Crime Fiction Books Coming This December
There’s no better time to read than in winter, when the days are short and the nights are cold, long and lonesome. All I want in the depths of winter is to escape the cold by turning into the blankets and cracking a new spine. Follow me on the most suspenseful release of this December, from crime to mystery to horror, let’s get swept away with these eight books.
England, 1895. Louisa West, a young beauty from Boston, looks like she has it all: a handsome husband, she is lady of Ashworth Manor and one day she’ll be a duchess. But in truth, her life is falling apart. Louisa’s honeymoon is barely over when her husband deserts her, leaving her devastated and alone. She flees to Paris, longing to escape her grief, but finds only tragedy…
Boston, 2015. Life hasn’t been kind to Sarah West. In one year, she has lost both her parents and her marriage. After her father’s death, Sarah is sorting through his belongings when she finds a letter about her mysterious ancestor, Louisa. There have always been whispers in the family about Louisa’s suicide—from a high balcony in Paris—but as Sarah reads, she starts to question everything she was told. Desperate to leave her broken heart behind, she books a trip to Paris to find out more…
When Sarah arrives in the city of lights, the cobbled streets of Montmartre and the river Seine at twilight make her heart sing. Then, on the bookshelf of a beautiful Paris apartment, hidden inside the yellowing pages of an old novel, she finds a note about Louisa which shatters Sarah’s understanding of her family’s past. Did Louisa really throw herself from a Paris balcony? And when Sarah uncovers the truth, will it change everything about her future?
Blame the booze, her shaky marriage, her troubled son, or a thousand other things. Jewelann Jordan has one thing on her mind when she attends her class reunion, and that's making sure her old crush Christian Campbell sees exactly what he lost all those years ago. A late night, a hotel room, a rekindled flame that burns even hotter than it did back then. What could go wrong?
Everything.
The night with Christian isn't the first secret Jewelann has kept from her husband Ken, so one more shouldn't be much harder—except that Christian shows up without warning, seemingly determined to do his best to mess up Jewelann's life in any way he can. Worse than that, he seems to have his sights set on charming her son, Eli, and befriending her husband. Revenge isn't so sweet when it bites you back, but Jewelann is determined to keep Christian from ruining everything she's worked so hard to keep safe, including her son.
Fighting to keep it all from spiraling out of control, Jewelann discovers Christian is not the man he claims to be. When darker secrets emerge, even closer to home, Jewelann takes the chance to turn the tables on him. The more Jewelann digs for the truth, the uglier—and the deadlier—it gets.
The day she died was only the beginning...
Sam Cooper is on the verge of a happy life—a true feat after his disastrous childhood. Sam's mother, Laurie, died tragically and his father was torn apart by grief. But now after years of silence, Sam's father makes a shocking confession on his deathbed.
Who was Laurie Cooper? What happens when you discover you've been lied to for twenty-five years? Sam is determined to find out, but someone wants to silence the truth forever. Following a trail from London to Connecticut, Sam will have to uncover exactly what his mother did and why—no matter the cost.
A top secret F117 aircraft crashes into the Nevada desert. The Nighthawk is the most advanced fighting machine in the world and the Soviets will do anything to get their hands on its secrets.
In East Berlin, a mysterious figure contacts the CIA with an incredible offer—invaluable details of his government’s espionage plans in return for asylum.
It’s an offer they can’t pass up…if it’s genuine, but the risks are too great to blindly stumble into a deal. With the East German secret police closing in, someone will have to go to behind the Berlin Wall to investigate the potential defector. It’s a job Deputy Director James Greer can only trust to one man—Jack Ryan.
Ryan is a former Marine and a brilliant CIA analyst who’s been the architect of some of the CIA’s biggest coups but this time he’s in enemy territory with a professional assassin on his tail. Can he get the right answers before the Cold War turns into a Red Winter?
Colleagues turned spouses Dr. Laurie Montgomery and Dr. Jack Stapleton already have their plates full with crazy work schedules and family pressures. The last thing they need is a murder. When Laurie’s longtime friend, by all accounts healthy Dr. Sue Passero, dies mysteriously in the hospital parking garage, an autopsy is required, which falls squarely under Laurie’s purview as newly appointed chief medical examiner. So when Laurie asks Jack to take special care with the case, he can hardly refuse.
With his curiosity sparked by the mystery around Sue’s death, the indefatigable Jack, compelled to resolve the case at hand, sets out to investigate on-site at Manhattan Memorial Hospital, even though it means blatantly defying the Office of Chief Medical Examiner’s rules. What started out as an inquiry into Sue’s tragic passing soon turns into a deadly and dangerous chess game between Jack and the clever and deranged killer, who might just administer another lethal blow if Jack isn’t careful.
Senior year at Ellingham Academy for Stevie Bell isn’t going well. Her boyfriend, David, is studying in London. Her friends are obsessed with college applications. With the cold case of the century solved, Stevie is adrift. There is nothing to distract her from the questions pinging around her brain—questions about college, love, and life in general.
Relief comes when David invites Stevie and her friends to join him for study abroad, and his new friend Izzy introduces her to a double-murder cold case. In 1995, nine friends from Cambridge University went to a country house and played a drunken game of hide-and-seek. Two were found in the woodshed the next day, murdered with an ax. The case was assumed to be a burglary gone wrong, but one of the remaining seven saw something she can’t explain. This was no break-in. Someone’s lying about what happened in the woodshed.
The note pinned to the dead body found on the remote beach has no name, just Ravinia Rutledge’s phone number and the words “Next of Kin.” Ravinia insists she doesn’t recognize the man on the mortuary slab, but she suspects Detective Nev Rhodes doesn’t believe her. He can tell that she’s one of them—the Siren Song women.
Five years after moving away from The Colony, Ravinia has carved out a life as a private investigator whose specialty is helping others locate their missing loved ones. Yet sometimes, it’s better if the missing are never found. “Good Time Charlie” is the name given to a monster from her past, a man whom she and her sisters hoped was gone forever. But the dead man on the beach is a sign that Charlie has merely been waiting, preparing to fulfill his mission to rid the world of the Siren Song women—and anyone else who gets in his way.
Rhodes has his own reasons for being fascinated with The Colony and its surroundings—a place marked by unexplained deaths and tragedies. Rhodes plays by the rules, but there are forces at work here that defy notions of law and order. And despite Ravinia’s reluctance to team up with Nev, it’s the only way to stop an adversary determined to see that each and every member of The Colony will die at his hands . . .
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Mary Kay McBrayer is the author of America’s First Female Serial Killer: Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster. You can find her short works at Oxford American, Narratively, Mental Floss, and FANGORIA, among other publications. She co-hosts Everything Trying to Kill You, the comedy podcast that analyzes your favorite horror movies from the perspectives of women of color. Follow Mary Kay McBrayer on Instagram and Twitter, or check out her author site here.