Frank Carlson Library

"Ellie Brown thought she'd finally escaped her stifling hometown of Broadland, Illinois; med school was supposed to be her ticket out. But when her father has a stroke, she must return home to share his care with her older sister, Amelia, who's busy with her own family. Working as a paramedic, Ellie's days are monotonous, driving an ambulance through streets she'd hoped never to see again. Until a 911 dispatch changes everything. The address:...

"Talented and idealistic young reporter Petra Kovach is on the brink of being laid off from her third failing newspaper in a row. To save her job, she pitches the launch of a true crime podcast about a sensational, unsolved murder. Years earlier, an alt-right YouTuber was killed in her Harvard dorm room, and the case went cold. Petra knew the victim--she was once her camp counselor and loved her like a little sister, despite their political differences....

New York District Attorney Butch Karp and his crime-fighting wife, Marlene, place their lives in danger to seek justice for a murdered FBI associate while exposing security-compromising corruption at the highest levels of government. When a former Army veteran suddenly murders a colonel in New York, he claims that he had to do it because he was being used in mind control experiments. Is it a case of post-traumatic stress from his tours in Afghanistan--...

"On an isolated farm in the United Kingdom, a woman is trapped by the monster who kidnapped her seven years ago. When she discovers she is pregnant, she resolves to protect her child no matter the cost, and starts to meticulously plan her escape. But when another woman is brought into the fold on the farm, her plans go awry. Can she save herself, her child, and this innocent woman at the same time? Or is she doomed to spend the remainder of her life...

Claude Dremdell, a white supremacist whose sole hope against his terminal illness is a pricy experimental Swiss treatment, ropes Burke into a plot to extort money from three wealthy men who years earlier committed a brutal murder (loosely based on the real-life Martha Moxley case), but were never suspected. Armed with only fragmentary evidence in the form of two checks, Burke turns for help to an Israeli intelligence operation working covertly in...

In these true-crime stories in which the bonds of matrimony and love can tear you apart, "Til Murder Do Us Part" features a husband too good to be true, and "Ramp Up to Murder" involves a missing teen.

January 15th 1947, local police had arrived to the nightmarish scene, hardly believing it was possible as they stared down at the porcelain lifeless body of Elizabeth Short. Her limp arms raised above her head; her torso precisely sliced through and her lower half of her body and legs erotically laid out some 30 cm away. This young woman had suffered at the hands of some evil that police and investigators had never come across; some deranged individual...

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. As the death toll climbed, the FBI took up the case. But the bureau badly bungled the investigation. In desperation, its young director, J. Edgar Hoover,...