Some Stimulating Fiction
Discover gripping, stimulating fiction in our curated reading list—from Kathy Reichs' *Devil Bones* and John Sandford's *Phantom Prey* to Alan Furst's *The Foreign Correspondent*. Explore 15 thrilling novels packed with suspense, mystery, and intrigue that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Perfect for fans of smart, page-turning storytelling.
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A Simple Plan
by Scott Smith
“Spectacular. . . . Ten shades blacker and several corpses grimmer than the novels of John Grisham. . . . Do yourself a favor. Read this book.” —Entertainment Weekly Two brothers and their friend stumble upon the wreckage of a plane–the pilot is dead and his duffle bag contains four million dollars in cash. In order to hide, keep, and share the fortune, these ordinary men all agree to a simple plan.
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The Good German
by Joseph Kanon
Set in Berlin just after the end of World War II, a brilliant thriller about the end of one war and the beginning of another.
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Kill Chain
by Meg Gardiner
Phil Delaney has been kidnapped and it is up to Evan Delaney to save him. Evan has 72 hours to come up with what the kidnappers want or her father dies.
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Still Life with Crows
by Douglas Preston
A small Kansas town has turned into a killing ground. Is it a serial killer, a man with the need to destroy? Or is it a darker force, a curse upon the land? Amid golden cornfields, FBI Special Agent Pendergast discovers evil in the blood of America's heartland. No one is safe.
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The Book of Skulls
by Robert Silverberg
Four college students searching for the secret of eternal life embark on a journey to the Arizona desert where they encounter a mysterious, ancient sect called the Keepers of the Skulls who guard a mystic rite that controls all of their futures. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.
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The Foreign Correspondent
by Alan Furst
From Alan Furst, whom The New York Times calls “America’s preeminent spy novelist,” comes an epic story of romantic love, love of country, and love of freedom–the story of a secret war fought in elegant hotel bars and first-class railway cars, in the mountains of Spain and the backstreets of Berlin. It is an inspiring, thrilling saga of everyday people forced by their hearts’ passion to fight in the war against tyranny. By 1938, hundreds of Italian intellectuals, lawyers and journalists, university professors and scientists had escaped Mussolini’s fascist government and taken refuge in Paris. There, amid the struggles of émigré life, they founded an Italian resistance, with an underground press that smuggled news and encouragement back to Italy. Fighting fascism with typewriters, they produced 512 clandestine newspapers. The Foreign Correspondent is their story. Paris, a winter night in 1938: a murder/suicide at a discreet lovers’ hotel. But this is no romantic traged–it is the work of the OVRA, Mussolini’s fascist secret police, and is meant to eliminate the editor of Liberazione, a clandestine émigré newspaper. Carlo Weisz, who has fled from Trieste and secured a job as a foreign correspondent with the Reuters bureau, becomes the new editor. Weisz is, at that moment, in Spain, reporting on the last campaign of the Spanish civil war. But as soon as he returns to Paris, he is pursued by the French Sûreté, by agents of the OVRA, and by officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service. In the desperate politics of Europe on the edge of war, a foreign correspondent is a pawn, worth surveillance, or blackmail, or murder. The Foreign Correspondent is the story of Carlo Weisz and a handful of antifascists: the army officer known as “Colonel Ferrara,” who fights for a lost cause in Spain; Arturo Salamone, the shrewd leader of a resistance group in Paris; and Christa von Schirren, the woman who becomes the love of Weisz’s life, herself involved in a doomed resistance underground in Berlin. The Foreign Correspondent is Alan Furst at his absolute best–taut and powerful, enigmatic and romantic, with sharp, seductive writing that takes the reader through darkness and intrigue to a spectacular denouement.
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The Last Patriot
by Brad Thor
"In an adrenaline-charged tour de force, Navy SEAL turned covert Homeland Security operative Scot Harvath must race to locate an ancient secret that has the power to stop militant Islam dead in its tracks." "June 632 A.D.: Deep within the Uranah Valley of Mount Arafat in Mecca, the prophet Mohammed shares with his closest companions a final and startling revelation. Within days, he is assassinated." "September 1789: U.S. minister to France Thomas Jefferson, charged with forging a truce with the violent Muslim pirates of the Barbary Coast, makes a shocking discovery - one that could forever impact the world's relationship with Islam." "Present day: When a car bomb explodes outside a Parisian cafe, Scot Harvath is thrust back into the life he has tried so desperately to leave behind." "Saving the intended victim of the attack, Harvath becomes party to an amazing and perilous race to uncover a secret so powerful that militant Islam could be defeated once and for all without firing another shot, dropping another bomb, or launching another covert action. But as desperate as the American government is to have the information brought to light, there are powerful forces aligned against it - men who are just as determined that Mohammed's mysterious final revelation remain hidden forever."--BOOK JACKET.
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Deception
by Denise Mina
Things like this don't happen to people like us. That's what Lachlan Harriot thinks as he watches his wife, Susie, led to jail in handcuffs. Yes, Susie, a psychologist, was found covered in blood near the spot where one of her clients appears to have been murdered. But Susie is not a killer, Lachlan thinks. She's my wife. She's our child's mother. Secrets lurk behind closed doors, however, a dark truth made chillingly clear as Lachlan's efforts to prove Susie's innocence uncover an entire secret history--illicit affairs, false identities, unimaginable deception--and this brilliantly acclaimed, page-turning novel speeds toward a conclusion as shocking as it is ingenious.
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Shoot Him If He Runs
by Stuart Woods
Sent by the CIA to a beautiful Caribbean island where they are to track down murderous rogue agent Teddy Fay, the team of Stone Barrington, Holly Barker, and Dino Baldachetti finds their mission thwarted by corrupt local politicians and secretive American expatriates. By the author of Iron Orchid.
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L.A. Outlaws
by T. Jefferson Parker
Investigating the latest crime scene of a celebrity thief who has been staging lucrative heists and donating the spoils to charity, rookie deputy Charlie Hood is forced to make an ethics-testing decision when the thief is targeted by a professional killer.
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Blow the House Down
by Robert Baer
Former CIA operative Robert Baer pushes fiction to the absolute limit in this riveting and unnervingly plausible alternative history of 9/11. Veteran CIA officer Max Waller has long been obsessed with the abduction and murder of his Agency mentor. Though years of digging yield the name of a suspect—an Iranian math genius turned terrorist—the trail seems too cold to justify further effort. Then Max turns up a photograph of the man standing alongside Osama bin Laden and a mysterious westerner whose face has been cut out, feeding Max’s suspicion. When the first official to whom Max shows the photo winds up dead, the out-of-favor agent suddenly finds himself the target of dark forces within the intelligence community who are desperate to muzzle him. Eluding a global surveillance net, Max—in the summer of 2001—begins tracking the spore of a complex conspiracy, meeting clandestinely with suicide bombers and Arab royalty and ultimately realizing the Iranian he’d sought for a decades-old crime is actually at the nexus of a terrifying plot. Showing off dazzling tradecraft and an array of richly textured backdrops, and filled with real names and events, Blow the House Down deftly balances fact and possibility to become the first great thriller to spring from the war on terrorism. Also available as a Random House AudioBook and an eBook
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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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Phantom Prey
by John Sandford
Lucas Davenport has had disturbing cases before, but never one quite like this. Filled with his brilliant trademark suspense, "Phantom Prey" is the shocking new novel from the #1 "New York Times"-bestselling author.
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Dead Heat
by Dick Francis
With his rising culinary career threatened by an episode of food poisoning at a private affair that he had catered, Max Moreton caters an exclusive luncheon at the 2,000 Guineas horse race, a party devastated by a bomb blast that kills many of the guests.
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Bone Rattler
by Eliot Pattison
Ordered to find another prisoner accountable for a series of suspicious deaths aboard a British convict ship, Duncan McCallum follows a series of clues that lead him into the heart of the French and Indian War and finds himself in love with the daughter of a man to whom he is indentured.
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Friend of the Devil
by Peter Robinson
From the "New York Times"-bestselling author comes his latest novel of suspense revolving around two towns, two murders, and two detectives searching for one indisputable truth. William Morrow & Company
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Ice Trap
by Kitty Sewell
At the height of his career, a British surgeon has found success in both the hospital and at home. He and his wife have everything they want out of life, except the child she longs for, the child Dr. Woodruff secretly believes he may never be ready to par
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Blind Fall
by Christopher Rice
"New York Times"-bestselling author Rice delivers the gripping story of an Iraqi War vet seeking redemption and revenge when one of his fellow Marines is brutally murdered.
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Killer Heat
by Linda A. Fairstein
Manhattan D.A. Alex Cooper investigates the murders of three victims while dodging infuriated gang members packing heat. Her interrogation skills lead to someone with a twisted obsession concerning the military, and things grow increasingly dangerous whe
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Dark Horse
by Mike Langan
A Syracuse attorney who's made a specialty of skating on thin ice feels the surface tremble beneath him when his partner is murdered. Nicky Rigopoulos is every inch the modern politician. There's his gift for bringing people together, his call to public service and, of course, his extramarital affairs.
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Gambit
by Karna Small Bodman
Bodman, a former director of the National Security Council and author of "Checkmate," returns with another gripping thriller that reads like tomorrow's headlines.
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Primal Threat
by Earl W. Emerson
On a late August day in the foothills of the Cascades, five bicyclists climb into the hot, dry air, the breeze of their movement cooling their overheated bodies, the stress of a workweek slipstreaming behind them. But another group has entered the park, too. They're in cars, for pleasure and for vengeance. In Earl Emerson's gripping new novel, a grudge turns an idyllic setting into a terrifying landscape of men and nature at their most dangerous. Zak Polanski doesn't do long-term relationships, doesn't like rich people, and, after saving Nadine Newcastle from an accident scene, isn't ready to be loved back. When the improbable affair sours, Zak returns to his old ways. But Nadine's former boyfriend, William Potter III, can't let it go. Potter knows that Zak is one of five mountain bikers at an isolated camping ground at Panther Creek, and has come for a little payback. What starts as a nasty prank soon escalates. Someone has a gun. Someone makes a move. And a spark ignites amid a volatile mix of anger and alcohol, pride and betrayal. Now, men and women cut off from their urban environment are making choices, choosing sides, facing one another's demons and their own. And when human hatred merges with nature's fury, the only goal is to get out alive. A mesmerizing novel that weaves the story of a charged love affair with a drama of sheer survival, Primal Threat is a thriller delivered with the brawny, vivid, and lyrical style that makes Earl Emerson one of the most compelling storytellers of our time.
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Devil Bones
by Kathy Reichs
When a plumber discovers the remains of a murdered girl and various dark religious objects in the cellar of a client's house, Temperance Brennan is called in to investigate the case and finds her efforts challenged by vigilante upheavals against Wiccans and occultists. 450,000 first printing.
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Hitler's Judas
by Tom Lewis
Continuing the saga from "Sundays Child," the first book in the trilogy Pea Island Gold, "Hitlers Judas" covers the elaborate plot by Hitlers right-hand man, Martin Bormann, to smuggle gold out of Germany. The gold ends up on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, buried in the sand around the house of Sunday Everette, a young black woman who falls in love with the Nazi submarine captain she rescues.
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1st to Die
by James Patterson
Four crime-solving friends face off against a killer in San Francisco in the Women's Murder Club novel that started James Patterson's thrilling series. Each one holds a piece of the puzzle: Lindsay Boxer is a homicide inspector in the San Francisco Police Department, Claire Washburn is a medical examiner, Jill Bernhardt is an assistant D.A., and Cindy Thomas just started working the crime desk of the San Francisco Chronicle. But the usual procedures aren't bringing them any closer to stopping the killings. So these women form a Women's Murder Club to collaborate outside the box and pursue the case by sidestepping their bosses and giving each other a hand. The four women develop intense bonds as they pursue a killer whose crimes have stunned an entire city. Working together, they track down the most terrifying and unexpected killer they have ever encountered--before a shocking conclusion in which everything they knew turns out to be devastatingly wrong. Full of the breathtaking drama and unforgettable emotions for which James Patterson is famous, 1st to Die is the start of the #1 New York Times bestselling series of crime thrillers.