Author Miles Van Meter is on a book tour to promote his sensational bestseller Sleeping Beauty, a true-crime account of a deeply personal subject: the attack by a serial killer that left his twin sister, Casey, in a coma. Tonight the audience waits to hear Miles discuss recent developments in his sister's case — unaware that pieces of this complex puzzle of violence, unknown even to the author, are about to be revealed.

Six years earlier,

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After working with bestselling crime writer Alan Conway for years, editor Susan Ryeland is intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries in sleepy English villages. His traditional formula has proved hugely successful, so successful that Susan must continue to put up with his troubling behavior if she wants to keep her job. Conway's latest tale involves a murder at Pye Hall, with dead bodies and a host of intriguing suspects....

When two of Peyton Cross' bridesmaids die in freak accidents, the third turns for help to Bailey Weggins, true crime writer, sometime-sleuth, and Peyton's former college roommate. A dangerous trail of clues leads Bailey from the elegant suburbs of Connecticut to New York's Lower East Side and finally to a fabulous oceanfront hotel room in Miami.

"Madeleine d'Leon doesn't know where Edward, her novel's main character, came from. But as she writes, he becomes all she can think about. Edward McGinnity can't get Madeleine out of his mind. She will be the perfect heroine for his next book. But who is the author and who is the creation? And as the lines start to blur, who is affected when a killer finally takes flesh? CROSSING THE LINES is a wildly inventive twist on the murder mystery filled with...

"The murder of her mother when Lydia Strong was a teenager made her into a woman obsessed with bringing brutal killers to justice. Now thirty years old, she is a reclusive bestselling true-crime writer and investigative consultant whose intuitions never fail her. The latest case to capture her attention is the disappearance of three adults, each the kind of loner whose sudden absence isn't missed they have no family, few friends."--Jacket.