Recommendations based on "Tropic of Murder A Nick Hoffman Mystery"

“[A] fantastically hopped-up thriller . . . a wrong-man plot worthy of Hitchcock.”—Entertainment Weekly (Editor’s Choice)In development as a major motion picture!It’s three thousand miles from the green fields of glory, where Henry “call me Hank” Thompson once played California baseball, to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the tenements are old, the rents are high, and the drunks are dirty. But now Hank is here, working as a bartender and taking care of a cat named Bud who is surely going to get him killed.It begins when Hank’s neighbor, Russ, has to leave town in a rush and hands over Bud in a carrier. But it isn’t until two Russians in tracksuits drag Hank over the bar at the joint where he works and beat him to a pulp that he starts to get the idea: Someone wants something from him. He just doesn’t know what it is, where it is, or how to make them understand he doesn’t have it.Within twenty-four hours Hank is running over rooftops, swinging his old aluminum bat for the sweet spot of a guy’s head, playing hide and seek with the NYPD, riding the subway with a dead man at his side, and counting a whole lot of cash on a concrete floor.All because of two cowboys, two Russian mafia men, and some of the weirdest goons ever assembled in one place. All because of Bud. All because once, in another life, in another world, the only thing Hank wanted was to take third base—without getting caught.

An Instant New York Times BestsellerNamed a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by the Washington Post, TIME Magazine, BBC, TODAY, Elle, CrimeReads, and more"Hailed as the queen of Irish crime fiction, French spins a taut tale of retribution, sacrifice, and family."—TIMEFrom the New York Times bestselling author of The Searcher and “one of the greatest crime novelists writing today” (Vox), a spellbinding new novel set in the Irish countryside.It’s a blazing summer when two men arrive in a small village in the West of Ireland. One of them is coming home. Both of them are coming to get rich. One of them is coming to die.Cal Hooper took early retirement from Chicago PD and moved to rural Ireland looking for peace. He’s found it, more or less: he’s built a relationship with a local woman, Lena, and he’s gradually turning Trey Reddy from a half-feral teenager into a good kid going good places. But then Trey’s long-absent father reappears, bringing along an English millionaire and a scheme to find gold in the townland, and suddenly everything the three of them have been building is under threat. Cal and Lena are both ready to do whatever it takes to protect Trey, but Trey doesn’t want protecting. What she wants is revenge.From the writer who is “in a class by herself,” (The New York Times), a nuanced, atmospheric tale that explores what we’ll do for our loved ones, what we’ll do for revenge, and what we sacrifice when the two collide.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The past comes back to haunt psychologist Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis when they investigate a grisly double homicide and uncover an even more unspeakable motive in this riveting thriller from the bestselling master of suspense. Los Angeles is a city of sunlight, celebrity, and possibility. The L.A. often experienced by Homicide Lt. Detective Milo Sturgis and psychologist Alex Delaware, is a city of the dead.   Early one morning, the two of them find themselves in a neighborhood of pretty houses, pretty cars, and pretty people. The scene they encounter is anything but. A naked young man lies dead in the street, the apparent victim of a collision with a moving van hurtling through suburbia in the darkness. But any thoughts of accidental death vanish when a blood trail leads to a nearby home.   Inside, a young woman lies butchered. The identity of the male victim and his role in the horror remain elusive, but that of the woman creates additional questions. And adding to the shock, Alex has met her while working a convoluted child custody case. Cordelia Gannett was a self-styled internet influencer who’d gotten into legal troubles by palming herself off as a psychologist. Even after promising to desist, she’s found a loophole and has continued her online career, aiming to amass clicks and ads by cyber-coaching and cyber-counseling people plagued with relationship issues.   But upon closer examination, Alex and Milo discover that her own relationships are troublesome, including a tortured family history and a dubious personal past. Has that come back to haunt her in the worst way? Is the mystery man out in the street collateral damage or will he turn out to be the key to solving a grisly double homicide? As the psychologist and the detective explore L.A.'s meanest streets, they peel back layer after layer of secrets and encounter a savage, psychologically twisted, almost unthinkable motive for violence and bloodshed.   This is classic Delaware: Alex, a man Milo has come to see as irreplaceable, at his most insightful and brilliant.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Psychologist Alex Delaware and detective Milo Sturgis search for answers to a brutal, decades-old crime in this electrifying psychological thriller from the master of suspense. LAPD homicide lieutenant Milo Sturgis is a master detective. He has a near-perfect solve rate and he’s written his own rule book. Some of those successes—the toughest ones—have involved his best friend, the brilliant psychologist Alex Delaware. But Milo doesn’t call Alex in unless cases are “different.” This murder warrants an immediate call. Milo’s independence has been compromised as never before, as the department pressures him to cater to the demands of a mogul: a hard-to-fathom, megarich young woman who is obsessed with reopening the coldest of cases—the decades-old death of the mother she never knew. The facts describe a likely loser: a mysterious woman found with a bullet in her head in a torched Cadillac that has overturned on infamously treacherous Mulholland Drive. No physical evidence, no witnesses, no apparent motive. And a slew of detectives have already worked the case and failed. But as Delaware and Sturgis begin digging, the mist begins to lift. Too many coincidences. Facts turn out to be anything but. And as they soon discover, very real threats lurking in the present. This is Delaware/Sturgis at their best: traversing the beautiful but forbidding place known as Los Angeles and exhuming the past in order to bring a vicious killer to justice.

The mutilated body of a young woman. The town doctor lying comatose in the road. A hundred and fifty tablets of Canadian OxyContin. This is the havoc that a merciless killer has wreaked on a sleepy Maine seaport. As detectives Maggie Savage and Michael McCabe investigate, they realize the man they are after does not exist. Nobody knows his real name. Nobody has seen his face. But everybody fears his blade. The only one who may know the murderer's true identity is an eleven-year-old girl—who has vanished into thin air. Taut, twisting, and starring two unforgettable heroes, Darkness First will thrill fans of John Sandford and C. J. Box.

Detective Lena Gamble knows how to handle the hottest cases--do it fast and keep her head down. Because if it all goes south, the department won’t hesitate to make a scapegoat out of her. So when she gets called to the scene of a double murder at Club 3 AM, the latest A-list hangout for Hollywood celebs, she knows the fun is only beginning.And she's not wrong. It's just much worse than she imagined. As expected, one of the victims is club owner Johnny Bosco, one of the most well-connected men in Hollywood politics. But the shocker comes when Lena sees the other victim: twenty-five-year-old Jacob Gant, acquitted just days ago of murdering his sixteen-year-old neighbor, after L.A.'s latest trial-of-the-century. But are these victims of a father's righteous anger or is something bigger at play?Robert Ellis delivers all the twists and turns fans have come to expect in this bestselling series with plenty to spare in Murder Season, his most outstanding white-knuckled thriller yet.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsStrictly speaking, Lew Archer is only supposed to dig up the dirt on a rich man's suspicious soon-to-be son-in-law. But in no time at all Archer is following a trail of corpses from the citrus belt to Mazatlan. And then there is the zebra-striped hearse and its crew of beautiful, sunburned surfers, whose path seems to keep crossing the son-in-law's—and Archer's—in a powerful, fast-paced novel of murder on the California coast.

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? -- Back cover.

With San Francisco under siege and every cop a suspect, the Women's Murder Club must risk their lives to save the city-and each other. With a beautiful baby daughter and a devoted husband, Detective Lindsay Boxer can safely say that her life has never been better. Things seem to be going well for a change when all the members of the Women's Murder Club gather to celebrate San Francisco Medical Examiner Claire Washburn's birthday. But the party is cut short when Lindsay is called to a gruesome crime scene, where a woman has been murdered in broad daylight. As Lindsay investigates, shocking video footage of another crime surfaces: the video is so horrific that it shakes the city to its core. Their faces obscured by masks, the cold blooded criminals on the tape could be anyone-and now all of Lindsay's co-workers are suspects. As a rash of violence sweeps through San Francisco, and public fear and anger grows, Lindsay and her friends must risk their lives in the name of justice, before it's too late. With shocking twists and riveting suspense, 14th Deadly Sin proves yet again that when it comes to suspense fiction, "nobody does it better" than James Patterson (Jeffrey Deaver).

Deputy U.S. Marshall Jack Slade's on the trail of kith and kin killers. Slade can't help but remember his own murdered twin brother, while trying to keep one outlaw from busting his equally notorious twin out of prison. But with a Colt on his hip, Slade's dead set on making this one hell of a family reunion...