Start the New Year With New Mysteries

January can be a frigidly bleak start to the new year, but it's also a great month to stay cozily indoors enjoying the year's first crop of mystery debuts. For fans of J.D. Robb's Detective Eve Dallas, and her sexy husband Roarke, January brings a 46th entry in the Robb series: Dark in Death. A young woman is murdered with an ice pick during a screening of Hitchcock’s "Psycho" (during the most appropriate scene), and Dallas soon finds a link between the murder and a recent strangulation—with both deaths echoing scenes written by an author of procedural thrillers. Every mother's nightmare propels the tense Two Girls Down by Louisa Luna: Single mother Jamie Brandt leaves her 8- and 10-year-old daughters in the car for a few minutes while she buys a birthday present, and returns to find they've vanished. Brandt's sister enlists tough-as-nails bounty hunter Alice Vega to find the girls, and, when the police resist her help, Alice teams up with a disgraced former cop named Max Caplan. If you want to tap into marital nightmares instead, January offers a twisty psychological thriller in The Wife by Alafair Burke. After a tragic past, Angela is enjoying a quiet life with her son when she meets and marries Jason. Several years later, Jason’s writing career takes off and puts the family in an uncomfortable spotlight as several women make troubling accusations against Jason, and Angela realizes she may not know her husband as well as she thinks. Finally, for a dark exploration of how family legacies can shape us (and destroy us), read A Map of the Dark by Karen Ellis. When a teenage girl named Ruby disappears under mysterious circumstances, FBI agent Elsa Myers takes the case even though she’s already struggling with a dying father and dysfunctional family. As Ruby’s case unfolds, it stirs up long-buried secrets, and Elsa’s own painful history threatens to derail her investigation and her life. For a list of more mysteries and thrillers ahead in 2018, see https://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Coming-Soon-Thriller-Suspense/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=n%3A10457%2Cp_n_publication_date%3A1250228011