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By Dean Koontz

FROM THE COVER: Martie Rhodes, a happily married, successful video games designer, takes an agoraphobic friend to therapy sessions twice a week. Each trip is a grim ordeal, but the experience has brought the two friends even closer together. Then, one morning, Martie experiences a brief, irrational but disquieting fear of... her shadow. When autophobia - one of the rarest and most intriguing phobias known to psychology - is diagnosed, suddenly, radically her life changes, and the future looks dark. Martie's husband, Dusty, loves her profoundly, and is desperate to understand the cause of her autophobia. But as he comes closer to the terrible truth, Dusty himsell starts showing signs of a psychological disorder even more frightening than that afflicting Martie...FALSE MEMORY is the breathtaking new thriller from the internationally bestselling author of SEIZE THE NIGHT and FEAR NOTHING.

London. Headline Book Publishing. 1999. 827p.

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J. D. ROBB

While Eve examines a fresh body in Washington Square Park, her husband, Roarke, spots a man among the onlookers he’s known since his younger days on the streets of Dublin. A man who claims to be his half brother. A man who kills for a living—and who burns with hatred for him.

Eve is quick to suspect that the victim’s spouse—resentful over his wife’s affair and poised to inherit her fortune—would have happily paid an assassin to do his dirty work. Roarke is just as quick to warn her that if Lorcan Cobbe is the hitman, she needs to be careful. Law enforcement agencies worldwide have pursued this cold-hearted killer for years, to no avail. And his lazy smirk when he looked Roarke’s way indicates that he will target anyone who matters to Roarke...and is confident he’ll get away with it.

Eve is desperate to protect Roarke. Roarke is desperate to protect Eve. And together, they’re determined to find Cobbe before he finds them—even if it takes them across the Atlantic, far outside Eve’s usual jurisdiction...

PIATKUS First published in the United States i by St Martin's Press. 2020. 348p.

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By Ruth Rendell

A bypass is planned in Kingsmarkham, but before the protestors make their presence felt, the badly decomposed body of a young woman is discovered. Burden thinks he knows the identity of the murderer, but Wexford is not convinced.

London. Random House. 1997. 389p.

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Robert Whitaker

In 1735 a team of French scientists set out on a daring expedition into the South American wilderness to resolve one of the great scientific challenges of the time: the precise size and shape of the Earth. Scaling the Andes and journeying along the Amazon, the mapmakers faced all manner of danger, while madness, disease and violent death each took their toll. However one, Jean Godin, fell in love with a local girl called Isabel Grameson. When the time came for the expedition to return to France, Godin travelled ahead to ensure the way was safe for his new family. But on reaching French Guiana, disaster struck: Spain and Portugal closed their borders and he was stranded, unable to return to Isabel. What followed lies at the core of this extraordinary tale - a heartbreaking 20-year separation that ended when Isabel, believing she might never see her husband again, decided to make her own way across the continent: a journey that began in hope but became hell on earth...

Drawing on his own experience retracing Isabel's epic trek as well as contemporary records, Robert Whitaker recounts a captivating true story of love and survival set against the backdrop of what many still regard as 'the greatest expedition the world has ever known'.

LONDON. BANTAM. 2004. 416p.

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Minette Walters

CRIME & MYSTERY. In 1970, Harold Stamp, a retarded twenty-year-old was convicted on disputed evidence and a retracted confession of brutally murdering his grandmother the one person who understood and protected him. Less than three years later he is dead, driven to suicide by isolation and despair. A fate befitting a murderer, perhaps, but what if he were innocent? Thirty years on, Jonathan Hughes, an anthropologist specialising in social stereotyping, comes across the case by accident. He finds alarming disparities in the evidence and has little doubt that Stamp's conviction was a terrible miscarriage of justice. But how far is he prepared to go in the search for justice? Is the forgotten story of one friendless young man compelling enough to make him leave his books and face his own demons? And with what result? If Stamp didn't murder Grace Jeffries then somebody else did, which means there's a dangerous killer still at large.

Crows Nest, Australia. ALLEN & UNWIN. 2003. 408p.

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LOUISE PENNY

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache returns in the eighteenth book in #1 New York Times bestseller Louise Penny's beloved series.

It’s spring and Three Pines is reemerging after the harsh winter. But not everything buried should come alive again. Not everything lying dormant should reemerge.

But something has.

As the villagers prepare for a special celebration, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators’ lives after many years. The two were young children when their troubled mother was murdered, leaving them damaged, shattered. Now they’ve arrived in the village of Three Pines.

But to what end?

Gamache and Beauvoir’s memories of that tragic case, the one that first brought them together, come rushing back. Did their mother’s murder hurt them beyond repair? Have those terrible wounds, buried for decades, festered and are now about to erupt?

As Chief Inspector Gamache works to uncover answers, his alarm grows when a letter written by a long dead stone mason is discovered. In it the man describes his terror when bricking up an attic room somewhere in the village. Every word of the 160-year-old letter is filled with dread. When the room is found, the villagers decide to open it up.

As the bricks are removed, Gamache, Beauvoir and the villagers discover a world of curiosities. But the head of homicide soon realizes there’s more in that room than meets the eye. There are puzzles within puzzles, and hidden messages warning of mayhem and revenge.

In unsealing that room, an old enemy is released into their world. Into their lives. And into the very heart of Armand Gamache’s home.

London. Hodder & Stoughton L. 2002. 400p.

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By Kathy Reichs

“Down time” is not a phrase in Tempe Brennan’s vocabulary. A string of disturbing cases has put her vacation plans on hold; instead, she heads to the lab to analyze charred remains from a suspicious fire, and a mysterious black residue from a small plane crash. But most troubling of all are the bones. Even more disturbing is the fact that bones turns up on a family picnic in North Carolina—but are they animal or human? X-rays and

London. Arrow Books. 2012. 434p.

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By Patricia Cornwell

Forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta has come almost full circle, returning to Virginia, the state where she launched her storied career, as the chief medical examiner. Finding herself the new girl in town once again after being away for many years, she's inherited both an overbearing secretary and a legacy of neglect and potential corruption.

She and her husband, Benton Wesley, now a forensic psychologist with the U.S. Secret Service, have relocated to Old Town Alexandria, where she's headquartered five miles from the Pentagon in a post-pandemic world that's been torn apart by civil and political unrest. After just weeks on the job, she's called to a scene by railroad tracks--a woman's body has been shockingly displayed, her throat cut down to the spine--and as Scarpetta begins to follow the trail, it leads unnervingly close to her own historic neighborhood.

At the same time, a catastrophe occurs in a top secret labo-ratory in outer space, endangering at least two scientists aboard. Appointed to the highly classified Doomsday Commission that specializes in sensitive national security cases, Scarpetta is summoned to the White House and tasked with finding out exactly what happened. But even as she remotely works the first potential crime scene in space, an apparent serial killer strikes again very close to home.

This latest novel in the groundbreaking Kay Scarpetta series captivates readers with the shocking twists, high-wire tension, and forensic detail that Patricia Cornwell is famous for, proving once again why she's the world's #1 bestselling crime writer.

NY. Harper Collins. 2021. 413p

From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction

By Susan Rowland

From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell is the first book to consider seriously the hugely popular and influential works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Nag Marsh, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. Providing studies of 42 key novels, this volume introduces these authors for students and the general reader in the context of their lives, and of critical debates on gender, colonialism, psychoanalysis, the Gothic, and feminism. It includes interviews with P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine.
Palgrave macmillan, 2000. 232p.