Showers of ARCS (Thrillers Edition)

This is my second list of ARCs. In case you missed my post  yesterday, you can find a list of the historical, literary and women’s fiction ARCs that I have here. Thrillers are my favorite genre and I have a couple of ARCs in this genre which all sound quite interesting. This is what my NetGalley shelf looks like:

Last Breath by Robert Bryndza

He’s your perfect date. You’re his next victim. When the tortured body of a young woman is found in a dumpster, her eyes swollen shut and her clothes soaked with blood, Detective Erika Foster is one of the first at the crime scene. The trouble is, this time, it’s not her case. 

While she fights to secure her place on the investigation team, Erika can’t help but get involved and quickly finds a link to the unsolved murder of a woman four months earlier. Dumped in a similar location, both women have identical wounds – a fatal incision to their femoral artery. 

Stalking his victims online, the killer is preying on young pretty women using a fake identity. How will Erika catch a murderer who doesn’t seem to exist? Then another girl is abducted while waiting for a date. Erika and her team must get to her before she becomes another dead victim, and, come face to face with a terrifyingly sadistic individual.

Sleep Tight by Caroline Mitchell

Close your eyes … Just pray you don’t wake up. A killer stalks the streets of East London. All over the area, murdered young women are discovered, their bodies posed into a sickening recreation of fairytale princesses.

Detective Ruby Preston is determined to hunt down a disturbed individual who is using the women to realise his dark fantasies. But when body parts are found at the home of her lover, Nathan Crosby, Ruby is torn between her job and her heart.
 Convinced that he is being framed, Ruby must catch the killer before Nathan becomes the number one suspect. But as more victims are found, it becomes harder to prove his innocence.

As Ruby starts to close in on the twisted individual, can she stop him before he strikes again? And how well does she really know the man she loves?

Justice Delayed by Marti Green

The brutal murder of sixteen-year-old Kelly Braden sends shock waves through a community—and an intellectually disabled man to jail. The only witness to Kelly’s murder is the five-year-old cousin she was babysitting. The young girl names their neighbor, Jack Osgood, as the bat-wielding criminal. Two decades later, Osgood faces execution.

Defense Attorney Dani Trumball and her partner, investigator Tommy Noorland, are summoned to the Georgia prison where Osgood is on death row. With no friends or family of his own, there is no one left to believe Jack didn’t kill Kelly but Dani and her Help Innocent Prisoners Project. With a mentally disabled son of her own, defending Osgood could be her most heartrending case yet.

While fighting a system that blocks her attempts to overturn his conviction, Dani must race to identify the real killer before Osgood’s time runs out—and the murderer strikes again.

 

Lie to Me by Jess Ryder

Three minutes. That’s all it takes for Meredith’s entire world to fall apart when she watches the videotape of her four-year-old self with Becca, the mother she’s never known. Meredith can’t believe what her eyes have seen. Yet what if her memory has locked away the painful reality of her childhood? Can there be any truth in the strange and dangerous story her mother forced her to tell on camera? 

The search for answers leads Meredith to Darkwater Pool, the scene of the murder of a young woman, Cara, over 30 years ago. What could possibly be the link between her mother and the victim? To find the truth Meredith must search through a past that is not her own. The problem is, she’s not the only one looking…

 

Traitor in the Family by Nicholas Searle

‘While her husband prepared to murder a young man he had never met, Bridget O’Neill completed her packing for Christmas with her in-laws.’

Francis O’Neill is a terrorist, trained to kill for his cause. Bridget is his wife, expected to be loyal and stand by her husband. She has learned not to hope for much more, until the day she glimpses, for the first time, the chance of a new life. A life without violence, without secrets, and without knocks on the door in the dead of night. A life without her husband. But what if freedom for Bridget means grave danger for Francis?

 

The Killer on the Wall by Emma Kavanagh

The first body comes as a shock. The second brings horror. The third signals the beginning of a nightmare

When fifteen-year-old Isla Bell finds three bodies propped against Hadrian’s Wall, her whole world falls apart. In such a close-knit community, everyone knows the victims, and the man who did it.

Twenty years on and Isla has dedicated her life to forensic psychology; studying the brains of serial killers, and even coming face to face with the convicted murderer who turned her world upside down. She is safe after all, with him behind bars.

Then another body appears against the Wall. And another. As the nightmare returns and the body count rises, everyone in town is a suspect. Who is the Killer on the Wall?

 

Harsh Little Baby by Joana Barnard

When baby Oliver breaks his arm, no-one can (or will) say how it happened. His mother is exhausted. His father is angry. His older sister is resentful. And they all have something to hide.

 

One Perfect Lie by Lisa Scottoline

On paper, Chris Brennan looks perfect. He’s applying for a job as a high school government teacher, he’s ready to step in as an assistant baseball coach, and his references are impeccable.But everything about Chris Brennan is a lie.

 Susan Sematov is proud of her son Raz, a high school pitcher so athletically talented that he’s being recruited for a full-ride scholarship to a Division I college, with a future in major-league baseball.  But Raz’s father died only a few months ago, leaving her son in a vulnerable place where any new father figure might influence him for good, or evil. Heather Larkin is a struggling single mother who lives for her son Justin’s baseball games.  But Justin is shy, and Heather fears he is being lured down a dark path by one of his teammates, a young man from an affluent family whose fun-loving manner might possibly conceal his violent plans.

 Mindy Kostis succumbs to the pressure of being a surgeon’s wife by filling her days with social events and too many gin and tonics. But she doesn’t know that her husband and her son, Evan, are keeping secrets from her – secrets that might destroy all of them. At the center of all of them is Chris Brennan. Why is he there? What does he want? And what is he willing to do to get it?

The Darkest Lies by Copperthwaite

A mother desperate for the truth. A daughter hiding a terrible secret.

Melanie Oak appeared to have the perfect life. Married to her childhood sweetheart, Jacob, the couple live with their beautiful, loving, teenage daughter, Beth, in a pretty village.

Nothing can shake her happiness – until the day that Beth goes missing and is discovered beaten almost to the point of death, her broken body lying in a freezing creek on the marshes near their home.

Consumed with grief, Melanie is determined to find her daughter’s attacker. Someone in the village must have seen something. Why won’t they talk? 

As Melanie tries to piece together what happened to Beth, she discovers that her innocent teenager has been harbouring some dark secrets of her own. The truth may lie closer to home and put Melanie’s life in terrible danger…

A Criminal Defense by William L. Myers Jr.

Losing the trial of his life could mean losing everything.

When a young reporter is found dead and a prominent Philadelphia businessman is accused of her murder, Mick McFarland finds himself involved in the case of his life. The defendant, David Hanson, is Mick’s best friend, and the victim, a TV news reporter, had reached out to Mick for legal help only hours before her death.

Mick’s played both sides of Philadelphia’s courtrooms. As a top-shelf defense attorney and former prosecutor, he knows all the tricks of the trade. And he’ll need every one of them to win.

But as the trial progresses, he’s disturbed by developments that confirm his deepest fears. This trial, one that already hits too close to home, may jeopardize his firm, his family—everything. Now Mick’s only way out is to mastermind the most brilliant defense he’s ever spun, one that may cross every legal and moral boundary.

NetGalley Shelf

So there you have it. One evening in March, I was staying at a hotel that had free Wi-Fi  and I spent the evening browsing the NetGalley titles. 2 hours later, I had submitted almost 20 new requests. If you ask me, I think it’s the hotel room. There was a vybe to it, flickering light, comfortable bed with very white bedding… obviously it was haunted, perhaps by the ghost of ARCs? So yeah, it is not me. It’s the hotel room. So be careful when you stay at hotels.

And now… My NetGalley shelf is a bit out of control now. I have 30 ARCs and I am down to 75% feedback ratio. This means that my personal TBR is suffering so I have set a few goals for myself. I will not request anything until I get down to 19 books.  In the meantime, I hope to enjoy the books that I have. They do sound like interesting reads so will see how it goes.