Crime Book Club – New Vote

Welcome back to the crime book club. After a short break over the festive period we start afresh in 2025 and I look forward to the coming books.

To start off the year we are reading a book that has been previously nominated, but not chosen. Read the blurbs and leave your vote in the comments below by the end of Saturday 18th January.

If you have not yet joined the book club but are looking to join a reading group this year, you will find all details HERE and the sign-up link, which you’ll need to access the zoom meetings.

Now onto the books.

The Girl Beneath the Sea by Andrew Mayne

The Girl Beneath the Sea by Andrew Mayne

For a Florida police diver, danger rises to the surface…

Coming from scandalous Florida treasure hunters and drug smugglers, Sloan McPherson is forging her own path, for herself and for her daughter, out from under her family’s shadow. An auxiliary officer for Lauderdale Shores PD, she’s the go-to diver for evidence recovery. Then Sloan finds a fresh kill floating in a canal—a woman whose murky history collides with Sloan’s. Their troubling ties are making Sloan less a potential witness than a suspect. And her colleagues aren’t the only ones following every move she makes. So is the killer.

Stalked by an assassin, pitted against a ruthless cartel searching for a lost fortune, and under watch within her ranks, Sloan has only one ally: the legendary DEA agent who put Sloan’s uncle behind bars. He knows just how deep corruption runs—and the kind of danger Sloan is in. To stay alive, Sloan must stay one step ahead of her enemies—both known and unknown—and a growing conspiracy designed to pull her under.

Snow Creek by Gregg Olson

Footprints were scattered about like fallen leaves. She looked down into the ravine, and once more her lungs filled with fear. A body lay silent and unmoving in the bushes.

When Ruth Turner walks into the Sheriff’s office in Jefferson County’s Port Townsend claiming her sister Ida Wheaton has been missing for over a month, Detective Megan Carpenter’s instincts tell her that she needs to do more than just file a report.

Racing over to Ida’s secluded farmhouse in the hills above Snow Creek, Megan finds Ida’s teenage children alone and frightened. She can’t help but notice there’s no TV. No video games. Nothing of the outside world. Something about the Wheaton family doesn’t add up and triggers a painful childhood memory for Megan – when one day, in a flash, both her parents were gone.

Then the body of a woman is discovered in an abandoned pickup truck close to the Wheatons’ home and Megan’s convinced the cases are connected.

If she has any chance of catching the killer, Megan must first unravel the secrets of the isolated Snow Creek community. But Megan has dark secrets of her own…

Hidden in the back of her closet is a box of tapes containing every single recording of her therapy sessions over thirteen years ago. Can she finally confront the past she’s spent years trying to block out? And will reliving her own painful story help her solve the complex case unravelling in the hills above Snow Creek before another innocent life is lost?

The Frozen Dead by Bernard Minier

The first victim is a horse: its headless body hangs suspended from the edge of a frozen cliff.

On the same day as the gruesome discovery, a young psychiatrist starts her first job at a secure asylum for the criminally insane, just a few miles away.

Commandant Servaz, a Toulouse city cop, can’t believe he has been called out over the death of an animal. But there is something disturbing about this crime that he cannot ignore.

Then DNA from one of the most notorious inmates of the asylum is found on the corpse… and a few days later the first murder takes place. 

In this snowbound valley, deep in the Pyrenees, a dark story of madness and revenge is unfolding. It will take all of Servaz’s skill to solve it.

A Deadly Influence by Mike Omer

Lieutenant Abby Mullen is no stranger to crisis. As the hostage negotiation instructor for the NYPD, she deals with worst-case scenarios every day. Nothing fazes her anymore.

That all changes when she gets a call from Eden Fletcher, a fellow survivor of the infamous Wilcox cult. The two haven’t spoken since the night of a tragic, fiery massacre, when their paths diverged. But now Eden needs Abby’s help: someone has kidnapped her son and is demanding a $5 million ransom. As Abby throws herself into the case, she can’t help but wonder why the kidnapper has targeted Eden. But Eden refuses to talk. She’s silent about the relics of their shared past hanging on her walls. About the kidnapper’s possible motives. About what’s happened in the years since she and Abby parted ways.

As the truth closes in, Abby realizes that her past may not be as far behind as she thought…and it’s come home to collect.

The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill

In every person’s story, there is something to hide…

The ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library is quiet, until the tranquility is shattered by a woman’s terrified scream. Security guards take charge immediately, instructing everyone inside to stay put until the threat is identified and contained. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers, who’d happened to sit at the same table, pass the time in conversation and friendships are struck. Each has his or her own reasons for being in the reading room that morning—it just happens that one is a murderer.

Award-winning author Sulari Gentill delivers a sharply thrilling read with The Woman in the Library, an unexpectedly twisty literary adventure that examines the complicated nature of friendship and shows us that words can be the most treacherous weapons of all.