Archives de catégorie : Crime & Thrillers

SEVEN ALL ALONE de Kirsty McKay

Ten years ago, seven kids were kidnapped by their bus driver…held captive until he took his own life. Now the seven are thrust back together on a trip in the mountains, cut off from civilization and hunted one by one by an unknown assailant who wants them dead. From the author of The Assassin Game and Have You Seen My Sister comes another chilling thriller.

SEVEN ALL ALONE
by Kirsty McKay
Sourcebooks, December 2025

Maggie Atkins will never forget what happened in that cave ten years ago when she and six other elementary school kids were kidnapped by their bus driver and kept captive. She will never forget that her friends left her alone to escape, or the image of her kidnapper falling to his death, but she has done her best to put the ordeal behind her and move on.

Her past catches up with her when she’s forced to go on a school trip to the mountains with the very same people who abandoned her, and only a stone’s throw away from the scene of her kidnapping. She’s determined to suck it up and get through it though since it’s only one night of her life. But then a brutal storm changes everything and separates her group from their chaperone. With no phones and a limited food supply, the group strategizes how they can survive the elements and make it back to safety.

Then they realize there is someone else on the mountain. Someone who knows what really happened all those years ago. Someone who wants them dead and is willing to take them out one by one. Maggie thought she’d already survived the worst thing she would ever go through―she was wrong.

Kirsty McKay is a former actor who was born in the U.K. but spent many wicked awesome years in Boston, MA. She now lives in the hills of Northumberland, England with her family, beloved muckhound, and a lot of bad weather. She is the author of The Assassin Game and Have You Seen My Sister? Follow @kirkybean.bsky.social

SHERLOCK & YOU d’Andrew Lane

An interactive mystery series for middle grade in the world of Sherlock Holmes, for fans of Murdle.

SHERLOCK & YOU:
The Mystery of the Missing House
by Andrew Lane
Ravensburger Germany, November 2024
(via Randle Editorial & Literary Consultancy)

London, 2024. Something strange, odd, bizarre has happened, and nobody will believe you. Who do you turn to for help? Sherlock Holmes and Verity Watson, that’s who!

Sherlock Holmes is the 12-year-old descendent of the Great Detective, for whom he is named, and has inherited his forebear’s investigative skills. Verity Watson is the 13-year-olddescendent of the Great Detective’s best friend and confidant, Dr. John H. Watson, and has inherited her forebear’s willpower, conscience and ability to put up with Sherlock’s many quirks. Together they make a formidable team, living and working out of an abandoned tube train in a dusty and long forgotten London Underground station near Baker Street. Their clients find them based on recommendations from previous clients and from rumours circulating on social media about the last resort for kids faced with impossible situations.

Sherlock and Verity are helped out by the Baker Street Irregulars – a team of local Academy pupils in blazers and smart trousers who have set up their own internet data-mining and scientific analysis company operating out of their school IT and science suites without their teachers’ knowledge.

With each chapter finished with a fiendish puzzle, the reader can solve the crime through these puzzles along with Sherlock and his friends and become a great detective just like him! This is a new way into the marvellous, mystery-solving world of Sherlock for younger readers, in the vein of Murdle for kids.

Andrew Lane is the best-selling author of over forty books, including eight in the Young Sherlock Holmes middle-grade series (Macmillan Children’s Books) and four in the Agent Without Licence middle-grade series (Piccadilly Books). He has also written and ghostwritten adult novels as well as nonfiction books and audio scripts, and has worked extensively in the expanded licenced universe of BBC TV’s wildly popular series Doctor Who.

SALT WATER BLOOD de Manuia Heinrich

Inspired by the impact of France’s nuclear tests on the people of Mā‘ohi Nui, SALT WATER BLOOD is a YA thriller set on an alternate Polynesian island for fans of Angeline Boulley’s Firekeeper’s Daughter and Disney’s Moana.

SALT WATER BLOOD
by Manuia Heinrich
Simon & Schuster, 2026
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Eighteen-year-old Moe hears the sea’s prophetic thoughts. Correction: Moe doesn’t just hear them—the sea makes Moe feel them. This is how Moe learned years ago that her father would drown and her mother would abandon her and her younger brother, Tao. So, when the sea warns that Tao will follow their father’s fate, Moe is determined to secure them a way off the island. All those plans fall a part when Tao’s girlfriend is then found dead and Tao is blamed.

As incriminating evidence piles up, Moe will do all she can to protect the only family she has left, even if it means swallowing her pride and teaming up with her archenemy Temanea. Even if it means relying on the sea and its prophecies—because her dreaded gift might be the only way to stop the killer.

Manuia Heinrich holds a PhD in Pacific Studies and is the co-founder of APIpit and Pacific Islanders in Publishing. She is a We Need Diverse Books mentee, and was selected for the Write Mentor and New Zealand Society of Authors program. She currently lives in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

SISTER, BUTCHER, SISTER de KD Aldyn

The chilling prose of Karin Slaughter meets the high-stakes plotting of The Butcher and the Wren in a dark debut following three normal sisters, their own forgotten traumas, and the serial killer that lives within one, begging the question: can you ever truly recognize the evil around you?

SISTER, BUTCHER, SISTER
by KD Aldyn
Poisoned Pen Press/Sourcebooks, June 2025

Three sisters. One killer. Which one is SHE?

The Rowling sisters have always been people you can understand – with partners and children, homes and dreams. And secrets, the sisters have those too. But when Kate, the eldest, finally returns to buy her late grandfather’s home, the dark things each sister has kept buried soon rise to the surface.

Is Kate having unexplained visions tied to a past she can hardly recall? Is Aurora, the married mother of two, finally acting out in the face of her sisters’ indiscretions? Is Peggy, the youngest and a recovering addict, able to move on from the memories that haunt her?

And then there’s SHE.

SHE is one of them, but SHE is not like them at all. SHE is defined only by the carnage she lets the world see, the murders that have swept through their coastal community. And as the police close in on their newest serial killer, scrutiny lands on the Rowlings, forcing them to face their demons and reveal all they have kept hidden.

KD Aldyn lives everywhere and nowhere (home is where the Wi-Fi is). She most often wears black (and sometimes red) and sometimes dances like Elaine from Seinfeld. SISTER, BUTCHER, SISTER is her debut.

THE GIRLS BEFORE de Kate Alice Marshall

There is a girl in a basement. The door has stopped opening. The light is gone.
The next book from this acclaimed and bestselling author.

THE GIRLS BEFORE
by Kate Alice Marshall
Flatiron Books, February 2026

Stranger is trapped in the dark, with only her imagination and the scribbles on the wall left by long-dead girls to keep her company. Nearly out of food and water, she makes one last attempt to escape. But what will happen if the door opens? Audrey is a search and rescue expert who never stopped looking for her ex-best friend, Janie, who disappeared when they were teenagers. Janie used to love the local legend of a forest witch who saves girls from bad men, but Audrey knows now that for every one saved, there’s always another one lost. When she stumbles upon evidence in the forest that a teenage runaway might have actually been kidnapped from land belonging to the town’s wealthiest family, she will have to dig through decades of secrets to reveal the biggest one of all: what happened to the girls before.

Kate Alice Marshall is the USA Today bestselling author of What Lies in the Woods, No One Can Know, A Killing Cold, and multiple novels for younger readers. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family.