Recommendations based on "Roadside Crosses"

A psychopathic killer targets San Francisco's most innocent and vulnerable. A young mother and her infant child are ruthlessly gunned down while returning to their car in the garage of a shopping mall. There are no witnesses, and Detective Lindsay Boxer is left with only one shred of evidence: a cryptic message scrawled across the windshield in blood-red lipstick. The same night, the wife of A-list actor Marcus Dowling walks in on a cat burglar who is about to steal millions of dollars worth of precious jewels. In just seconds there is an empty safe, a lifeless body, and another mystery that throws San Francisco into hysteria. Before Lindsay and her friends can piece together either case, one of the killers forces Lindsay to put her own life on the line - but is it enough to save the city?

Lincoln Rhyme is back, in the gripping new thriller from number one bestseller Jeffery Deaver - and this time it's close to home . . .

"Lynn gripped the sides of the armchair, trying to put aside her own inner terror. 'I can't believe I'm thinking this, Ross. I'm not a violent person, even before Caitlin's influence, I never even liked killing flies in my kitchen. Now I'm sitting here actually willing some stranger to die'. The body of a teenager dredged from the seabed off the coast of Sussex is found to be missing its vital organs. Soon two more young bodies are found. Caitlin Beckett, a fifteen-year-old in Brighton, will die if she does not receive an urgent liver transplant. When the health system threatens to let her down, Lynn, her mother, turns in panic to the internet and discovers a broker who can provide her with a black-market organ - but at a price. As Superintendent Roy Grace investigates the recovered bodies, he unearths the trail of a gang of child traffickers operating from Eastern Europe. Soon Grace and his team will find themselves in a race against time to save the life of a young street kid, while a desperate mother will stop at nothing to save her daughter's life." --Book Jacket.

A rare book. An old crime. And someone who’s willing to kill again… Fifteen years ago, Gustavo Rodriguez’s small town was rocked by a scandal involving theft and forgery. Now back with his young daughter, he discovers a rare book at his new ranch—a clue to solving the community’s strangest case. His ex, Jeanette Lawson, agrees to help…but their investigation takes them to places darker than theft. Secrets point to murder…and a killer who wants to stay hidden.

"Lean forward, grab on, and ride for adventure." So says Library Journal of J. A. Jance's last J. P. Beaumont mystery, Without Due Process. Now Jance's veteran police sleuth is back in Failure to Appear, tracking an insanely clever killer through the well-heeled world of actors, stage folk, and arts patrons. Beaumont doesn't exactly have a simple life, solving murders as one of the Rainy City's finest, staying sober one day at a time, and dealing with his frustrating new girlfriend. But when his eighteen-year-old daughter, Kelly, runs away to join a theatrical commune and announces her plans to marry a krumhorn-playing thespian, Beau hits the wall. He has no choice but to follow her south to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, thereby landing himself a part in a modern-day Greek tragedy. Murder enters stage left. One of Beau's unsavory acquaintances turns up very messily dead, and the Festival's beloved Juliet, Tanya Dunseth, is the star suspect. Trying to please a headstrong daughter, a difficult girlfriend, and an implacable exwife, Beau agrees to do what he can to clear the actress of the charge. Then a second corpse makes an appearance soon after the mysterious arrival of a kiddie porn tape featuring a very young Tanya in the leading role. Way off his beat, and faced with a territorial local cop who doesn't appreciate out-of-town help, Beau races against time to sort through the tangled plot lines before the final act of this deadly revenge play comes to life. With fascinating characters and tight plotting, Jance tells the story in the unflappable Beaumont style that her readers love and have come to expect. In Failure to Appear, she takes us to new turns in Beau's life and new heightsof storytelling magic.

Top ten New York Times bestselling author J.A. Jance returns with a powerful tale that explores the darkest corners of human nature. The heat is a killer in Cochise County, Arizona, with temperatures over 100 degrees. In the suffocating stillness of an airless trailer, a woman is lying dead, a bullet hole in her chest. Why someone would murder a harmless loner with a soft spot for strays is only one of the questions nagging at the local police; another is why the killer used an eighty-five-year-old bullet, fired from the same weapon that slaughtered two other women who were discovered bound, naked, and gruesomely posed on the remote edge of a rancher′s land. The slayings are as oppressive as the blistering heat for Sheriff Joanna Brady, who must shoulder the added double burden of a brutal re-election campaign and major developments on the home front. With more on her plate suddenly than many big city law officers have to contend with, she must put marital distractions and an opponent′s dirty tricks in the background and deal with the terrifying reality that now threatens everyone in her jurisdiction: a serial killer in their midst. Sheriff Brady must pursue this sadistic murderer into the shadows of the past to get to the roots of a monstrous obsession and expose the permanent wounds of a crime far worse than homicide.

A seemingly impossible prison escape. A powerful and corrupt company. And a little boy's life hanging in the balance. Three startling plot threads come together as deputy U.S. marshal Tim Rackley faces the most deadly adversary of his career-a man whose lethal skills, cunning, and single-minded determination make him a mirror image of Rackley himself. Walker Jameson, dishonored Recon Marine, has pulled off an impossible break from California's Terminal Island Penitentiary. After starting a riot, he literally vanishes from his cell, leaving behind only a cup of mouthwash, a strand of dental floss tied to one cell bar, and the body of a sadistic killer. Tim Rackley, elite man hunter, must solve the riddle and track Walker down. But uncertainty begins to color the mission as Rackley learns more about his quarry and the death of the escaped prisoner's sister, a suicide that looks increasingly like a murder. Walker, too, has begun a bloody investigation of his own, a mission that propels him through the dark underworld of a big pharmaceutical company and its cutting-edge therapeutic viruses. But the life of Walker's nephew, a young boy suffering from a fatal disorder, hangs in the balance, and if Rackley hopes to stop the bloodshed, he must put the pieces together, even if it means battling a lethal opponent every inch his equal.

From a beloved master of crime fiction, "A Purple Place for Dying" is one of many classic novels featuring Travis McGee, the hard-boiled detective who lives on a houseboat. Travis McGee's taking his retirement in installments while he's still young enough to enjoy it. But sooner or later, his money runs out and he has to work. This time McGee's lured out West to a strangely secretive meeting with a woman in trouble, in a place whose beauty hides some ugly, dangerous secrets. "John D. MacDonald created a staggering quantity of wonderful books, each rich with characterization, suspense, and an almost intoxicating sense of place."--Jonathan Kellerman Mona is in love with a poor, young college professor and married to a wealthy man whom she is convinced is stealing from her trust fund. So she does what any self-respecting girl would do: She hires someone to steal her money back so she can run away with the love of her life. Travis isn't sure he wants to help out until he sees Mona getting shot and killed out on the cliffs near her cabin. Now he's a lead suspect in a plot to help her escape, and to clear his name, he needs to get to the bottom of things. But the murders just keep mounting, and for Travis, even working with Mona's husband doesn't seem to help matters. Will he be able to uncover the complex plot in time to save his own skin? Features a new Introduction by Lee Child

In the latest high-intensity thriller in the New York Times bestselling sniper series, Marine Gunnery Sergeant Kyle Swanson is sent into Pakistan, where an international team of medical workers has been executed in order to cover up a deadly terrorist secret.In the aftermath of great floods, a doctor on a relief mission in northeastern Pakistan discovers the remains of a collapsed bridge that reminds him of a bridge near his childhood home in Ohio. He snaps a cellphone picture and sends it to his sister, just before his entire team is slaughtered.His sister is Beth Ledford, a Coast Guard sniper, who suspects that the answer to the mystery of her brother's death is in that cellphone picture. No one believes her until she finds Swanson and the secret special operations team known as Task Force Trident. When Kyle takes Beth into Pakistan to investigate, they find the true secret behind the mass murder--what may be the last, best hope of victory by al-Qaeda and the Taliban over allied forces.Now the two snipers have their sights set on one man, an American diplomat who has become the biggest obstacle to victory in the war on terror. The only question is: which of them gets to pull the trigger?

Fast, furious and fatal . . . a pair of killers seek brutal revenge. When a homeless veteran is found dead in a squalid Sacramento alley, FBI special agent Megan Elliott vows to find the murdered hero’s killer. Her investigation gets complicated fast, for the victim, a former Delta Force soldier, is just one link in a nationwide spree of torture and murder. Straight off a job rescuing medical missionaries, soldier-for-hire Jack Kincaid returns to his home base in the Texas border town of Hidalgo only to receive the news that one of his closest colleagues–also ex-military–has been brutally murdered. Faced with an inept local police force, Jack takes matters into his own hands. Now, as part of a national task force to stop the sadistic killings, by-the-book Megan and burn-the-book Jack form a tense alliance, sparked with conflict and temptation. But they struggle against more than passion, for a vicious pair of killers has only just begun a rampage of evil . . . and the primary target is much closer than Megan suspects.