Ellie Jordan is a paranormal investigator who specializes in removing unwanted ghosts—a job that is considerably more dangerous than it sounds, requiring not just the confrontation of supernatural entities but the historical detective work of understanding why spirits have failed to move on. Each case is a mystery as much as a haunting, and each one demands that Ellie face something new while protecting the living from forces the dead have no intention of relinquishing. 👻
This three-book collection opens with the first Ellie Jordan novel, in which she must unravel the secret history behind a disturbing presence in a dilapidated mansion while simultaneously training her new assistant Stacey—a recent film school graduate with a talent for capturing paranormal images on camera. Book two, Cold Shadows, sends her to investigate a destructive poltergeist whose connection to a child’s invisible friends may be considerably more literal than the parents want to believe. Book three, The Crawling Darkness, brings her back to an apartment building haunted by an entity that takes the shape of each victim’s specific nightmares—the same entity Ellie and her mentor Calvin tried and failed to capture before. 💀
JL Bryan writes urban fantasy horror with the pacing of a thriller and the emotional investment of a character series—Ellie’s developing relationship with Stacey, her complicated history with Calvin, and her own psychological response to the things she encounters give the series its texture beyond the case-by-case supernatural mechanics. The three-book collection offers readers the complete opening arc of the series at substantial value, with enough story to establish definitively whether the Ellie Jordan world is one worth inhabiting for the long run. ⚡
What makes this essential: JL Bryan collects the first three Ellie Jordan novels in one free set—a ghost trapper who solves historical mysteries as much as hauntings, a new assistant with a camera that catches what human eyes miss, and an escalating supernatural threat that previously ended in disaster. 🌟
Wyatt Blake spent his career as a district attorney, which means he knows how the prosecution builds a case and what it feels like to be confident of guilt. Now he is a defense lawyer, and his first murder trial from the other side of the courtroom is a case that tests every instinct he developed as a prosecutor. His client is Ryker Brando, a wealthy rock climber charged with murder for cutting the rope of his climbing partner—sending the man hurtling to his death. ⚖️
The motive is not in dispute. The man who fell was having an affair with Ryker’s wife. What is in dispute is whether Colorado’s “Choice of Evils” defense applies—a legal doctrine that allows a defendant to argue they committed a crime to prevent a greater harm. Wyatt has to determine whether that argument is available to a man who cut a rope in what might have been, depending on the circumstances, an act of desperate self-preservation rather than cold-blooded revenge. The legal puzzle is genuinely complex, and Morley Swingle—a former Missouri prosecutor himself—writes it with insider authority. 🏔️
Running parallel to the courtroom drama is Wyatt’s personal life: a widower raising a six-year-old daughter, battling grief and guilt over his wife’s death, navigating his own choice of evils between the professional demands of the case and the personal demands of being present for a child who needs him. The dual pressure—public and private, legal and emotional—gives the thriller its depth beyond the courtroom mechanics. 💛
What makes this gripping: Morley Swingle delivers a legal thriller with genuine courtroom authority—a former DA defending a man who cut his climbing partner’s rope, Colorado’s “Choice of Evils” doctrine as the only viable defense, and a widowed lawyer fighting his own personal battles alongside the case. 🌟
Lexi Brewer and Skye Metcalf used to walk home from school side by side, sharing secrets and dreams. That was a long time ago. The friendship has crumbled, along with whatever once connected their families. When both girls fail to return home one evening, panic grips their small Idaho town and a frantic search begins—with law enforcement’s focus shifting quickly to the parents, the people who should know these girls best and who, it rapidly becomes clear, know considerably less than they think. 🔍
What the investigation uncovers is not just the girls’ whereabouts but the sediment of old resentments, shattered trust, and a devastating secret that binds the two families together in ways they have spent years pretending they do not. As buried betrayals rise to the surface, relationships fracture under the weight of guilt, suspicion, and the specific kind of blame that accumulates when people have been lying to themselves as much as to each other. The question that the ticking clock keeps pressing—whether the sins of the past have come back to claim retribution—is one that neither family is equipped to answer. 💀
Robin Mahle writes psychological thriller with the family-secrets structure and escalating revelation pacing that the genre delivers at its most effective—a missing persons case that functions as an excavation of everything the community buried, with each new discovery recontextualizing what came before. The Idaho small-town setting reinforces the claustrophobia: there is nowhere to hide, and the people doing the searching are also the people with the most to hide. 🌑
What makes this gripping: Robin Mahle delivers a psychological thriller of sustained tension—two estranged childhood friends who vanish on the same evening, a small Idaho town in panic, and a buried secret connecting their families that the investigation is about to expose in the worst possible way. 🌟
A Risk Worth Taking
The dot-com bubble bursts and Dan Porter is laid off, which strips away the professional identity that has been organizing his sense of himself for years. What remains is a marriage of twenty years to Jackie—a beautiful and successful managing director at a clothing designer shop who has grown in a direction that no longer quite connects to him—and three teenagers who are distant and confusing in the specific way that adolescents are distant and confusing when their parents are too preoccupied with their own crises to pay full attention. 💔
The situation pressures everything. Jackie finds herself drawn to the attentions of a younger man at her office—a development she has not acted on but has not closed the door to. A magazine article plants an idea in Dan’s mind about a drastic change that might reorient his life around something that actually matters to him. The question the novel builds toward is the one that faces anyone at mid-life who has been operating on autopilot long enough to lose track of what they actually value: what is worth risking what you have? 💛
Robin Pilcher—the son of Rosamunde Pilcher, which situates him clearly within the tradition of accessible British literary fiction with emotional intelligence—writes with the fluidity and character specificity that makes this kind of mid-life crisis novel feel like observation rather than formula. Dan’s journey from laid-off husband to someone who has reckoned honestly with what he wants is rendered with the unsentimental warmth that the best fiction in this tradition delivers. The novel does not offer easy answers because the questions it is asking do not have them. 🌅
What makes this compelling: Robin Pilcher delivers a mid-life literary novel of genuine insight—a man laid off and lost, a marriage that has grown quietly disconnected, three teenagers, a wife tempted elsewhere, and the question of what a person is willing to risk when they finally take stock of what they actually value. 🌟
A small South American republic has decided to monetize its national symbol: a prized gold statue of a dancing Aztec priest. The president commissions sixteen copies for sale abroad. The sculptor, seeing an opportunity, replaces the original with one of his fakes and ships the real statue to New York for an under-the-table museum sale. The statues travel in five crates, labeled to ensure the right one goes to the right destination. The labeling system works perfectly until the moment it doesn’t. 🗿
Delivery man Jerry Manelli, asked to pick up crate “E” at the airport, mishears the instruction through a Spanish accent and takes crate “A” instead. The genuine Aztec statue disappears into New York City, and the resulting chase is as baffling for Jerry as it is potentially lethal. He does not know what is in the crate. He does not know why people keep appearing to want it back with escalating urgency. He knows only that picking up the wrong crate may cost him his life if he cannot figure out what he has and what to do with it. 😄
Donald E. Westlake—one of crime fiction’s great comic masters, the author of the Dortmunder series and winner of multiple Edgar Awards—wrote Dancing Aztecs in 1976 with the anarchic energy and plot precision that distinguishes his best work. The caper comedy operates on the principle that a sufficiently absurd initial mistake, pursued with absolute narrative logic through a recognizable New York City, will generate escalating hilarity without ever losing the thriller stakes underneath. It is a rare combination and Westlake executes it perfectly. ⚡
What makes this irresistible: Donald E. Westlake delivers a classic caper comedy—a real gold Aztec statue mistakenly delivered to the wrong New York address, a bewildered delivery man who has no idea what he picked up, and a baffling chase through the city that could cost him his life. 🌟
Jennie Whitmore already regrets attending her school reunion—White Cross Academy was not a kind place, and the people who made it unkind are not noticeably improved by adulthood. She is a police officer now, which gives her a different kind of authority in the room than she had thirty years ago, but the social dynamics of the place still operate on their old logic. The only person who was ever genuinely kind to her there was Hannah—charming, beautiful Hannah, who disappeared one day and never came back. 🔍
When the old school building is demolished the morning after the reunion, construction finds teenage remains on the grounds. The heart-shaped gold pendant around the neck—the one Hannah never took off—tells Jennie everything she does not want to know before the official identification confirms it. Hannah did not run away. She never left White Cross at all. Someone kept that secret for thirty years, and Jennie is now investigating the murder of her best friend—a case in which her own connection to the victim is the thing most likely to get her pulled from the investigation or worse. 💀
M. J. Arlidge and Steph Broadribb—both established names in British crime thriller fiction—collaborate on a novel that earns its serial killer thriller designation while delivering something more emotionally complex: a cold case murder investigation conducted by the victim’s closest friend, with a mystery stalker making clear that someone wants the case to stay cold. The school reunion setting and the thirty-year timeline give the thriller its particular claustrophobia. ⚡
What makes this gripping: M. J. Arlidge and Steph Broadribb deliver a school reunion thriller of devastating emotional power—a police officer who attends her reunion dreading the past, demolition crews who find her best friend’s remains, and a thirty-year-old murder she must solve before someone silences her for good. 🌟
… See the rest of today ‘s Book Picks here on page 3Page 3