A mother receives a call telling her child has been kidnapped and that she must both pay and kidnap another child to free her — and the release depends on a continuing chain where each victimizer becomes a victim.

Set in ancient Thebes during the 11th dynasty, the novel places a household under scrutiny after a series of deaths.

A fictional reimagining of a doomed overland expedition in the 19th-century American West that places characters under escalating scarcity and suspicion.

Set during the American Civil War, the novel focuses on a freedwoman who takes a dangerous undercover role within a Confederate household to gather intelligence, while a man posing as a Confederate soldier is secretly working the same network for Union purposes.

A woman who works as a local tour guide becomes alarmed by disappearances and unsettling changes in her Brooklyn neighborhood and starts investigating.

A small, remote English setting hosts a tightly observed family story in which religious rites, interpersonal strain, and mysterious occurrences create sustained unease.

Set in a rural Southern backwater, the novel follows Miranda Crabtree, who runs contraband for a local preacher-sheriff to survive and to protect an old woman and a child who fled his home years earlier. Miranda faces escalating danger when she’s asked to make one last, fraught delivery involving that same preacher.

A middle-aged woman in an affluent Atlanta suburb watches a striking modern house built next door and becomes convinced something malevolent resides within it.

A mother narrates her struggle with fear and suspicion about her child and her own capacity to parent, with rising suspicion and consequences that test family bonds. The setup focuses on maternal doubt and the social and personal fallout of mistrust within a family unit.

An African-American Texas Ranger, Darren Matthews, travels Highway 59 into a small Texas town to investigate the death of a Black visitor and encounters local resistance, simmering racial tensions, and tangled loyalties.

A murder is discovered on the grounds of Belle Vie, a working antebellum plantation in Louisiana that now operates as an event venue. The estate’s manager becomes entangled in the official investigation and the local upheaval that follows, with labor relations and the plantation’s history intensifying the stakes.

A collection of personal documents—letters, diary entries, and newspaper reports—traces a mounting confrontation with a predatory nobleman who relocates from Eastern Europe to England.

Set around a single house that becomes the locus of strange occurrences, the book follows characters drawn into unexplained phenomena and the effort to understand what’s happening.

Set in Georgian England, Marian Hayes flees London after shooting her abusive husband and falls into an uneasy alliance with Rob Brooks, a cheerful highwayman and con man who has blackmailed her.

Set across multiple time periods beginning in the early 20th century, the novel places two close young women inside a secluded, quasi-religious community on a Scottish island.

A compact, tense novel set around a single household where strange omissions and unsettling behaviors create a mystery of who can be trusted. Multiple perspectives and withheld information generate pressure: secrets accumulate inside the house while outside facts remain uncertain.

Set against the political tensions of the early 1960s, an American intelligence officer, Paul Christopher, investigates the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A woman who has left a life tied to intelligence work is living overseas when a chain of events forces secrets from her past back into play, putting family and identity at risk.

A contemporary American family becomes entangled with unexplained, possibly supernatural occurrences that surface long-buried trauma and danger. The story places intimate domestic fractures next to uncanny events, creating a pressure between ordinary family life and escalating, mysterious threat.

An unnamed young woman marries a wealthy widower and moves to his grand West Country estate, where she finds the household dominated by the presence and legend of his late first wife.

A group of older, formerly professional killers—now ostensibly retired—are pulled into a dangerous sequence of events when a job and its fallout force them to act. The book follows their attempts to manage threats, reckon with past choices, and protect one another while outside forces close in.

A U.S. Marshal travels to a remote island hospital for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of a patient who is also a serial killer.

A sprawling crime thriller that follows characters entangled in the international drug trade and the institutions that pursue or abet it.

Told from the viewpoint of a returning World War II veteran, the novel follows his arrival in Los Angeles and the tense relationships he forms there while an external string of murders and police investigation encircle him.

A compact English-set tale shaped by a disappearance and the effort to reconstruct what happened. The narrative assembles documents, testimony, and close third-person focus to press on how absence reshapes memory, suspicion, and local rumor.

A professionally curious narrator pursues the life of a shadowy criminal figure across interwar European settings, following clues from travel and chance encounters to reconstruct motive and method.

A determined investigator reopens a dangerous case tied to recent political violence and personal loss, tracing clues that connect domestic life to wider conflict. The book follows her efforts to untangle family grief and a history of unrest while someone with violent intent may still be at large.

A tightly plotted political thriller about a professional assassin hired by a dissident French paramilitary group to carry out a high-profile killing. The book sets up a procedural duel between the lone contractor's meticulous preparations and the official security forces racing to identify and stop him.

A literary mystery shaped by old films and the archival traces they leave behind: a narrator follows production records, stills, and fragments of silent cinema to reconstruct a troubling past and the people connected to it.

A solitary, resourceful man becomes both would-be assassin and hunted prey after attempting to kill a powerful foreign figure.

A married couple's crisis becomes the novel's engine when the wife disappears and attention turns to the husband as a suspect.

Joanna Eberhart, a photographer and new mother, notices that the wives in her suburban Connecticut community are becoming unnaturally compliant and domestic.

Set around a Mexican hacienda, the narrative follows characters entangled in domestic power, inherited secrets, and unexplained phenomena. The central pressure is an escalating, intimate threat—social and supernatural—that forces private histories and loyalties into the open.

An espionage thriller centered on a woman trained by Russian intelligence to use seduction and deception as tools of recruitment and infiltration.

A midcareer novelist-turned-MFA-teacher recognizes a student’s apparently brilliant plot idea and later faces a career- and conscience-shaped crisis tied to that idea. The setup focuses on intellectual ownership, ambition, and how one striking idea can change a writer’s fortunes and ethical choices.

A government research zone has been sealed off after decades of strange phenomena. A team of four unnamed female specialists enters as the twelfth expedition to survey the area and record observations.

A troubled fashion model moves into a large New York brownstone divided into apartments and encounters strange disturbances centered on the building and its top-floor, blind Catholic priest.

Set in a farming community, the novel follows how the arrival or actions of a persuasive auctioneer alters local social bonds and everyday life. The central pressure comes from interpersonal influence, suspicion, and the erosion of trust among neighbors.

Set in a near-future dystopia, the novel follows a skilled programmer pursued after years on the run; his escape relies on creating and deploying computer programs to confuse trackers and undermine the systems that control society.

An ostensibly ordinary man becomes entangled in international intrigue and must flee to survive after learning of a conspiracy. The setup focuses on pursuit, mistaken identity (or forced suspicion), and a race to uncover key information before hostile agents can stop him.

Two grieving men find solace in fishing and become drawn to a local, haunted fishing spot whose history links to deeper, primordial forces. Their attempt to escape loss becomes entangled with an older, supernatural presence that tests what they will risk to reclaim what is gone.

A British intelligence officer is sent into East Germany as a fake defector as part of a controlled operation intended to mislead the enemy.

A father with a criminal past confronts an urgent family crisis involving his daughter and choices that threaten to undo both their lives. The setup focuses on parental responsibility, the consequences of past crimes, and a high-stakes situation that forces the protagonist to weigh loyalty, protection, and legal peril.

A country solicitor is drawn into defending a mother and daughter accused of abducting and assaulting a visiting young woman. The plot hinges on assembling testimony, scrutinizing inconsistent claims, and testing how community suspicion and newspaper pressure shape culpability.

Two women’s lives intersect around a risky decision to assume another identity, and that choice sets off a chain of deception, pursuit, and moral reckoning. The immediate pressure is whether the protagonist can keep the assumed life intact while past secrets close in, with consequences for friendship and survival.

Three apparently separate family tragedies — a child's disappearance, a domestic killing, and an inexplicable murder — form the puzzle around a private investigator who reconstructs lives through interviews, documents, and visits.

A newly placed woman at a secluded country house confronts eerie, inexplicable phenomena tied to the home’s past while she navigates grief, social scrutiny, and household secrets. The book sets up a slow-building collision between domestic routine and uncanny intrusions that heighten psychological strain.

A mid-20th-century espionage thriller centered on an intelligence investigator drawn into a baffling missing-persons and brainwashing case. The plot pressure comes from unraveling institutional secrecy and technical clues inside an atmosphere of Cold War suspicion.

A coded plea from deep inside frozen Russia summons a linguistically gifted outsider to infiltrate a secret research installation.