The best books about guilt

A woman is strangled and her son, Eddy, is arrested. When his alibi falls apart, the police are satisfied he is guilty. Only Detective Inspector Geraldine Steel doubts whether Eddy is cunning enough to kill his mother and cover his tracks so successfully. The situation becomes more complicated when the girl Eddy identified as his girlfriend denies having met him. Shortly after she suspects she is being stalked, her dead body is discovered outside Eddy's house.

As the body count grows, Geraldine finds herself under almost unbearable pressure. She needs to track down the killer before he strikes again.

On the forbidding fringes of the tundra, where years are marked by seasons of snow, humans war with immortals in the name of their shared gods. Irjan, a ruthless human warrior, is a legend among the Brethren of Hunters. But even legends grow tired and disillusioned. Scarred and weary of bloodshed, Irjan turns his back on his oath and his calling to seek a peaceful life as a farmer, husband, and father. When his bloody past is revealed, Irjan’s present unravels as he faces an ultimatum: return to hunt the immortals or lose his child.

With his son’s life hanging in the balance, Irjan enters the world of the immortals, seeking not death, but the magic of life.

My first novel follows a Scottish father and son, Paul and Fenno, and a young American artist, Fern, who meets the two men on opposite ends of a decade. It begins in Greece, where Paul has fled after his wife's death—and ends on Long Island, where Fern, also widowed, ponders what to do about a surprise pregnancy. At the center stands Fenno, a bookseller in Greenwich Village, who receives a strange gift that forces him to confront the fear and heartbreak of living as a gay man at the height of the AIDS epidemic. 

I wrote this book after enduring, in one year, divorce, the loss of my only sibling to suicide, and cancer treatment. I realized that all the most powerful fiction is about how we survive devastating grief and rediscover hope.

In a small Pennsylvania town, a woman is found brutally murdered one winter night. Next to the body is Danny Bedford, a misunderstood man who suffered a tragic brain injury that left him with limited mental capabilities. Despite his simple life, his intimidating size has caused the community to ostracize him. After Danny is discovered with the body, it appears that his physical strength has finally become deadly. But in the long, freezing night that follows, the murder is only the first in a series of crimes that viciously upset the town order. With the threat of an approaching blizzard, the local sheriff and a state trooper work through the predawn hours to restore some semblance of order to Wyalusing. 

Picture in the Sand is unlike anything I've written before. Most of my other books are crime novels. But this is a historical suspense novel that takes place in Egypt in 1954, when the most extravagant Bible epic in Hollywood history showed up in the aftermath of a revolution. A young local movie fan named Ali Hassan gets his dream job working with the legendary Cecil B. DeMille, on his most famous film The Ten Commandments. Instead, Ali winds up on a journey of love and loss that takes him from the movie set with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, to an assassination plot based on real-life events, to prison, a daring escape attempt, and finally to a chance for redemption. It’s a story that Ali has kept secret but now he’s forced to share it because his Americanized, college-bound grandson has decided to become a Holy Warrior instead.

Insecure, shy, and way overweight, Colby hates the limelight as much as her pageant-pretty mom and sisters love it. Dad's a superstar, running for office on a family values platform. Then suddenly, he ditches his marriage for a younger woman and gets caught stealing money from the campaign. Everyone hates Colby for finding out and blowing the whistle on him. From a mansion, they end up in a poor relative's trailer, where her mom's contempt swells. A cruel video of Colby half-dressed finds its way onto the internet. Colby plans her own death. A tragic family accident intervenes, and Colby's role in it seems to paint her as a hero, but she's only a fraud. Finally, threatened with exposure, Colby must face facts about her selfish mother and her own shame.

“Big-box” retailers like Target, Walmart, Costco, and Amazon thrive because so many people want one-stop shopping. The New Retirement: The Ultimate Guide to the Rest of Your Life, 3rd edition, provides the same type of service to you, the reader. This book is for those who want to create more than just a financial plan – it’s for those looking to create a life plan.

The chapter titles give a good indication of the content: "What Makes Retirement Successful?"; "168 Hours a Week"; "Working in Retirement: It’s not an Oxymoron"; "What and Where is Home?"; "Locations, Locations, Locations"; "Forever Young"; "Dollars and Sense"; "The Taxman Cometh"; "Money Saving Tricks and Tips"; "The Final Chapter". 

"Not much daylight left now," begins the field diary of Alix Verhoeven, whose acceptance of an offer to spend Easter on a remote island has turned into a terrifying ordeal. Hiding in a tiny cave, she carefully rations her diminishing supplies, while desperately trying to escape the men hunting her. By day disciplined and living by the strict rules necessary for survival, at night she finds herself haunted by questions about her life that she has never wanted to face. And time is running out.

Writing this book was very much influenced by the adventure books I have been reading since I was eight years old. It was equally as much based on the reading and research I've done about the ways humans manage to survive against the odds.

Four months of torture in an undisclosed location. Four months of silence. Four months of praying she won’t lose her mind and give away secrets she’s fought so hard to keep.

Avery Kent escapes with her life, but she is pursued deep into the heart of the British Columbia wilderness by the men who almost took her life—and shattered her mind. After wandering for two days in the mountains, she stumbles upon a cabin—but little does she know that the man inside is not the sheltering protector he claims to be.