Historical Fiction Serial Killer

Fast-paced, evocative, and brutal, The Cold Cold Ground is a brilliant depiction of Belfast at the height of the Troubles—and of a cop treading a thin, thin line—from the New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award–winning author Adrian McKinty. “McKinty is one of the most striking and...

The year is 1906, and America is segregated. Hatred and discrimination plague the streets, the classroom, and the courts. But in WashingtonD.C., Ben Corbett, a smart and courageous lawyer, makes it his mission to confront injustice at every turn. He represents those who nobody else dares defend...

He performs his profane ceremony in a wooded Minneapolis park, anointing his victims, then setting the bodies ablaze. He has already claimed three lives, and he won't stop there. Only this time there is a witness. But she isn't talking. Enter Kate Conlan, former FBI agent turned victim/witness advocate. Not even she can tell if the reluctant witness is a potential victim or something more troubling still.

🕯 He couldn’t stop history’s first serial killer… but he might finally save himself. 🕯 On the brink of relapse, a broken man wanders into a decaying amusement park exhibit on Chicago’s lakefront. Moments after taking a long-feared hit of heroin, he finds himself not dead — but transported to the glittering horror of the 1893 World’s Fair. There, amid marvels of invention and carnival excess, he meets a charming doctor named H.H. Holmes. What begins as a surreal hallucination turns into a waking nightmare as the man realizes he’s inside the past… and inside the orbit of...

Chicago, 1923: Ten-year-old Dani Flanagan returns home to find police swarming the house, her parents dead. Michael Malone, the young patrolman assigned to the case, discovers there’s more to the situation—and to Dani Flanagan herself—than the authorities care to explore. Malone is told to shut his mouth, and Dani is sent away to live with her spinster aunts in Cleveland.

London, 1888. Fog-choked streets. Lamplit alleys. A killer who moves like a shadow—and a secret far darker than history ever recorded. When barrister Montague John Druitt makes a desperate bargain with a mysterious Gentleman in black, he believes it will save his collapsing life. Instead, he becomes trapped in a waking nightmare as the pact twists his thoughts, fractures his mind, and drives him toward the Whitechapel murders that will echo through history. As the bodies multiply, Inspector Frederick Abberline follows a trail of fear through the East End, unaware that the monster he hunts...

Chief Inspector Soobramania is called when three bodies are discovered in the space of twenty-four hours, with mutilations bearing an eerie resemblance to Jack the Ripper’s victims. Initial suspicion centres on an English Duke visiting Hyderabad and his friend, a powerful Deccani noble and the angry stepson of one of the dead. In the face of political pressure, Soob must ally with his rival in the British Residency Police, Inspector Wilberforce, to unearth the culprit.

Some secrets are meant to stay buried in the woods. Because no one truly wants to know. Sixty-seven years ago, a young girl vanished without a trace at Camp Rockatchee. Within a month, another girl tragically drowned. Sydney Wilkerson’s grandmother, Ginny Hunt, was a camper at the time, but Sydney never learned all the details. As a kid, she loved to hear her grandmother’s stories about the brighter, happier days of her teenage years. Most of all, Sydney loved playing among the Washington pines that surrounded her grandmother’s home, just yards away from the shuttered, decaying ...

Philadelphia, 1986. Someone is killing men the city is already trying to forget. When private investigator Danny Malloy is called to the Saint Jude Lounge after a young bartender is found dead in the rain, the police are ready to file it away as another overdose, another lost gay man, another body in a city full of excuses. But Kenneth Hoffman came to Danny days before he died. He was frightened. He had names. He had rumors of missing men, stolen clinic files, and a religious card marked with three words: No more suffering. As Danny follows Kenneth’s trail through gay bars, hospital wards...

Sherlock Holmes must contend with his past upon returning from the great hiatus. Unanswered questions linger in his mind. Holmes is aware that Watson is hiding something, but Watson struggles with the secret. The veil begins to tear by a visitor at their door, and what seems a simple request turns into a life or death encounter.

When Matt Moreno’s close friend, Blake Brady, accepted an internship in Utah, some of his new associates were cagey about their private lives. But then again, the world had just changed. In the late 1970s, folks in Utah—who had once felt safe—found new anxiety in things as simple as walking alone in their own neighborhoods. For good reason. The serial killer Ted Bundy had come to Utah, brutally killing girls and women, and as the newspapers of the day put it, he had stolen everyone’s innocence. There was a new, sinister tint on everything.

A man is found murdered in his locked study. The weapon lies beside his body. The fingerprints point to only one suspect. And the verdict is already waiting. But legendary detective Vincent Gideon knows something is wrong. The crime scene is too perfect. The evidence is too clean. The witnesses are too certain. And when a woman he loves stands accused of murder, Gideon is forced into the most dangerous investigation of his career — a case that reaches into secret rooms, staged deaths, disappearing identities, and a criminal mastermind who has never been caught. Behind the polished walls ...

The gripping, true story of a brutal serial killer who unleashed his own reign of terror in Nazi-Occupied Paris. As decapitated heads and dismembered body parts surfaced in the Seine, Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, head of the Brigade Criminelle, was tasked with tracking down the elusive...

Jack the Ripper is one of the most notorious serial killers in history—and yet over one hundred years later, his identity remains cloaked in mystery. Or does it? There’s only ever been one man who could solve this crime: the inimitable Sherlock Holmes. When news of the first murder hits the paper, the story immediately catches Holmes’ attention—and he’s determined to be involved in the case. Soon, Holmes has entered a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with the Ripper, trying to unmask the murderer before being framed for the crimes himself. As he wanders the dark, seedy streets of ...

From Brandie Van Hartesvelt, winner of a regional writing guild’s Best Upcoming Young Author award, comes a riveting story of suspense and redemption, with a twist you won't see coming and real-life inspiration pictures from the Missouri State Penitentiary. As the clock ticks down to his execution, a serial killer grapples with the knowledge of his impending death. Determined not to die with unfinished business, he hatches a daring escape plan that takes readers through a tumultuous attempt to cheat death. In Death Row, the moments between life and death stretch unbearably thin for the ...

The tea is warm, the smile is kind — and the poison is already working. When Nurse Brenda Glenford inherits her aunt’s flat and a strange silver pendant, she steps into a legacy steeped in silence, shadows, and death. At Ashmere Hospital, she becomes a comforting presence — calm, attentive, beloved by patients. But beneath the surface, something ancient is whispering to her. Something that remembers every death. Something that urges her to kill again. Poison is her method. Tea is her ritual. And murder is the mercy she believes she offers. As her past blurs with another woman's dark ...

This monster is someone’s mother… In a quiet Italian town, the widow, Leonarda Cianciulli is known as a devoted mother and skilled butcher. Superstitious, watchful, and fiercely protective of her child, she believes the world is full of unseen dangers and that only vigilance can keep disaster at bay. When she perceives her son Giuseppe is in danger, Leonarda becomes convinced that fate itself is circling him. Signs appear everywhere. Warnings whisper through daily rituals. And slowly, horrifyingly, she reaches a conclusion that no one else but her can see. To save her son, sacrifices ...

A dazzling spy thriller about a female CIA agent whose extraordinary facial recognition powers lead her into the dangerous heart of the Soviet Union—and the path of a killer who shouldn’t exist. ​ It is 1990 when Melvina Donleavy arrives in Soviet Belarus on her first undercover mission...

From READERS' FAVORITE Reviewer Demetria Head: "FIVE STARS. It had me hooked from the first chapter." Cold Cases: A City Haunted by its Past. Unsolved Murders and Disappearances In the turbulent backdrop of 1960s San Francisco, the newly formed Cold Case Squad of the San Francisco Police Department takes on three of the city’s most disturbing unsolved crimes. Leading the unit is Homicide Detective Holly Webb—sharp, relentless, and unwilling to let the dead be forgotten. A stockbroker plunges thirty stories to his death on Black Tuesday in 1929, the darkest day in stock market history. ...

Brought to you by Penguin. 'They will forget that we are flesh-and-blood women who have lived, and who now die, at the mercy of those who judge us.' Discover the dark and gothic historical novel inspired by the true story of Giulia Tofana, the first documented female serial killer in history...