Fast-Paced Fiction to Talk About Over Snacks
Discover the best fast-paced fiction books perfect for lively discussions over snacks. Find thrilling, engaging reads that keep you hooked and spark great conversations.
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The Turnaround
by George P. Pelecanos
Thirty-five years after a devastating accident that irrevocably shapes the lives of six people, a pair of redemption-seeking survivors reaches out to one another in an effort that is compromised by a fellow survivor's release from prison and the changing neighborhoods of modern Washington, D.C.
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Foreign Body
by Robin Cook
A series of unexplained deaths in foreign hospitals sends Jennifer Hernandez, an idealistic UCLA medical student, on a desperate search for answers about her grandmother's sudden death. With the discovery of other unexplained deaths followed by hasty cre
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The Night Following
by Morag Joss
Subtle, intimate, and terrifying, this work is the story of a killers journey from the shadows into the light, in an unflinching examination of the shattering repercussions of deception.
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Don't Tell a Soul
by David Rosenfelt
The popular author of six Andy Carpenter mysteries, including the recent hit "Play Dead," delivers his first stand alone with this gripping suspense novel.
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The Lost Luggage Porter
by Andrew Martin
Working as an official railway detective during the winter of 1906, Jim Stringer covers York Station for the North Eastern Railway Company and encounters the Lost Luggage Porter, who tips him off about a gang of railway thieves, a group that he is asked to infiltrate in order to stop a proposed robbery and getaway across the English Channel. Original.
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An Incomplete Revenge
by Jacqueline Winspear
In this latest installment of the bestselling series, Maisie Dobbs, the extraordinary psychologist and investigator, delves into a strange series of crimes in a small rural community.
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The Closers
by Michael Connelly
In this #1 New York Times bestseller, Detective Harry Bosch joins LA's elite Open/Unsolved Unit to help piece together the mysterious death of a teenage girl. He walked away from the job three years ago. But Harry Bosch cannot resist the call to join the elite Open/Unsolved Unit. His mission: solve murders whose investigations were flawed, stalled, or abandoned to L.A.'s tides of crime. With some people openly rooting for his failure, Harry catches the case of a teenager dragged off to her death on Oat Mountain, and traces the DNA on the murder weapon to a small-time criminal. But something bigger and darker beckons, and Harry must battle to fit all the pieces together. Shaking cages and rattling ghosts, he will push the rules to the limit -- and expose the kind of truth that shatters lives, ends careers, and keeps the dead whispering in the night . . .
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Running Scared
by Ken Douglas
Joey Sapphire wakes next to a dead man, the son of the American Ambassador to Trinidad, in a boat at anchor. It quickly dawns on her that she has to get rid of the body, because it looked like she did it and they hang murderers in Trinidad. So she weighs it down and drops it overboard. But she knows she's not safe, because the killer knows about her.
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Diablerie
by Walter Mosley
Enjoying a precarious sober life balancing family duties with his relationship with a patient mistress, Ben finds his years of alcoholism catching up with him when he encounters a woman with knowledge of a significant event from his past that Ben cannot r
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Burn Zone
by James O. Born
It was supposed to be a low-level bust for ATF agent Alex Duarte, with the hope that he could work it up the ladder to someone important. In New Orleans to check out a mysterious Panamanian named Ortiz who likes to trade guns illegally and import marijuan
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Atomic Lobster
by Tim Dorsey
Batten the hatches, don the life jackets, and take cover--Serge A. Storms is setting sail on a cruise ship to hell in this latest manic adventure from the acclaimed author of "Hurricane Punch."
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A Toast to Tomorrow
by Manning Coles
Book Sense March 2008 Notable Book Pick. Joseph Goebbels is fuming. It's the mid-1930s and the Nazi Minister of Propoganda has a nice little racket going. He and his cohorts are allowing Jews to slip out of Germany in return for 80 percent of their assets. But longtime Nazi party member Klaus Lehmann, the Chief of the German Police, is too much of a prig to let him get away with it. And given that Lehman was one of Hitler's earliest supporters, he's virtually untouchable. In the meantime, British Intelligence is going around in circles. Someone in Germany is sending them messages in a code that hasn't been used since World War I. When it was first published in 1941 in the U.S., A Toast to Tomorrow, along with its predecessor, Drink to Yesterday, was heralded by famed critic Anthony Boucher as "a single long and magnificent novel of drama, intrigue and humor."
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The Chameleon's Shadow
by Minette Walters
Returning from the war in Iraq a changed man due to serious head injuries, British lieutenant Charles Acland rejects his former life and grows increasingly reclusive, suspicious, and aggressive, until he finds himself the prime suspect in a series of recent killings.
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Calumet City
by Charlie Newton
Among the most self-assured and sharply crafted debuts in recent years, "Calumet City" detonates a Molotov cocktail of character-driven suspense and ghetto-Chicago intrigue.Meet Patti Black, the most decorated cop in Chicago. On her ghetto beat, Patti Black redefines the word badass. But her steel-plated exterior -- solitary, stoic, loveless -- belies the wrenching legacy of her orphan childhood. Haunted by the horrifying abuse she suffered at the hands of her foster parents, Patti Black sublimates past torments into a meticulously maintained tough-gal persona.When a series of unrelated cases -- a drug bust gone bad, a mayoral assassination attempt, the murder of a state attorney, the exhumation of a long-concealed body from a tenement basement wall -- all point in Patti Black's direction, she finds herself facing the dark truth: You can't hide from your history, no matter how far into the fog you run. For Patti Black, that history didn't die in the tenement wall; it's alive -- and riding her down.In researching this electrifying thriller, Charlie Newton rode in the squad car with real-life street cop Patti Black. The result is a powerful fiction debut that captures the precise emotional landscape of one cop's hard-bitten life in the trenches. This first-time author joins that rare breed whose fiction is suffused with profound authenticity
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The Secret Scroll
by Ronald Cutler
Josh Cohan, a work-obsessed archaeology professor, has a recurring dream about uncovering a great secret. He follows his instincts to the Judean desert, where he makes a fantastic discovery -- an ancient scroll which seems to have been written by Jesus Christ.. The Israel Antiquities Authority has a claim on the scroll, but another, more sinister organisation wants the scroll as well. The Guardians, members of an ancient extremist religious sect, are willing to kill to get what they want. Josh joins the government-sponsored team of translators who believe the scroll might be genuine, and falls in love with Danielle, the fiery daughter of one of the translators. When a friend turns up dead and Danielle goes missing, Josh realises that the scroll might be more powerful and controversial than he had ever imagined. Will Josh be able to prevent something terrible from happening to the woman he loves without giving up the most important discovery mankind has ever made?
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Bone Rattler
by Eliot Pattison
Ordered to find another prisoner accountable for a series of suspicious deaths aboard a British convict ship, Duncan McCallum follows a series of clues that lead him into the heart of the French and Indian War and finds himself in love with the daughter of a man to whom he is indentured.
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The Venetian Betrayal
by Steve Berry
The "New York Times" bestselling author of "The Alexandria Link" offers a gripping international thriller that sends Cotton Malone on a perilous quest for the truth about the mysterious death of Alexander the Great.
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Radio Secrets
by Steve Brown
"A free man after 22 years and 22 days in prison, Raymond Lister has set out on a mission of revenge against the woman who put him behind bars."--Back cover.
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Touchstone
by Laurie R. King
Left with an extraordinary sensitivity that allows him to determine the lies and deceptions of everyday life with a mere touch after the Great War, Bennett Grey lives a reclusive life until he is called in by the British government to find a terrorist.
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The Dark Tide
by Andrew Gross
A woman whose husband was caught in a deadly explosion, teams up with a detective to uncover secrets from her husband's past.
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Betrayal
by John T. Lescroart
Taking over the casework of a recently disappeared attorney, Dismas Hardy and his friend, detective Abe Glitsky, tackle an unexpectedly challenging appeal to overturn the life sentence of a National Guard reservist who has been convicted for a complicated double murder.
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The Spies of Warsaw
by Alan Furst
In 1937 Warsaw, on the eve of World War II, intelligence operatives on both sides of the forthcoming struggle wage their own espionage battle in a world of betrayal, intrigue, and abduction, including Colonel Jean-Franois Mercier, a decorated hero drawn into a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations. 75,000 first printing.
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Three Shirt Deal
by Stephen J. Cannell
LAPD detective Shane Scully fights to save a man railroaded for murder, while he struggles to save his marriage.
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Last Call
by James Grippando
Jack Swyteck is drawn into the investigation of a mother who was murdered on a hot Miami night twenty years ago.
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A Prisoner of Birth
by Jeffrey Archer
International bestseller and master storyteller Jeffrey Archer is at the very top of his game in a story of fate and fortune, redemption and revenge. If Danny Cartwright had proposed to Beth Wilson the day before, or the day after, he would not have been arrested and charged with the murder of his best friend. But when the four prosecution witnesses are a barrister, a popular actor, an aristocrat, and the youngest partner in an established firm’s history, who is going to believe your side of the story? Danny is sentenced to twenty-two years and sent to Belmarsh prison, the highest-security jail in the land, from where no inmate has ever escaped. However, Spencer Craig, Lawrence Davenport, Gerald Payne, and Toby Mortimer all underestimate Danny’s determination to seek revenge, and Beth’s relentless quest to pursue justice, which ends up with all four fighting for their lives, Thus begins Jeffrey Archer’s most powerful novel since Kane and Abel, with a cast of characters that will remain with you long after you’ve turned the last page. And if that is not enough, prepare for an ending that will shock even the most ardent of Archer’s fans.
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City of Shadows
by Ariana Franklin
A cultured city scarred by war. . . . An eastern émigré with scars and secrets of her own. . . . A young woman claiming to be a Russian grand duchess. . . . A brazen killer, as vicious as he is clever. . . . A detective driven by decency and the desire for justice. . . . A nightmare political movement steadily gaining power. . . . This is 1922 Berlin. One of the troubled city's growing number of refugees, Esther Solomonova survives by working as secretary to the charming, unscrupulous cabaret owner "Prince" Nick, and she's being drawn against her will into his scheme to pass a young asylum patient off as Anastasia, the last surviving heir to the murdered czar of all Russia. But their found "princess," Anna Anderson, fears that she's being hunted—and this may turn out to be more than paranoia when innocent people all around her begin to die.