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Things We Do in the Dark
When Paris Peralta is arrested in her own bathroom—covered in blood, holding a straight razor, her celebrity husband dead in the bathtub behind her—she knows she'll be charged with murder. But as bad as this looks, it's not what worries her the most. With the unwanted media attention now surrounding her, it's only a matter of time before someone from her long hidden past recognizes her and destroys the new life she's worked so hard to build, along with any chance of a future. Twenty-five years earlier, Ruby Reyes, known as the Ice Queen, was convicted of a similar murder in a trial that riveted Canada in the early nineties. Reyes knows who Paris really is, and when she's unexpectedly released from prison, she threatens to expose all of Paris's secrets. Left with no other choice, Paris must finally confront the dark past she escaped, once and for all. Because the only thing worse than a murder charge are two murder charges.
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Little Secrets
Marin had the perfect life. Married to her college sweetheart, she owns a chain of upscale hair salons, and Derek runs his own company. They're admired in their community and are a loving family—until their world falls apart the day their son Sebastian is taken. A year later, Marin is a shadow of herself. The FBI search has gone cold. The publicity has faded. She and her husband rarely speak. She hires a P.I. to pick up where the police left off, but instead of finding Sebastian, she learns that Derek is having an affair with a younger woman. This discovery sparks Marin back to life. She's lost her son; she's not about to lose her husband, too. Kenzie is an enemy with a face, which means this is a problem Marin can fix. Permanently.
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Jar of Hearts
This is the story of three best friends: one who was murdered, one who went to prison, and one who's been searching for the truth all these years . . . When she was sixteen years old, Angela Wong—one of the most popular girls in school—disappeared without a trace. Nobody ever suspected that her best friend, Georgina Shaw, now an executive and rising star at her Seattle pharmaceutical company, was involved in any way. Certainly not Kaiser Brody, who was close with both girls back in high school. But fourteen years later, Angela Wong's remains are discovered in the woods near Geo's childhood home. And Kaiser—now a detective with Seattle PD—finally learns the truth: Angela was a victim of Calvin James. The same Calvin James who murdered at least three other women. To the authorities, Calvin is a serial killer. But to Geo, he's something else entirely. Back in high school, Calvin was Geo's first love. Turbulent and often volatile, their relationship bordered on obsession from the moment they met right up until the night Angela was killed. For fourteen years, Geo knew what happened to Angela and told no one. For fourteen years, she carried the secret of Angela's death until Geo was arrested and sent to prison. While everyone thinks they finally know the truth, there are dark secrets buried deep. And what happened that fateful night is more complex and more chilling than anyone really knows. Now the obsessive past catches up with the deadly present when new bodies begin to turn up, killed in the exact same manner as Angela Wong. How far will someone go to bury her secrets and hide her grief? How long can you get away with a lie? How long can you live with it?
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Wonderland
Welcome to Wonderland. By day, it's a magical place boasting a certain retro charm. Excited children, hands sticky with cotton candy, run frenetically from the Giant Octopus ride to the Spinning Sombrero, while the tinkling carnival music of the giant Wonder Wheel--the oldest Ferris wheel in the Pacific Northwest--fills the air. But before daybreak, an eerie feeling descends. Maybe it's the Clown Museum, home to creepy wax replicas of movie stars and a massive collection of antique porcelain dolls. Or maybe it's the terrifyingly real House of Horrors. Or...maybe it's the dead, decaying body left in the midway for all the Wonder Workers to see. Vanessa Castro's first day as deputy police chief of Seaside, Washington, is off to a bang. The unidentifiable homeless man rotting inside the tiny town's main tourist attraction is strange enough, but now a teenage employee--whose defiant picture at the top of the Wonder Wheel went viral that same morning--is missing. As the clues in those seemingly disparate crimes lead her down a mysterious shared path of missing persons that goes back decades, she suspects the seedy rumors surrounding the amusement park's dark history might just be true. She moved to Seaside to escape her own scandalous past, but has she brought her family to the center of an insidious killer's twisted game?
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The Butcher
In 1985, Edward Shank famously gunned down the Beacon Hill Butcher, ending the serial killer's reign of terror over the city of Seattle. But now in his eighties, Edward's action-packed glory days are long behind him. The decorated former Seattle police chief has given up his high-maintenance Victorian home to his grandson Matt for a quiet life at the nearby Sweetbay Village Retirement Residence, where mac-n-cheese Wednesdays have become the highlight of his week. Though it's hard to watch his grandfather get older, Matt is thrilled to inherit the large house he grew up in. Already an accomplished chef with a popular restaurant and a TV show in the works, Matt's dream life is finally within reach...until he discovers a crate buried in the backyard that holds a secret about his grandfather so terrible, it threatens to ruin all their lives if it ever gets out. Especially his girlfriend Sam's, whose mother was killed when she was only two years old. As Matt struggles with his dark family secret, Sam's obsession with solving her mother's murder continues to grow. A true crime writer now working on a book about the Butcher, Sam has always suspected her mother was one of his victims, even though she was killed two years after the Butcher was supposedly gunned down. But when new victims begin to turn up, their murders eerily similar to the Butcher's all those years ago, Sam realizes she might be right. The more she digs into the old murders, the more dangerous it gets...and the truth is closer to home than she ever could have imagined.
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Freak
#2 in the Creep Series
Sitting alone in a maximum-security prison cell, Abby Maddox is a celebrity. Her claim to fame is the envy of every freak on the outside: she's the former lover of Ethan Wolfe, the killer who left more than a dozen dead women in his wake and nearly added Puget Sound State professor Sheila Tao to the tally. Now Abby, serving a nine-year sentence for slashing a police officer's throat in a moment of rage, has little human contact—save for the letters that pour in from demented fans, lunatics, and creeps. But a new wave of murders has given Abby a possible chance for a plea bargain—because this killer has been sending her love letters, and carving a message on the bodies of the victims: Free Abby Maddox. Jerry Isaac will never forget the attack—or his attacker. The hideous scarring and tortured speech are daily reminders that the one-time Seattle PD officer, now a private investigator, is just lucky to be alive. Abby Maddox deserves to rot in jail—forever, as far as Jerry's concerned. But she alone may possess crucial evidence—letters from this newest killer—that could crack open the disturbing case. With the help of Professor Sheila Tao, seasoned police detective Mike Torrance, and intuitive criminology student Danny Mercy, Jerry must coax the shattering truth from isolated, dangerous Abby Maddox. Can he put the pieces together before Abby's number one fan takes another life in the name of a killer's perverted idea of justice?
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Creep
#1 in the Creep Series
A popular psychology professor in Seattle, Sheila works hard to keep her secrets hidden. On the surface, she's an expert in human behavior and a well-liked educator, but nobody knows she's a recovering sex addict in therapy—and she needs it to stay that way, or she could lose everything. But Ethan Wolfe is impossible to resist. The graduate student is brilliant, charming, and seductive as hell. He's also Sheila's teaching assistant, and thirteen years her junior. Ignoring the risks, they begin an illicit affair that lasts three months until Sheila finally puts a stop to it. But Ethan can't move on so easily—after all, he didn't pursue his professor for as long as he did without plans of his own. When the body of one of Sheila's students is discovered floating in Puget Sound—a young woman Ethan was rumored to have dated—it's clear that the graduate student has secrets of his own. And he's not about to let Sheila get away.
