"Tough-as-nails criminal defense attorney Jane Smith is hip-deep in the murder trial of the century. Actually, her charmless client might've committed several murders. She's also fallen in love with a wonderful guy. And an equally wonderful dog, a mutt. But Jane doesn't have much time. She's just received a terminal diagnosis giving her twelve months. Unless she's murdered before her expiration date" --

Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925) is nothing less than what the title holds it to be; it is the story of a weak-willed young man who is both villain and victim (the victim of a valueless, materialistic society) and someone who ultimately destroys himself. Dreiser modeled the story of Clyde Griffiths on a real-life murder that took place in 1906; a young social climber of considerable charm murdered his pregnant girlfriend to get her out...

Court-appointed lawyer Jake Brigance puts his career, his financial security, and the safety of his family on the line to defend a sixteen-year-old suspect who is accused of killing a local deputy and is facing the death penalty.

A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. In the story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched...

"What if everything you know about the worst night of your life turns out not to be true? Nine years ago, with the world's eyes on her, Charlie Colbert fled. The press and the police called Charlie a "witness" to the nightmarish events at her elite graduate school on Christmas Eve--events known to the public as "Scarlet Christmas"--though Charlie knows she was much more than that. Now, Charlie has meticulously rebuilt her life: She's the editor-in-chief...

"Gage Chandler is descended from kings. That's what his mother always told him when he was a child. Years later, he is a true crime writer, with one grisly success--and a movie adaptation--to his name, along with a series of subsequent less notable efforts. But now he is being offered the chance for the big break: to move into the house where a pair of briefly notorious murders occurred, apparently the work of disaffected teens during the Satanic...

Forty years after Emily Vaughn was murdered on her prom night, U.S. Marshal Andrea Oliver picks up the cold case to find justice. Who killed Emily Vaughn? The stunning new standalone thriller from international No. 1 bestseller Karin Slaughter. A girl with a secret ... Longbill Beach, 1982. Emily Vaughn gets ready for prom night, the highlight of any high school experience. But Emily has a secret. And by the end of the evening, she will be dead....

"Crissy Dowling has created a world that suits her perfectly. She passes her days by the pool in a private cabana, she splurges on ice cream but never gains an ounce, and each evening she transforms into a Princess, performing her musical cabaret inspired by the life of the late Diana Spencer. Some might find her strange or even delusional, an American speaking with a British accent, hair feathered into a style twenty years old, living and working...

The narrator of this story studies a murder which takes place shortly after a wedding and explores the mass community complicity that allowed it to happen.

"The Wolfs, the most powerful family in California, have a new head--thirty-six-year-old former high school teacher Jenny Wolf. That means Jenny now runs the prestigious San Francisco Tribune. She also controls the legendary pro football team, the Wolves. And she hopes to solve her father's murder."--