy Hotel. A mysterious Czechoslovakian widow, Sofiya. A sojourn on St. Croix, a tropical island. Two love affairs. Secrets. Nazis. Concentration camp. Conflict, jealousy, kindness, tenderness. A rescue and a resurrection. All wove...

When Ann-Marie Ross murders her abusive husband and feeds him to the pigs, she thinks she's got away with murder and secured the future of her Scottish cider farm. But she soon finds herself having to keep more than one deadly secret to protect those closest to her. As four women embrace their new-found independence, Ann-Marie is tormented by the threat of discovery. A darkly comic tale of murder,...

In 1955, small-town girls flock to Minneapolis for work, love, and adventure. But Teresa Hickman, from Dollar, North Dakota, is a special case. Beguiling. Promiscuous. And, on a chilly April morning, dead along an abandoned trolley track in a Southside neighborhood.  Teresa Hickman was three months pregnant when she was strangled. Was the unborn child’s father also her killer? Could the kille...

Six months after vanishing into an underground silo with sixty-one others, Wynter and Chase emerge to an altered world. There is no sign of Noah and the rest of the group that was supposed to greet them when they surfaced—the same people Wynter was counting on to help her locate the antibiotics her gravely ill friend, Julie, needs. As the clock ticks down on Julie’s life, Wynter and Chase embark o...

An ad in the newspaper. A Civil War veteran in need. An artist companion. One of these things is not what it seems. Miss Grant’s sole purpose in life is to help Civil War veterans by painting portraits of them to reveal the beautiful souls beneath their injuries. She has met many exceptional men through answering their newspaper advertisements for a companion. But the latest veteran, the beautiful...

Pinkerton Detective Abigail MacKay is a master of disguises—and of new crime-solving technology! But she’ll have to move fast to stay a step ahead of Nat Quinn and Jake Conroy. Nat and Jake are the ringleaders of The Innocents, a western gang that specializes in holding up trains carrying payrolls—and Nat is pretty savvy when it comes to using the new sciences of 1868 in committing his crimes. Cha...

Fate, misfortune and opportunity entangle three rivals in a quick-paced suspense thriller. CEO Suzanne Simpson fends off accusations of corporate money laundering on two continents as a global pandemic wreaks havoc on Multima Supermarkets.  Fugitive Howard Knight flees from the Caribbean to Asia, trying desperately to elude both an Interpol Red Notice and a dangerous criminal outfit call...

Aaron Decker's life changes one December morning when his wife Allison is killed. Haunted by her absence—and her ghost—Aaron goes through her belongings, where he finds a receipt for a motel room in another part of the country. Piloted by grief and an increasing sense of curiosity, Aaron embarks on a journey to discover what Allison had been doing in the weeks prior to her death.   Yet Aaron...

Murder meets the absurd in the sizzling thriller Summer Club, a new novel by award-winning journalist Katherine Dean Mazerov. Normally, politics and parent drama, drunken soirees and sex-capades reign at Lydia Phillips’s swim and tennis club. Now, a strange car following the club manager, a break-in at Lydia’s home, and a shocking discovery on the club grounds have this stay-at-home mom dusting of...

When Sage Miller’s sister Laken decides to host a fashion show as a grand opening for the new location of Vintage Sage, she’s not amused. Even less so when she discovers her sister hired a Hollywood fashion designer to help. Not only does the designer show up in the middle of renovations, but he drags along his protégé. Then she finds Sebastian Hayward III, dead in her store. Suddenly it seems hal...

When a meth bust goes bad, Detective Jessica Ramirez and her partner, Officer Alexandra Clark, find themselves in pursuit of a serial killer who dispatches her own form of street justice from the rim of the Grand Canyon. They soon discover that the danger their adversary poses reaches well beyond Arizona and into the very heart of the New York City Financial District. Filled with 21st century crim...

Lyndsey Duncan worries her career with the CIA might be over. After lines are crossed with another intelligence agent during an assignment, she is sent home to Washington on administrative leave. So when a former colleague--now Chief of the Russia Division--recruits her for an internal investigation, she jumps at the chance to prove herself. Lyndsey was once a top handler in the Moscow Field Stati...

Dr. Hope Sze doesn't need a free trip to Egypt. She can't afford the flight to Cairo, or the cruise down the Nile, so she'd keep studying in Canada—except her fiancé, Dr. John Tucker, yearns to patrol the pyramids and confront the curse on King Tutankhamun's tomb. So when a company offers them both a free stay in Cairo in exchange for a month's work in an emergency department, Tucker lobbies for a...

On her way to a new job in America, Maria Puente accidentally discovers a human trafficking ring. Fearing exposure, the American company that manages the operation—with the help of their Mexican partners—kidnaps Maria. Maria’s disappearance triggers a desperate search, by her family and local law enforcement, to find her before the kidnappers can permanently dispose of her. As the investigation un...

Rebecca has come back home to the small town of Eriston to bury her father, Sean. Sean was always obsessed with the town's urban legend, of a killer who supposedly comes in the night. Rebecca's never had time for the rumours. Except, as she reads through his notes, it's clear he was sure he was about to uncover the truth. And then she hears that there are unanswered questions about his death. It's...

When the body of reality TV star Desiree Pierce is found on a playground in the Bronx the morning after her twenty-fifth birthday party, the police and the media are quick to declare her death an overdose. A tragedy, certainly, but not a crime. Yet Columbia grad student Lena—principled, headstrong, and allergic to the spotlight—knows that can’t be the case. Despite the bitter truth that the two ha...

Nick Heller is at the top of his game when he receives some devastating news: his old army buddy Sean has died of an overdose. Sean, who once saved Nick’s life, got addicted to opioids after returning home wounded from war.  Then at Sean’s funeral, a stranger approaches Nick with a job, and maybe also a way for Nick to hold someone accountable. The...

* Winner of the Agatha Award for Best Children's/YA Mystery * * Winner of the Anthony Award for Best Children's/YA * All's great for sixteen-year-old actor Dalton Black as he portrays a teen killer on a crime reenactment show. That is, until he realizes someone is stalking him. When that someone turns out to be Homer Lee Varney, the man convicted of the murder, things take a dark turn, and Da...