Featuring North America's foremost thriller authors, Thriller is the first collection of pure thriller stories ever published. Offering up heart-pumping tales of suspense in all its guises are thirty-two of the most critically acclaimed and award-winning names in the business. From the signature characters that made such authors as David Morrell and John Lescroart famous to four of the hottest new voices in the genre, this blockbuster will tantalize and terrify. LOCK THE DOORS, DRAW THE SHADES, PULL UP THE COVERS AND BE PREPARED FOR THRILLER TO KEEP YOU UP ALL NIGHT.
Every day Charles Schine rides the 8:43 to do the job he has done for over a decade in a New York advertising agency. With a wife and an ill child who depend on him, Charles is not a man who likes changes or takes risks...until he is later for his regular train, and sits down across from the woman of his dreams.Her name is Lucinda. Like Charles, she is married. Like Charles, she takes the train every day to work in New York City. Her train is the 9:05, and tomorrow she will be on it again, and so will Charles. For there is something about Lucinda, the flash of thigh beneath her short skirt, the way every man on the train is eyeing her, something about this time of the morning that will make Charles take a chance he shouldn't take, break a vow he shouldn't break, and enter a room he should never enter.In a matter of days, a flirtation turns to a passion, and Charles and Lucinda are drawn into the dark side of the American Dream. In a matter of weeks, Charles's life is in shambles. A man is dead. A small fortune is stolen. Charles's home is violated and everything violently spirals out of control.But Charles is about to discover that once you leave the straight and narrow, getting back on track is the most perilous journey of all. And for Charles, that journey - of lies, terror, and deception - has just begun.
A disgraced journalist.
The scoop of a lifetime.
If it doesn’t redeem him...
It’ll kill him.
It looks like just another car crash: a head-on collision on a lonely stretch of desert highway that leaves one driver dead. But Tom Valle, the local newspaperman assigned to the story, is damned good at spotting lies. And for Valle, once a star reporter at America’s most prestigious daily, this so-called accident may be just the ticket he needs to resurrect his career and get him out of the aptly named town of Littleton, California, for good.
Yet as Valle eagerly starts investigating, he finds himself the only one who cares about getting the story right. As he starts checking facts, and unveiling lie after lie, he finds himself completely alone–and negotiating a dark trail of corruption, cover-ups, fraud, and murder that stretches back for decades.
The more he discovers, the closer he gets to the heart of a conspiracy that threatens to destroy him. From a seedy after-hours bar in L.A. to a remote cabin in the woods to the dark corridors of a psychiatric ward, Valle is desperately seeking redemption in the truth.
But, as the boy who cried wolf so many times before, will anyone believe him?
Or is that exactly the reason he was assigned this story in the first place?
When Paul and Joanna, who are desperate to have children, fail to conceive, they decide to adopt and arrange a trip to Colombia to bring back home a baby girl, Joelle. To help them into parenthood, a nanny has been sent. Yet, returning home one night, they discover that the baby waiting for them isn't Joelle. Suddenly, they are taken prisoner, and Paul is given an ultimatum to either transport millions of dollars worth of cocaine to a location in U.S. or his wife and daughter will be killed.
