by Ruth Rendell (2005)
As soon as Kerstin Kvist arrives at remote, ivy-covered Lydstep Old Hall in Essex, she feels like a character in a gothic novel. A young nurse fresh out of school, Kerstin has been hired for a position with the Cosway family, residents of the Hall for generations. She is soon introduced to her "charge," John Cosway, a thirty-nine-year-old man whose strange behavior is vaguely explained by his mother and sisters as part of the madness that runs in the family. Weeks go by at Lydstep with little to mark the passage of time beyond John's daily walks and the amusingly provincial happenings that engross the Cosway women, and Kerstin occupies her many free hours at the Hall reading or making entries into her diary. Meanwhile, bitter wrangling among Julia Cosway and her four grown daughters becomes increasingly evident. But this is just the most obvious of the tensions that charge the old remote estate, with its sealed rooms full of mystery. Soon Kerstin will find herself in possession of knowledge she will wish she'd never attained, secrets that will propel the occupants of Lydstep Old Hall headlong into sexual obsession, betrayal, and, finally, murder.Also available in a Random House Large Print edition and as an eBookFrom the Hardcover edition.
Helen Wells
When Cherry goes to work as the nurse at a chateau-turned-boarding school, she and one of the students discover a formula that, when constituted to its exact specifications, produces a perfume that saves the school from bankruptcy.
Alexander Soderberg
When Sophie Brinkmann meets Hector Guzman, her life is perfectly uneventful. She's a nurse and a single mother, living with her son in a sleepy Stockholm suburb. She likes Guzman's quiet charm and easy smile; she likes the way he welcomes her into his family. She quickly learns, though, that his smooth façade masks something much more sinister, he's the head of an international crime ring that is at war with a rival organization. Before she can fully grasp the extent of his dangerous world, her life starts to come undone, her family is at risk, a long-lost friend mysteriously resurfaces, and she realizes that she can trust no one.
C. J. Kyle
Christmas, Tennessee, is a town where no one locks their doors and the worst crime is a stolen bicycle. Until the night blood is found . . . but there's no body.
Richard Steinberg
The last man standing...At the height of the cold war, a few elite secret agents earned the title of "4 Phase Man." From Berlin to the Middle East, only two of them survived....The first man in...Once he was a man with a family and a home. Then Gerald Goldman rose through the ranks of the CIA with his ability to survive in any situation, and to kill. Now he is called Xenos, the outsider, the exile. But Xenos has just come in from the cold, searching for a missing young man and finding an astounding conspiracy to co-opt the United States government. Between a tough and beautiful U.S. congresswoman who is being forced to betray her country and a deep-cover spy who is aiming at the second-highest office in the land, Xenos finds himself at war. And standing against him is the one man as deadly as Xenos himself: the only other 4 Phase Man in the world....From the Paperback edition.