Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for April 2022
Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.
So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of crime fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some March books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.
Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, hardboiled mysteries, humorous mysteries, historical mysteries, Jazz Age mysteries, Regency mysteries, paranormal mysteries, crime thrillers, psychological thrillers, action thrillers, adventure thrillers, pulp thrillers, spy thrillers, police procedurals, police officers, private investigators, amateur sleuths, FBI agents, spies, assassins, terrorists, missing families, missing jade masks, organised crime, crime-busting witches, crime-busting socialites, crime-busting realtors, death by wind turbine, murder and mayhem in London, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, Colorado, Upstate New York, the Cayman Islands, Rome, Saudi Arabia, Tadjikistan and much more.
As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.
And now on to the books without further ado:
When Lillian Crawford is persuaded to investigate a mysterious death for a family friend, she thinks the case will be solved quickly. But as one surprise after another is unraveled, Lillian finds herself without the help of Felix just when she needs her brother most.
Can Lillian discover the victim’s secrets before it’s too late...and can she do it alone?
Despite all the dark happenings she has experienced at Pemberton Heights, Jane cannot refuse a summons to rush back to the bedside of her dying uncle. As it becomes clear there is a shadow hovering over the manor, Jane is drawn one final time into a web of lies and danger...
Smith has been asked to help with a case that no one wants to work. A girl’s gone missing and the most likely suspect is one of the Scotland Yard men.
He’s not a man to give a pass to police officers, but this will open himself, his wife, and his friends up to potential danger depending on who’s involved. Now the question is, what will it take for him to find the girl. How far will he go to catch the killer before Scotland Yard finds proof of the many, many laws he has broken? Or maybe Scotland Yard will turn on Smith and the tenuous peace between them will be broken. It’s a race of skill and trust as Smith tries to keep his family safe and Beatrice tries to keep Smith alive.
A roller coaster ride of action and adventure in the grand pulp tradition
Kidnapped friends. A raging revolution. Dangerous mountains. And, at the end of the trail, a lost city that holds a secret worth killing for.
Ace Barrett is a daredevil pilot with iron fists and a wooden head. There’s no danger he won’t face for his friends.
Verity Hester is a research assistant with unusual skills and a secret past. She can pick locks and pockets with equal dexterity. Just don’t ask her where she picked those skills up.
Explorers have called the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan “the roof of the world” for centuries. Snow-capped peaks tower over deep, dark valleys. Visitors to the Pamirs face extreme weather, dangerous slopes, and deadly creatures.
The year is 1922. When two members of a mapping expedition are kidnapped by raiders, the members of the Cartographers Guild will stop at nothing to get them back. The explorers follow the trail into the uncharted mountains and face doom at every turn, while their missing companions are forced to brave ancient dangers to locate a legendary treasure. If bandits or traps don’t kill them, the mountains will. Their crusade leads to an impossible lost city—one no archaeologist would believe—and the home of the fabled jade mask.
Will the explorers save their friends, or will they die while searching for the jade mask?
No smoke without a fire.
It’s New Year’s in Sinful, and the competition for the New Year’s Queen is heating up as the warring churches go head-to-head. Fortune Redding is not the sequined dress kind of woman, but reluctantly agrees to partake in the debacle so that Ida Belle and Gertie can best their nemesis, Celia, who’s put up former Sinful mean girl RJ Rogers.
RJ and her friend Brock Benoit left plenty of devastation in their wake when they fled Sinful after high school. So when they return and Brock is found dead, there’s no shortage of suspects. Fortune, Ida Belle, and Gertie know all too well what it’s like to live under suspicion of a crime with no resolution. When good people become the targets of gossip, they know they have to rush to unravel the tangled lives of RJ and Brock and expose a killer before the wrong person’s reputation is ruined. Or worse—they’re arrested for a crime they didn’t commit.
Surprise, Surprise!
Private Investigator Dev Haskell watches a gorgeous woman strut across the street and head into his building. A moment later she knocks on his office door. Beautiful, sexy, Phoenix Starr hires Dev to investigate her husband, Sterling Kozlow. She thinks he might be having an affair. After following Kozlow for days Dev waits for him to meet a woman in a bar. Unfortunately, he never shows, at least until Dev finds him… Meanwhile Crime Lord Tubby Gustafson has an unwanted visitor…his sister. Tubby makes it clear Dev Haskell will be dealing with this problem. Dev deals with the problem, just not the way Tubby may have considered. Another delightfully entertaining Dev Haskell tale.
I’m a magic-wielding Freak. My partner Flinty Jack is a sentient skeleton. But for all that, we’re not fireproof.
When a vengeful serial killer nearly roasts us in our beds, the FBI whisks me, my fiancée, and my partner into protective custody in a remote safehouse on a quiet Maine island.
But we’re about to find that we stepped out of the frying pan into the fire. There’re more skeletons in the closets of this picturesque town than one of Flinty Jack’s family reunions.
Between hostile locals, mysterious visitors from the past, and something fishy happening on the coast, a serial killer is looking tame.
When a family of 4 goes missing seemingly in the dead of night, Blake Wilder and her team are called to find the young family and determine the reason for their sudden disappearance.
Change is the only constant in life. It’s a lesson FBI Agent Blake Wilder is having to learn all over again. Summoned to DC by a Bureau legend, Blake is excited, imagining big things on the horizon for her team. That excitement though, is quickly dashed as her entire world is instead, turned upside down and she’s left to pick up all the pieces.
A reorganization within the Bureau has stripped Blake of her command and the unit she’d given her blood, sweat, and tears to build, turned over to somebody else. In this new role though, she is given a case that takes her team to Colorado to investigate a missing persons case.
There she finds that nothing is as it seems. Blake is having to adjust to this new world and her new team members as she finds herself caught up in a web of international intrigue, espionage, and cold-blooded murder.
New enemies rise, and old adversaries come to the forefront as Blake and her team race to find a man and his family being hunted by a ruthless organization. The sands of the world are shifting beneath her feet. Nobody and nothing is what she believes and Blake doesn’t know who to trust.
With the lives of the young family on the line, Blake juggles the danger that surrounds her, the changes that she faces, and the perplexing mysteries regarding what happened that night at The House on the Hill.
Ofelia Archer isn’t a fan of change, even when it benefits her. That’s why moving in with her boyfriend Zach Sully – even though it’s temporary – has her constantly pacing. She’s convinced it’s because the space doesn’t feel like her own, but it turns out to be more than that.
When leaving for work one day, Ofelia stumbles across a body hanging from the church belfry across the road. When she and Sully start asking questions, they find the church used to operate under a different name … and a tragic fire sixty years before has left a tainted memory.
Ofelia is haunted – and not just by the ghostly nuns flitting through the church’s windows – but also by a mystery that should’ve been solved decades before. The harder she digs, the more horror she finds.
It seems New Orleans has a demon on the loose, and the creature could be hiding behind any face. Ofelia is determined to take out the demon and free the neighborhood from torment, but when Sully becomes the demon’s next target, her efforts are for naught.
Ofelia is loyal to a fault and willing to die for those she loves. She just might have to if she expects to keep Sully safe.
New Orleans is home to ghosts and goblins on every corner. This monster, however, might be more than the city’s favorite witch can overcome.
A new crime. An old secret. A familiar demon.
When the Cayman Islands police investigate a burglary, Constable Nora Sommer recognises the victim from a past she's desperate to forget.
As thefts continue, consuming the department's focus and resources, Nora can't shake her new found knowledge - a guilty man living a happy life… behind a lie.
A missing girl adds further strain, and with little evidence in either case, Nora develops an improbable theory she's determined to prove.
How far will Nora go to right the wrong one man will do anything to hide?
Stella O'Neil tried to get along with her rival, she really did. But when her rival is found murdered, she wasn't as shocked as she might have been. Angela had been making enemies all her life; people either loved or hated her.
Everyone knew that Angela had been trying to ruin Stella’s business ever since she helped a client, so Stella is shocked to find she’s the prime suspect.
She has motive, access to the property where Angela was killed and no alibi... if she doesn't find the murderer, she might pay for a crime she didn't commit.
How do you say goodbye?
After an agonizing, unsuccessful search for his missing family, Jack Storm finally makes a breakthrough. But how much can he trust the one offering him this supposed sliver of hope? His source has already betrayed him before; could she be doing it again?
Before getting the intel, Jack is tasked with executing the most daring extraction of his entire career, right under his agency's nose. A former Saudi spy chief is seeking political asylum in Canada, but the Saudi royal family has branded him a traitor and wants him dead.
With more questions than answers, will Jack risk it all on this daredevil operation and be able to pull off … the Perfect Extraction?
Lose yourself in Jack's most personal and brilliant mission ever with a spectacularly satisfying twist.
What if your closest friend was going to kill you?
CIS elite operative Carrie O’Connor dives headfirst into the underground to uncover Italian mafia ties to a recent Islamic terrorist bombing of a passenger airplane from Rome. But when her asset within the mob is exposed, she realizes that nothing is as it seems and things are far worse than she could have ever imagined.
As she digs deeper, Carrie discovers a potential connection between the mafia and one of the highest religious figures in Italy. Working around dangerous loyalties, she must unmask the real conspirator to avoid a devastating clash between two worldwide religions.
How will Carrie discover the most sinister conspiracy to ever threaten The Vatican?
Stormy Morgan is a witch with too much attitude, an old love fueling new fires in her soul, and a talking cat who keeps threatening to give her an ulcer. She’s got a full plate. Things get even busier in her life when a body drops outside her boyfriend Hunter Ryan’s house … and the death looks like more than a standard murder.
Even though her magic is growing at an exponential rate, Stormy is still a novice when it comes to wielding her new power. She’s determined to find answers, prove herself invaluable to Hunter in the process, but each lead brings more questions … and all of them are of the mind-blowing variety.
The victim, a man who wove a tapestry of lies across multiple towns, doesn’t stir Stormy’s sympathy. The puzzle of his life is too much for her to ignore though. On top of that, her new roommate has turned into a big problem, and she has no idea how to fix it.
Stormy moved home to make her life better, and she’s succeeding at every turn. That doesn’t mean she’s safe.
At her core, she’s a fighter … and she’s going to need all her strength for what’s to come. The victim’s vices were of the human variety, but what killed him was something so much more dangerous. It’s up to Stormy to save the day. Again.
If she can, that is.
Cutter Dunn was born a ghost. Unchipped and unregistered, he exists as a nonperson, living off-the-grid, unrecognized by the facial recognition software built into every smart glass device that provides everyone with everything they want and need. According to the official system, he doesn't even exist.
He has the skills and out-of-the-box perspective to design the nuts-and-bolts mechanism for the next generation of driverless shipping vehicles. He's also the kind of person that a massively wealthy and corrupt corporation can exploit and make disappear without a trace. For good measure, they also erased his home settlement of Amenity, bulldozing the dwellings, scattering the residents. And that was their big mistake.
Because Cutter knows they can't track what they can't trace. And they won't know what he's planning until it hits them.
If looks can kill, a smile can be deadly.
Special Agent Stella Knox became an FBI agent to find the dirty cops responsible for her father’s murder and make them pay. But fresh out of Quantico, her first case has her seeking justice for a different victim—three of them, in fact.
The bodies of three teenage boys have turned up in a sleepy town outside of Nashville, TN. There’re no fingerprints, no DNA, and very little to connect the murders, except for a smiley face drawn in blood near two of the bodies. But why only two? The case makes zero sense, and the questions outnumber the answers.
Are the crimes related? Could it be the work of one calculating serial killer, or are they looking for three separate assailants?
One thing Stella knows for sure: someone is threatening the teenagers of small-town Cherry Farms, and they aren’t finished. As she and the team race against the clock to stop the nightmare that has descended upon this rural community, Stella has one more question...who will be next?
Senior Investigator Shana Merchant must dredge up dark secrets and old grudges if she's to solve the murder of a prominent local citizen in the Thousand Islands community she now calls home.
The body is discovered on Wolfe Island, under the shadow of an enormous wind turbine. Senior Investigator Shana Merchant, arriving on the scene with fellow investigator Tim Wellington, can't shake the feeling that she knows the victim - and the subsequent identification sends shockwaves through their community in the Thousand Islands of Upstate New York.
Politics, power, passion . . . there are dark undercurrents in Shana's new home, and finding the killer means dredging up her new friends and neighbors' old grudges and long-kept secrets.
That is, if the killer is from the community at all. For Shana's keeping a terrible secret of her own: eighteen months ago she escaped from serial killer Blake Bram's clutches. But has he followed her . . . to kill again?
The Shana Merchant novels are a brilliant blend of chilling psychological thriller and gripping police procedural, set in an atmospheric island community with a small-town vibe.
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