Next Reads: North Carolina Mystery Authors: Home

Patricia Cornwell returns with the remarkable twenty-fourth thriller in her popular high-stakes series starring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. In the quiet of twilight, on an early autumn day, twenty-six-year-old Elisa Vandersteel is killed while riding her bicycle along the Charles River. It appears she was struck by lightning--except the weather is perfectly clear with not a cloud in sight. Dr. Kay Scarpetta,...

Amelia Sachs is hot on the trail of a killer. She's chasing him through a department store in Brooklyn when an escalator malfunctions. The stairs give way, with one man horribly mangled by the gears. Sachs is forced to let her quarry escape as she jumps in to try to help save the victim. She and famed forensic detective Lincoln Rhyme soon learn, however, that the incident may not be an accident at all -

Sookie Stackhouse is a small-time cocktail waitress in small-town Louisiana. She's quiet, keeps to herself, and doesn't get out much. Not because she's not pretty. She is. It's just that, well, Sookie has this sort of "disability." She can read minds. And that doesn't make her too dateable. And then along comes Bill. He's tall, dark, handsome--and Sookie can't hear a word

At the Iron Mountain Home for Boys, there was nothing but time. Time to burn and time to kill, time for two young orphans to learn that life isn’t won without a fight. Julian survives only because his older brother, Michael, is fearless and fiercely protective. When tensions boil over and a boy is brutally killed, there is only one sacrifice left for Michael to make: He flees the orphanage and takes the blame with him.

An SCU team investigates a string of accidents, only to uncover a deadly and deliberate monster in the latest novel from New York Times bestselling author Kay Hooper. In Clarity, North Carolina, the residents have fallen victim to an unfortunate series of events. Seemingly random accidents have taken the lives of several citizens in the small mountain town. But these deadly coincidences are anything but.

"On a quiet August morning, Judge Deborah Knott's father Kezzie makes a shocking discovery on a remote corner of his farm: the body of a man bludgeoned to death. Investigating this crime, Deborah's husband, Sheriff's Deputy Dwight Bryant, soon uncovers a long-simmering hostility between Kezzie and the slain man over a land dispute.

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She's smart, talented and durable, but Casey Jones has had more than her share of bad luck in her life -- including a short stretch in a Florida pen that haunts her still. In Raleigh, N.C., where Casey now lives, a prison record means no private investigator's license. So she's doing legwork for legit p.i. Bobby D -- a blimp-sized eating machine with a bad toupee, who exercises few muscles below the jawline.

Hazel 'Lucky' Strike--a strident amateur detective who mines the Internet for cold cases--comes to Brennan with a tape recording of an unknown girl being held prisoner and terrorized. Strike is convinced the voice is that of eighteen-year-old Cora Teague, who went missing more than three years earlier. Strike is also certain that the teenager's remains are gathering dust in Temperance Brennan's lab.

When Miss Julia is named executrix of Miss Mattie Freeman's estate, she finds the task complicated when a young man claiming to be Mattie's great-nephew arrives and demands to stay in her apartment.

Professor Simon Shaw is called upon to help determine the murderer of a young women killed many decades ago. This mystery takes him back to Boone, N.C. where he grew up.