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Thirteen bibliomysteries by best-selling and award-winning authors are contained in this first of volume of a must-listen collection.

In Red Leaves, Edgar Award-winning author Thomas H. Cook pens a compelling tale of suspicion and its corrosive effects on a family. When a little girl is missing on the morning after his teenaged son baby-sits for her, Eric Moore watches his world crumble as suspicion falls on his son. Although Eric hires a lawyer to prepare his son’s defense, a haunting thought slithers into his mind. What if he has been nurturing a monstrous fiend?

As lawyer Henry Griswald draws up an aging client’s will, he reflects on a series of events in 1926-1927 that shattered the peace of his boyhood community. Griswald, then a student at the school where his father was headmaster, witnessed a passion that would change him forever. At the heart of Griswald’s reverie lies a mystery only he can solve. What really happened at Black Pond—a tragedy that eventually destroyed five lives?

It was not a clever killing. On May 5, 1973, three men escaped from a Maryland prison and disappeared. Joined by a 15-year-old brother, they surfaced in Georgia, where they were spotted joyriding in a stolen car. Within a week, the four young men were arrested on suspicion of committing one of the most horrific murders in American history. Jerry Alday and his family were eating Sunday dinner when death burst through the door of their cozy little trailer. Their six bodies are only the beginning of Thomas H. Cook's retelling of this gruesome story.

Delve into the mystical worlds of Celtic enchantment, the heroic sagas of Bulfinch's lore, the enigmatic tales of Slavic spirits, the celestial dances of Japanese deities, the profound fables of Turkish origins, the creation epics of Sumerian and Mesopotamian civilizations, the rich tapestry of Native American heritage, and the captivating chronicles from the Filipino archipelago.

When a lovely high-school girl is destroyed by a blow to her head, the savage act sends the people of a small southern town reeling. For 30 years, the mystery behind the attack has festered, damaging countless lives. Now the town physician, who once loved the girl, must tell the dark story of what really happened that day.

Samuel Madison always wondered what Sandrine saw in him, he a meek, stuffy doctorate student and she a brilliant, beautiful bohemian with limitless talent and imagination. Yet on the surface their marriage seemed perfectly tranquil: jobs at a small liberal arts college, a precocious young daughter, a home filled with art and literature, and trips to some of the world’s most beautiful places. Then one night Sandrine is found dead in their bed from a deadly overdose of pain medication and alcohol, and Samuel is accused of poisoning her.

Evil has a way of finding itself. How else could you explain the bond between Alvin and Judith Ann Neelley, who consecrated their marriage in blood? Before the killings started, they restricted themselves to simple mischief: prank calls, vandalism, firing guns at strangers' houses. Gradually their ambition grew, until one day at the Riverbend Mall in Rome, Georgia, they spotted Lisa Ann Millican.

This quartet of crime stories about deadly books, penned by award-winning contemporary mystery writers, includes The Little Men, What's in a Name?, The Book of the Lion, and From the Queen.

In 1937, a slender young woman arrived in a small Maine town. Dora March was lovely, quiet, and mysterious. Soon the tragedies began: a house fire, a murder, a suicide. Within a year, Dora vanished, leaving behind dark, unanswered questions. But before she disappeared, the town's newspaperman was stabbed to death. Now Cal, the slain man's brother, must tear off the emotional veil clouding his judgement and find Dora March.

On a rainy night in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen, a woman throws a doll from the fifth-floor window of a gutted tenement, then leaps herself. From his own apartment a few blocks away, freelance photographer David Corman listens to the radio reports as they come over his headset. Corman is a man at the edge, threatened with eviction, besieged by his wife’s attempt to regain custody of their daughter, yet reluctant to give up the life that permits him to roam the night. In the woman’s dying fall, he sees the chance to sell a story....

The young girl lies in a ditch without a scratch on her - a white high school student stretched out dead in the black part of Atlanta. She was a rich girl from a cold family, too genteel for the neighborhood where she died, and only the baby in her belly suggests how she might have gotten there. For Detective Frank Clemons, the scene is far too familiar. Too close to how it was when he found his own daughter, dead in the woods by her own hand, her youthful beauty cruelly ravaged by depression. To hang on to sanity, he must do everything he can to find justice for the dead.

One day in 1952, the strangled body of 10-year-old Cathy Lake is discovered in a public park. A homeless suspect, Albert Jay Smalls, is arrested and held for interrogation. Now, Officers Norman Cohen and Jack Pierce have only 24 hours to make the sullen young man talk before he's released. How far are they willing to push him to get a confession?

Multiple Edgar Award nominee Thomas H. Cook is the author of dark, terrifying thrillers like Places in the Darkand Red Leaves. In Master of the Delta, it's 1954 down in Mississippi and Jack Branch has finally come home, taking a job as a high school teacher. He soon learns that one of his students is the son of a notorious local murderer, the Coed Killer. And as they say, like father, like son.

David Sears grew up in the shadow of his brilliant younger sister, Diana, convinced by their father that she would accomplish great things. Instead, she married and had a son, Jason, who, like David and Diana's father, is schizophrenic. Her husband, Mark, a geneticist, never made peace with Jason's condition.

Lucas Paige, a floundering middle-aged historian, reluctantly sits down with the woman he suspects was responsible for his father’s murder decades before. As they drink, they open up about this seminal event and he discovers much of what he thought to be true is anything but.

The first case is simple. A wealthy man’s wife has grown distant, and he asks Frank Clemons, a private eye hardened by his past work on Atlanta’s homicide beat, to find out why. There are a number of simple reasons why a young woman might withdraw from her older husband, but the spurned spouse rejects them all. Her jewelry is disappearing, but he insists that she doesn’t have trouble with blackmail, drugs, or gambling. The answer must be more complex, and he begs Frank to find out what it is.

The sleek high-rises of Park Avenue make Frank Clemons uneasy. The former Atlanta homicide detective came to New York after a sickening murder case soured him on the South, but despite the glitz and excitement of his new surroundings and the beauty of the woman he shares them with, the city makes his skin crawl. Now a private eye, he is only at ease in the city's darker corners, among the whores, gamblers, and pimps who call Eighth Avenue home. That affinity for the socially isolated is what draws him to the case of Hannah Karlsberg, an elderly seamstress who deserved a better death than she got.

Thomas Danforth has lived a fortunate life. The son of a wealthy importer, he traveled the world in his youth, and now, in his twenties, he lives in New York City and runs the family business. It is 1939, and the world is on the brink of war, but Danforth's life is untroubled, his future assured. Then, on a snowy evening walk along Gramercy Park, a friend poses a fateful question. As it turns out, this friend has a dangerous idea that can change the world.

Thomas H. Cook’s mesmerizing novels have attracted many Edgar Award nominations, and his "Chatham School Affair" won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Filled with the haunting characters that have become Cook’s trademark, Instruments of Night creates a fusion between past and present that is unique and chilling.