Books with category Thrilling Tales
Displaying 7 books

I Would Die For You

2025

by Sandie Jones

From the New York Times bestselling author of the Reese's Book Club Pick The Other Woman and The Guilt Trip comes an electrifying new novel.

California, 2011: Nicole Forbes lives a quiet life in the small seaside town of Coronado with her husband and daughter. She is not expecting a writer to knock on her door asking for her personal insight into the downfall of the biggest British band of the 1980s—unveiling the threads of a life she left behind years ago. The same day, her daughter goes missing and the school claims her aunt picked her up . . . but she doesn’t have an aunt. Convinced of a link between the two, Nicole is forced to revisit long-abandoned memories from her past to protect everything she now holds dear.

London, 1986: Sixteen-year-old Cassie is obsessed with Secret Oktober, the hottest band of the moment. Harboring an intense crush on the leading man, Ben Edwards, she will do anything she can to capture his attention among the throngs of groupies at the band’s scandalous backstage parties. But when Ben discovers her older sister Nicole singing at a local bar one night, he can’t help but feel drawn to her, setting in motion a collision course that could tear their family apart.

Infused with the sounds of the 80s, this thrilling novel from the inimitable Sandie Jones explores the chaos that the frenzy of fandom can provoke.

The JFK Conspiracy

From the New York Times bestselling authors of The Nazi Conspiracy and The Lincoln Conspiracy comes a true, little-known story about the first assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy, right before his inauguration.

Kennedy, the thirty-fifth president of the United States, is often ranked among Americans’ most well-liked presidents. Yet what most Americans don’t know is that JFK’s historic presidency almost ended before it began—at the hands of a disgruntled sociopathic loner armed with dynamite.

On December 11, 1960, shortly after Kennedy’s election and before his inauguration, a retired postal worker named Richard Pavlick waited in his car—a parked Buick—on a quiet street in Palm Beach, Florida. Pavlick knew the president-elect’s schedule. He knew when Kennedy would leave his house. He knew where Kennedy was going. From there, Pavlick had a simple plan—one that could’ve changed the course of history.

Written in the gripping, page-turning style that is the hallmark of Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch’s bestselling series, this is a slice of history vividly brought to life. Meltzer and Mensch are at the top of their game with this brilliant exploration of what could’ve been for one of the most compelling leaders of the 20th century.

The Baby Killers

2010

by Jay Lake

Within our tale, gentle reader, you will see writ before you a palimpsest of low living and high misdemeanor, and the curious redresses that are visited as a result thereof...


The Baby Killers by Jay Lake restages mankind's Fall from Grace as an alternate-history steampunk fable. Written in a style of rambunctious Victoriana-that-never-was, this novella is set in Philadelphia in 1907, when that city serves as the seat of the British Dominion of the Americas, and as a Pandora's Box of sin and vice.


The Governor-General has a taste for violating innocents, while the good Dr. Scholes uses them to fashion his mechanized agents of Justice. The Gollinoster, a feminine incarnation of angry retribution, wanders beneath the city streets - and an undying creature of ancient destruction is rushing to meet her.


Villains and heroes (categories that overlap significantly) battle in a story of debauchery, degradation, radical experimentation, mad metaphysics... and a farting Frenchman.


Both popular culture and actual history are mined here to create a tale in which the use of idealized technology meets our darkest desires... and the result is positively electric.

Gentlemen and Players

2006

by Joanne Harris

Audere, agere, auferre. To dare, to strive, to conquer. For generations, privileged young men have attended St. Oswald's Grammar School for Boys, groomed for success by the likes of Roy Straitley, the eccentric Classics teacher who has been a fixture there for more than thirty years.

But this year, the wind of unwelcome change is blowing. Suits, paperwork, and information technology are beginning to overshadow St. Oswald's tradition, and Straitley is finally, and reluctantly, contemplating retirement. He is joined this term by five new faculty members, including one who — unbeknownst to Straitley and everyone else — holds intimate and dangerous knowledge of St. Oswald's ways and secrets.

Harboring dark ties to the school's past, this young teacher has arrived with one terrible goal: to destroy St. Oswald's.

As the new term gets underway, a number of incidents befall students and faculty alike. Beginning as small annoyances — a lost pen, a misplaced coffee mug — they are initially overlooked. But as the incidents escalate in both number and consequence, it soon becomes apparent that a darker undercurrent is stirring within the school. With St. Oswald's unraveling, only Straitley stands in the way of its ruin.

The veteran teacher faces a formidable opponent, however — a master player with a bitter grudge and a strategy that has been meticulously planned to the final move, a secret game with very real, very deadly consequences.

A harrowing tale of cat and mouse, this riveting, hypnotically atmospheric novel showcases New York Times bestselling author Joanne Harris's astonishing storytelling talent as never before.

Mr. Nice

2003

by Howard Marks

During the mid 1980s, Howard Marks had 43 aliases, 89 phone lines, and owned 25 companies throughout the world. Whether bars, recording studios, or offshore banks, all were money laundering vehicles serving the core activity: dope dealing.

Marks began to deal small amounts of hashish while doing a postgraduate philosophy course at Oxford, but soon he was moving much larger quantities. At the height of his career, he was smuggling consignments of up to 50 tons from Pakistan and Thailand to America and Canada and had contact with organizations as diverse as MI6, the CIA, the IRA, and the Mafia. This is his extraordinary story.

Sleepers

Sleepers (colloq.):

1. Out-of-town hit man who spends the night after a local contract is completed.
2. A juvenile sentenced to serve any period longer than nine months in a state-managed facility.

This is the story of four young boys. Four lifelong friends. Intelligent, fun-loving, wise beyond their years, they are inseparable. Their potential is unlimited, but they are content to live within the closed world of New York City's Hell's Kitchen. And to play as many pranks as they can on the denizens of the street.

They never get caught. And they know they never will. Until one disastrous summer afternoon.

On that day, what begins as a harmless scheme goes horribly wrong. And the four find themselves facing a year's imprisonment in the Wilkinson Home for Boys. The oldest of them is fifteen, the youngest twelve. What happens to them over the course of that year—brutal beatings, unimaginable humiliation—will change their lives forever.

Years later, one becomes a lawyer. One a reporter. And two have grown up to be murderers, professional hit men. For all of them, the pain and fear of Wilkinson still rages within. Only one thing can erase it. Revenge.

To exact it, they will twist the legal system. Commandeer the courtroom for their agenda. Use the wiles they observed on the streets, the violence they learned at Wilkinson. If they get caught this time, they only have one thing left to lose: their lives.

Sleepers is the extraordinary true story of four men who take the law into their own hands. It is a searing portrait of a system gone awry and of the people—some innocent, some not so innocent—who must suffer the consequences. At the heart of Sleepers is a sensational murder trial that ultimately gives devastating, yet exhilarating, proof of street justice and truly defines the meaning of loyalty and love between friends.

Told with great humor and compassion, even at its most harrowing, Sleepers is an unforgettable reading experience.

Mara, Daughter of the Nile

Mara is a proud and beautiful slave girl who yearns for freedom. In order to gain it, she finds herself playing the dangerous role of double spy for two arch enemies—each of whom supports a contender for the throne of Egypt.

Against her will, Mara finds herself falling in love with one of her masters, the noble Sheftu, and she starts to believe in his plans of restoring Thutmose III to the throne. But just when Mara is ready to offer Sheftu her help and her heart, her duplicity is discovered, and a battle ensues in which both Mara's life and the fate of Egypt are at stake.

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