Captivating Fiction Its Good for the Soul
Discover captivating fiction books that nourish the soul. Explore our curated list of must-read novels to inspire, uplift, and transport you to new worlds.
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Lady Killer
by Lisa Scottoline
Mary DiNunzio is a trademark Lisa Scottoline heroine—she's strong, she's smart, and she's got plenty of attitude. In recent years, she's become a big-time business-getter at Rosato & Associates, but the last person she expects to walk into her office one morning—in mile-high stilettos—is super sexy Trish Gambone, her high school rival. Back then, while Mary was becoming the straight-A president of the Latin Club and Most Likely to Achieve Sainthood, Trish was the head Mean Girl, who flunked religion and excelled at smoking in the bathroom. As it turns out, however, Trish's life has taken a horrifying turn. She's terrified of her live-in boyfriend, who's an abusive, gun-toting drug dealer for the South Philly mob. There's only one problem—Mary remembers the guy from high school too. Unbeknownst to Trish, Mary had a major crush on him. Then Trish vanishes, a dead body turns up in an alley, and Mary is plunged into a nightmare, one that threatens her job, her family, and even her life. She goes on a one-woman crusade to unmask the killer, and on the way, finds new love in a very unexpected place. But before the novel's shocking surprise ending, Mary is forced to confront some very uncomfortable truths about her own past, and the profound effects of lifelong love—and hate.
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The Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim Edwards
A #1 New York Times bestseller by Kim Edwards, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is a brilliantly crafted novel of parallel lives, familial secrets, and the redemptive power of love Kim Edwards’s stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964 in Lexington, Kentucky, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split second decision that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. Instead, she disappears into another city to raise the child herself. So begins this beautifully told story that unfolds over a quarter of a century—in which these two families, ignorant of each other, are yet bound by the fateful decision made that winter night long ago. A family drama, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter explores every mother's silent fear: What would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? It is also an astonishing tale of love and how the mysterious ties that hold a family together help us survive the heartache that occurs when long-buried secrets are finally uncovered.
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Book of the Dead
by Patricia Daniels Cornwell
Relocating to Charleston after a particularly grueling case, Dr. Kay Scarpetta opens a private forensic pathology practice but is quickly targeted by local politics and a covert saboteur before a series of violent deaths bring her skills into high view. 1,500,000 first printing. BOMC, Lit Guild, Doubleday, & Mystery Guild Main.
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Dark of the Moon
by John Sandford
Virgil Flowers is sent to Bluestem, a small town where everyone knows everyone else, to investigate the murders of a man burned to death in his home and a doctor and his wife, unaware that he is tracking a murderer who may be targeting Virgil as his nextv
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Dead Ringer
by Ken Douglas
"Maggie Nesbitt is pregnant and depressed, because her husband isn't the father of her unborn child. She's thinking about abortion when she's attacked on the beach. She barely gets away, then gets the shock of her life the next morning when she sees that she has been killed on the news and that her nude body had been dumped in the trash behind a beachside bar. She finds out the body behind the bar is the twin sister she'd been told had died when she was two weeks old. She also learns her twin was divorced from a horrid man and that she had an eight-year-old daughter, Jasmine. Maggie, showing a bump on her head she got while getting away from her attackers, claims partial amnesia and steps into her dead twin's life. This way she can have her baby, give it a home, and save Jasmine from having to go and live with her father. But she doesn't know her twin saw someone do murder. And that someone thinks he's killed the wrong woman."--Publisher description
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The Ghost War
by Alex Berenson
Returning to Washington after a harrowing case in the Middle East, CIA agent and al-Qaeda infiltrator John Wells is selected to investigate a surge in Taliban activity with possible Asian ties. By the author of The Faithful Spy. 150,000 first printing.
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Christine Falls
by Benjamin Black
The hero of Christine Falls, Quirke, is a surly pathologist living in 1950s Dublin. One night, after having a few drinks at a party, he returns to the morgue to find his brother-in-law tampering with the records on a young woman's corpse. The next morning, when his hangover has worn off, Quirke reluctantly begins looking into the woman's history. He discovers a plot that spans two continents, implicates the Catholic Church, and may just involve members of his own family. He is warned--first subtly, then with violence--to lay off, but Quirke is a stubborn man. The first novel in the Quirke series brings all the vividness and psychological insight of John Banville's writing to the dark, menacing atmosphere of a first-class thriller.
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Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Arctic Event
by Robert Ludlum
On a remote island in the Canadian Arctic, researchers discover the wreckage of a mysterious World War II-era aircraft, a discovery that forces the Russian Federation into a shocking admission. The unmarked plane is a Soviet strategic bomber that disappeared with its crew more than fifty years ago while carrying two metric tons of weaponized anthrax. Desperate to prevent a political and diplomatic firestorm, the U.S. president dispatches a Covert-One team led by Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith to the crash site. But others have reached the frigid, windswept island first, including an international arms dealer and his crew of vicious mercenaries. As for the Russians, they are lying: a second, even deadlier secret rests within the hulk of the lost bomber, a secret the Russians are willing to kill to protect. Trapped in a polar wilderness, Smith and his team find themselves fighting a savage war on two front--against an enemy they can see and another hiding within their own ranks.
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Third Degree
by Greg Iles
Pregnant with another man's child, Elizabeth Pike returns home to find her husband, already distraught over an IRS audit, with a letter from her lover and a gun in his hands.
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Stalked
by Brian Freeman
Obsession. Blackmail. Murder. In zero degrees. A chilling new thriller featuring detectives Jonathan Stride and Serena Dial
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Candy Cane Murder
by Joanne Fluke
A collection of three holiday mysteries includes stories by Joanne Fluke, Laura Levine, and Leslie Meyer, and features fourteen Christmas recipes.
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The First Patient
by Michael Palmer
In his most high-concept suspense novel to date, "New York Times" bestselling author Palmer delivers a thriller pitched at the crossroads of presidential politics and cutting-edge medicine.
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Dexter in the Dark
by Jeffry P. Lindsay
Miami cop Dexter Morgan and serial killer (the Dark Passenger), one-in-the-same, investigate a double murder on the University of Miami campus while the burned and beheaded body count continues to mount.
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Creation in Death
by J. D. Robb
Reopening an unsolved case from years earlier when the body of a torture victim is discovered, Lieutenant Eve Dallas becomes worried when clues reveal links between the killing and her billionaire husband's store that suggest Eve herself is being targeted
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The Secret Servant
by Daniel Silva
In the aftermath of an Amsterdam-based terrorism analyst's murder by a Muslim immigrant, Gabriel Allon investigates clues pertaining to the victim, in a case with ties to a secret terrorist organization and the abduction of an ambassador's daughter.
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Heart of Texas : Volume 1
by Debbie Macomber
Collects the novels in the "Heart of Texas" series, which are based in Promise, Texas, and star regular people with extraordinary love lives.
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Interred with Their Bones
by Jennifer Lee Carrell
Receiving a mysterious box from her eccentric mentor, who claims it contains a newly found work by Shakespeare, theater director and scholar Kate Shelton is horrified when her theater is burned to the ground and her mentor killed, an event that identifies the work of a calculated murderer who sets up crime scenes to resemble Shakespearean deaths.
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A Killer's Kiss
by William Lashner
The woman Victor Carl was once engaged to, reappears in his life and makes him the fall guy for the murder of her husband.
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Heartsick
by Chelsea Cain
Damaged Portland detective Archie Sheridan spent ten years tracking Gretchen Lowell, a beautiful serial killer, but in the end she was the one who caught him. Two years ago, Gretchen kidnapped Archie and tortured him for ten days, but instead of killing him, she mysteriously decided to let him go. She turned herself in, and now Gretchen has been locked away for the rest of her life, while Archie is in a prison of another kind---addicted to pain pills, unable to return to his old life, powerless to get those ten horrific days off his mind. Archie's a different person, his estranged wife says, and he knows she's right. He continues to visit Gretchen in prison once a week, saying that only he can get her to confess as to the whereabouts of more of her victims, but even he knows the truth---he can't stay away. When another killer begins snatching teenage girls off the streets of Portland, Archie has to pull himself together enough to lead the new task force investigating the murders. A hungry young newspaper reporter, Susan Ward, begins profiling Archie and the investigation, which sparks a deadly game between Archie, Susan, the new killer, and even Gretchen. They need to catch a killer, and maybe somehow then Archie can free himself from Gretchen, once and for all. Either way, Heartsick makes for one of the most extraordinary suspense debuts in recent memory.
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The Lost Luggage Porter
by Andrew Martin
Working as an official railway detective during the winter of 1906, Jim Stringer covers York Station for the North Eastern Railway Company and encounters the Lost Luggage Porter, who tips him off about a gang of railway thieves, a group that he is asked to infiltrate in order to stop a proposed robbery and getaway across the English Channel. Original.
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The Poe Shadow
by Matthew Pearl
“I present to you . . . the truth about this man’s death and my life.” Baltimore, 1849. The body of Edgar Allan Poe has been buried in an unmarked grave. The public, the press, and even Poe’s own family and friends accept the conclusion that Poe was a second-rate writer who met a disgraceful end as a drunkard. Everyone, in fact, seems to believe this except a young Baltimore lawyer named Quentin Clark, an ardent admirer who puts his own career and reputation at risk in a passionate crusade to salvage Poe’s. As Quentin explores the puzzling circumstances of Poe’s demise, he discovers that the writer’s last days are riddled with unanswered questions the police are possibly willfully ignoring. Just when Poe’s death seems destined to remain a mystery, and forever sealing his ignominy, inspiration strikes Quentin–in the form of Poe’s own stories. The young attorney realizes that he must find the one person who can solve the strange case of Poe’s death: the real-life model for Poe’s brilliant fictional detective character, C. Auguste Dupin, the hero of ingenious tales of crime and detection. In short order, Quentin finds himself enmeshed in sinister machinations involving political agents, a female assassin, the corrupt Baltimore slave trade, and the lost secrets of Poe’s final hours. With his own future hanging in the balance, Quentin Clark must turn master investigator himself to unchain his now imperiled fate from that of Poe’s. Following his phenomenal debut novel, The Dante Club, Matthew Pearl has once again crossed pitch-perfect literary history with innovative mystery to create a beautifully detailed, ingeniously plotted tale of suspense. Pearl’s groundbreaking research–featuring documented material never published before–opens a new window on the truth behind Poe’s demise, literary history’s most persistent enigma. The resulting novel is a publishing event that, through sublime craftsmanship, subtle wit, and devious twists, does honor to Poe himself
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Radio Secrets
by Steve Brown
"A free man after 22 years and 22 days in prison, Raymond Lister has set out on a mission of revenge against the woman who put him behind bars."--Back cover.
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Shadow of Power
by Steve Martini
The Supreme Court is one of our most sacred—and secretive—public institutions. But sometimes secrets can lead to cover-ups with very deadly consequences. Terry Scarborough is a legal scholar and provocateur who craves headline-making celebrity, but with his latest book he may have gone too far. In it he resurrects forgotten language in the U.S. Constitution—and hints at a missing letter of Thomas Jefferson's—that threatens to divide the nation. Then, during a publicity tour, Scarborough is brutally murdered in a San Diego hotel room, and a young man with dark connections is charged. What looks like an open-and-shut case to most people doesn't to defense attorney Paul Madriani. He believes that there is much more to the case and that the defendant is a pawn caught in the middle, being scapegoated by circumstance. As the trial spirals toward its conclusion, Madriani and his partner, Harry Hinds, race to find the missing Jefferson letter—and the secrets it holds about slavery and scandal at the time of our nation's founding and the very reason Scarborough was killed. Madriani's chase takes him from the tension-filled courtroom in California to the trail of a high court justice now suddenly in hiding and lays bare the soaring political stakes for a seat on the highest court, in a country divided, and under the shadow of power.