Shy, studious Irene Stenson and wild, privileged Pamela Webb had been the best of friends for one short high school summer. Their friendship ended the night Pamela dropped Irene off at home-and Irene walked in to discover her parents' bodies on the kitchen floor. It was ruled a murder-suicide, and Irene fled Dunsley, determined to wipe out every memory attached to her northern California hometown. But now she has been summoned back. Pamela's e-mail...

This is the tale of family, memory, love, and living told by 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who is already in heaven. Through the voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and builds out of her family's grief a hopeful and joyful story.

Marrying debonaire widower William Andrews despite her reluctance, Jane Warren struggles to understand her new husband's pervasive grief over his first wife's murder, until Jane realizes that someone is trying to kill her as well.

Injured by an unknown shooter who has killed his wife and abducted his baby daughter, surgeon Marc Seidman struggles with limited options when he receives a ransom note that he will never see his daughter again if he contacts the police.

Rise the dark. These were the last words written in Lauren Novak's notebook before she was murdered in a strange Florida village. They've never meant anything to the police or to her husband, investigator Markus Novak. Now the man he believes killed her is out of prison, and draws Markus to the place he's avoided for so long: the lonely road where his wife was shot to death beneath the cypress trees and Spanish moss in a town called Cassadaga. ...

Hired by Charlotte Mauravieff, who wants to clear her mother's name of the arson fire that killed one of her brothers, private investigator Kate Shugak finds the case complicated by someone who wants the truth to stay hidden.

Returning to her former home of San Francisco in 1924, Mary Russell and her husband, eminent detective Sherlock Holmes, are confronted by dark secrets of the past that continue to haunt Mary's dreams.