Showing results by publisher "HarperCollins" in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

In Germany on Christmas Day 1956 a baby girl was born without ears. She was the first victim of the notorious thalidomide epidemic. There would be over 10,000 more across 46 countries. For years the world believed the United States had avoided the catastrophe. After Frances Kelsey at the FDA became suspicious of the dangers of thalidomide in 1960, she led a successful fight to block its commercial approval. But now, having probed government and corporate archives and interviewed hundreds of key players, Jennifer Vanderbes reveals a darker truth that lay buried for decades.

Three women had been brutally murdered between early 1968 and late 1969, each after a night dancing at Glasgow’s infamous Barrowland Ballroom. Their murders were linked and ascribed to the spectre of the well dressed, scripture quoting killer who had apparently stalked the city’s dancehalls. The figure was never caught or identified. But the intervening years have spawned a legend that has never quite lost its grip on the popular imagination of Glasgow. The killings provoked the country's largest-ever manhunt.

In a tour de force of investigative journalism and novelistic storytelling, White Terror follows the National Socialist Underground, or NSU, from their radicalisation as young skinheads through their transformation into fully fledged terrorists carrying out bombings and assassinations while living on the run. But it’s also about something almost as terrifying: the German police and intelligence services that missed clues, mishandled far-right informants and repeatedly tried to paint the immigrant victims as mafiosos.

The beautiful bastide at Beaulieu-sur-Mer has always been an idyllic retreat for the Challant family, but the summer of 1928 changes everything. One humid, stormy night, a young local boy suffers a fatal accident in the bastide’s grounds – and the suspicious circumstances around his death sets off a chain of whispers in the town on the Riviera. For the Challant children, they have no choice but to move on and leave those terrible events in the past. But through the years of loves and losses, marriages and betrayals, the Challants’ lives will always be tainted by that night.

Jess and her husband need a new start. So when the chance to buy a rambling old house in the Suffolk countryside comes up, they leap at it. But not everyone in Suffolk is welcoming. The locals know a secret about the Maple House, and soon, Jess realises they’ve made a huge mistake. Something bad happened in that house. Something nobody wants to talk about.

From his abusive childhood, his inevitable journey into crime and his role in the dangerous underworld of south London’s gangland through to his eventful spells in many of Britain’s most secure jails, Ronnie Field is ready to recount his incredible story for the very first time. It’s a new take on the criminal fraternity of the 1970s and 80s from one of the last men standing. A raw, honest and sometimes humorous portrayal of a life in the fast lane of organised crime, Nefarious is a reflection on a bygone era from which there are few regrets. Though some things are best laid to rest.

It’s 1944 and Germany is facing its final defeat. 5,000 miles across the Allied dominated Atlantic, 22 men and five nuns aboard the Barquentine Deutschland are battling home to Kiel. Among them are a U-boat ace captured in a raid on Falmouth. A female American doctor caught in the nightmare of flying bombs. A gunboat commander who’s fought from the Solomons to the Channel and a rear admiral desperate to get some of the action. Allies and enemies, men and women, the hunters and the haunted all drawn into the eye of the storm.

Jo Lawless is still grieving her husband when his oldest friends invite her to a weekend houseparty in France. She’s always felt like an outsider in the group, but she decides to go, hoping their shared loss will bring them closer together. But the weekend is disrupted by the arrival of an unexpected guest, whose presence brings old tensions to the surface. Long-buried secrets begin to emerge, and it’s clear that at least one person is bent on revenge.

Detective Sergeant Nick Miller is tasked with hunting down a deranged killer stalking the streets of London. The Rainlover. Whose victims are always women. Always at night when the streets are wet. He could be any one of a thousand men. Hounded by the public and the press, Miller needs to find him before he strikes again. It’s time to throw out the rule book in the line of duty.

When Rachel, a GP in Salisbury, meets Luc, the attraction between them is instant. But Rachel is married with a daughter–and Luc isn’t well. Despite themselves, a heady love affair begins–one that threatens to risk everything Rachel has worked for. And when someone in the town is found dead, the spotlight turns to Luc. Torn between her career, her marriage and her heart, Rachel finds herself in the middle of something much darker than she could have imagined…

James has found himself at the fashionable resort Kimpton-on-Sea, all due to the persuasion of the young Grace who during the last few months of their courtship has become distinctly uppish. Amongst the upper echelons of society, including the Rajah of Maraputna, James feels distinctly disgruntled and out of place. Eager to both irritate and win over his sometime girlfriend, James bypasses the queue to the beach changing rooms and ducks into the private huts before impressively being the first in the sea.

When Marcie met Jason Maddox, she couldn’t believe her luck. Becoming Jason’s second wife catapulted her into the elite world of high society. But underneath the polite, old money manners, she knows she’ll always be an outsider, and her hard-won life hangs by a thread. Then Jason’s widowed boss brings back a new wife from his trip to London. Young, beautiful, reckless – nobody can take their eyes off Keisha. Including Jason.

The Bahamas, 1941. Newly-widowed Lulu Randolph arrives in Nassau to investigate the Governor and his wife for a New York society magazine whose readers have an insatiable appetite for news of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, that glamorous couple whose love affair nearly brought the British monarchy to its knees five years earlier.

The most popular detective story writer of all time turns her hand to the subject of Christmas. In a manger in Bethlehem, an angel offers Mary a vision of things to come...and a chance to change it all. A naughty little donkey learns the meaning of love as he carries a very special mother and child safely to Egypt. Mrs Hargreaves wanted to like people, but didn't really know how. Then she reached out to touch a stranger, and her eyes were opened to love. This charming reading of Agatha Christie’s stories and poems captures the true meaning of Christmas.

Narrowly surviving a terrorist attack in Paris, Stephanie Patrick finds herself pursued ruthlessly by a faceless enemy, her identity stolen from her. To give herself a slim possibility of escape, she seizes a hostage: Robert Newman. But is their encounter really just chance? Hunted from Paris to Vienna, Stephanie and Newman are forced together to survive. Yet the more she learns, the closer Newman seems to be to the heart of the conspiracy. Stephanie becomes sure of only one thing: that the answers will lie with the person who she knows only as The Third Woman.

Stephanie Patrick's peaceful civilian life in London is shattered when she receives a new assignment: track down a notorious Serbian warlord in the Far East. Confirmed dead four years ago in Kosovo, he has links to an international terrorist network called Gemini, whose trade in scientific secrets poses a horrifying threat to the West. The closer Stephanie gets to her target, the more dangerous her mission becomes...until she makes a rare mistake, setting in motion a chain of events with terrifying consequences.

Early March 1934, America’s most notorious criminal makes his spectacular escape from Lake County Jail, Indiana. Three months later, John Dillinger, the last American outlaw, is gunned down by FBI agents outside a movie theatre in Chicago. But what really happened during Dillinger’s final months of liberty? As the fugitive makes a desperate break for the Mexican border, master thriller writer Jack Higgins takes up the story, following Dillinger into the savage hands of his new captors. Where love is as elusive as a pardon. And the price paid for freedom is blood....

Locked away inside the impregnable fortress of Schloss Neustadt, Father Sean Conlin, survivor of Dachau and lifelong champion of human freedom, is fighting to deny his jailers their ultimate goal. On this momentous day, when the whole world is watching, they must make him admit to being a CIA hireling. But the West is determined to save him, and, gambling with their lives, a small band of men begin a daring rescue mission that could change the course of history.

On December 30th, 1999, in rural Oklahoma, 16-year-old Ashley Freeman and her best friend, Lauria Bible, were having a sleepover. The next morning, the Freeman family trailer was in flames and both girls were missing. While rumours of drug debts, revenge killings and police corruption abounded in the years that followed, the case remained unsolved and the girls were never found. In 2016, crime writer Jax Miller travelled to Oklahoma to discover what really happened.

Tuesday Mooney loves a puzzle. So when an eccentric billionaire drops dead, leaving behind a fiendish treasure hunt - open to anyone - to his fortune, Tuesday can’t resist. Although she works best alone, she soon finds herself partnering up with best friend Dex (money manager by day, karaoke zealot by night) and the mysterious Nathaniel Arches, eldest son of a wealthy family who held a long-running feud with the dead man.