Award-winning author Morag Joss has penned a beautifully rendered, meticulously crafted, and terrifyingly gripping novel of suspense—ideal for the fans of Eowyn Ivey, Ruth Rendell, and Barbara Vine.One night, two strangers.A damage that cannot be undone. For thirty years, Howard and Deborah Morgan have poured all their energy and modest savings into Stoneyridge, a smallholding deep in the English moors. Howard putters with pottery, Deborah dabbles in weaving, and both struggle to tend sheep and chickens and live off the land. But what began with simple dreams of solitude and sunlit picnics in the hills has given way to a harsher reality. To help with finances, they decide to turn Stoneyridge into a bed-and-breakfast. But a sudden stroke leaves Howard incapacitated and Deborah overwhelmed. Howard’s world, once so limitless, has shrunk to the confines of their crumbling house; Deborah’s main joy now comes in the form of a brief weekly email from their successful son, who lives abroad.Then, late one evening, two men arrive needing a room for the night—and set off a chain of events that uncovers the relics of old tragedies. New wounds are cut deep, betrayals and cruelties intermix with tenderness and love. And through it all, Stoneyridge quietly hides the bitter and transformative truth.Evocative, intimately claustrophobic, and psychologically complex, Our Picnics in the Sun is a novel of stunning prose and knife-sharp insight. Morag Joss crafts a modern masterpiece of rising tension that binds and releases like a beating heart, propelling readers to a final page that resonates and haunts. Praise for *Our Picnics in the Sun   “The British writer’s latest is a psychological dazzler.”*—Entertainment WeeklyPraise for Morag Joss’s Among the Missing   “This remarkable novel has an abundance of suspense at its core, put forth in beautiful prose that all but glows on the page. . . . [Joss] keeps a jittery tension going as the novel spins toward its violent, grand-scaled finale.”—Booklist (starred review)“A haunting, harrowing punch to the heart, Among the Missing is flat-out brilliant. About the secrets we keep, the lives we are desperate to live, and the chances we miss, it’s a psychological dazzler. Truly, one of my favorite books of this year—or any year.”*—Caroline Leavitt, author of Is This Tomorrow “Morag Joss is a writer who knows the old truth that genuine suspense comes not from car chases or gunplay but from the clash of conflicting hearts. Among the Missing is evidence not of a rising talent but of one already fully formed.”—Thomas H. Cook, author of Sandrine’s Case “A spectacular psychological thriller . . . Joss’s beautiful, evocative novel is filled with tension and suspense.”*—RT Book Reviews From the Hardcover edition.

CWA Silver Dagger Award winner Morag Joss peers into the soul of a wounded family in this haunting, harrowing masterpiece of psychological suspense. With equal parts subtlety and menace, Joss takes us on a dizzying journey toward a collision between fantasy and reality—and an astounding moment of revelation that shatters illusions, hopes, and lives forever. The year is 1960. The place is a Scottish seaside town utterly devoid of culture and charm. Here, Lila lives as the third player in her parents’ dramatically embittered marriage. Until her flamboyant, irrepressible uncle George shows up from London and her family decides to squander a windfall on the most preposterous of causes: a civic production of the Puccini opera Turandot. Lila knows nothing of opera and little of her uncle or the dashing young man he hires to sing the role of Calaf. But Lila does know passion. Because it’s coursing through her veins—and rushing blindly, wildly all around her. Now a girl on the verge of womanhood is about to blunder into a grown-up world where secrets are kept and exposed, hopes soar and wither, and where crimes petty and great exact the most chilling punishments of all. Masterfully paced and spellbinding till its final, haunting scene, Puccini’s Ghosts is a piercing look into the fierce darkness that lurks behind seemingly ordinary lives. From the Hardcover edition.**

An accident can end a life. The same accident can begin one. Three lives collide in the wake of an unforeseeable tragedy. When a bridge collapses in the Highlands of Scotland, dozens of commuters vanish into the freezing river below, swept by the currents toward the sea, and only an amateur video and the bridge's security camera record their last moments. A woman tourist, whose car was filmed pulling onto the bridge seconds before it fell, is assumed to be among the missing. But in desperate need of money, she had sold the car only hours before. Now she can begin life over. Her path leads her to a spartan cabin on the bank of the river where, as Annabel, she is reborn, free from her past. Here she lives with Silva, an illegal immigrant whose predicament is compounded by the disappearance of her husband and their child. She waits for them each day, clinging to hope against overwhelming evidence. The two women are befriended by the boatman Ron, and together they create a fragile sanctuary in the shadow of the bridge that has changed their lives. They keep secrets from one another, yet also connect in ways none of them expects. Lost souls all, they struggle to survive, to trust, and to love even as the consequences of the past prove inescapable. A masterly novel about the invisible ties that bind us to our identities, to our histories, and to one another, Among the Missing soars with the peerless voice of the author described by P. D. James as an 'exciting talent.' Morag Joss, with the psychological penetration and the finely wrought prose that are her hallmarks, spins a brilliant tale of damage and reparation, suspicion and salvation.

In Bath, England, good health is an ancient tradition and a booming business. One local font of wellness is the Sulis Clinic, where the rich come for rest, repair, and repasts of strictly organic - and not terribly pleasant - cuisine. World-famous cellist Sara Selkirk has come to Sulis to admit her former music teacher. The poor dear has fallen into decrepitude, and has lately been the unlikely suspect in the shocking murder in a local pub. Distracted from her upcoming Dvorak performance in Salzburg, Sara begins to wonder if there isn't an odd link between Sulis and the murder. But another death soon rocks Sara to her core, leading her to a choice she will regret - and a killer she can no longer avoid.... From the Paperback edition.

Edgar Awards (nominee) On a blustery April day, the quiet, rather private wife of a doctor discovers that her husband has been having an affair. Moments later, driving along a winding country road and distracted perhaps by her own thoughts, perhaps blinded by sunlight, she fails to see sixty-one-year-old Ruth Mitchell up ahead, riding her bicycle. She hits her, killing her instantly. And drives away. The hit-and-run driver is never found. But the doctor's wife, horrified by what she has done, begins to unravel. Soon she turns her attention to Ruth's bereaved husband, a man staggering sleeplessly through each night, as unhinged by grief as the killer is by guilt. Arthur Mitchell does not realize at first that someone has begun watching him through his windows, worrying over his disheveled appearance, his increasingly chaotic home. And when at last she steps through his doorway, secretly at first, then more boldly, he is ready to believe that, for reasons beyond his understanding, his wife has somehow been returned to him… A story of loss, lies, and wrongdoing, astonishingly complex and ingeniously inventive, The Night Following is also a love story and the extraordinarily moving tale of a killer's journey from the shadows into the light. It confirms the mastery of a writer who is both tender and unflinching in her examination of human frailty-and of the shattering repercussions of deception.

When a bridge collapses in the Highlands of Scotland, dozens of people vanish into the river below. A car hired by a woman tourist was filmed pulling onto the bridge moments before it fell. Now numbered among the missing, the woman seizes her chance to start her life over. But her new path takes her no farther than a wooden cabin on the riverbank, where she seeks rebirth and freedom from her old self. There she lives with Silva, an illegal immigrant whose husband and daughter have not been seen since the day of the bridge’s collapse. The women are befriended by the boatman Ron, and together they create a fragile sanctuary. Lost souls all, they keep secrets from each other, yet connect in ways none of them expects, as they strive to reconcile their past histories with the present and shape for themselves an elusive, longed-for future. “Thousands of people are reported missing each year, yet very little is understood about who they are, why they disappear and what happens to them. It is known that most people go missing intentionally, to escape family or other problems. Adults most at risk of going missing are those going through a crisis or a difficult transition.”“The likelihood of missing adults being traced and possibly reunited with their loved ones decreases over time. Among those who are ever found alive, only one in five returns.”Extracts from: Lost From View: A Study of Missing Persons in the UK by Nina Biehal, Fiona Mitchell and Jim Wade (Bristol: Policy Press, 2003), research undertaken by the University of York in partnership with the National Missing Persons Helpline

Dagger Awards (nominee) Loners Jean, Micheal and Steph are drawn together to Walden Manor by a mixture of deceit, good luck and misfortune. There, they shape new lives, full of hope and happiness. When their idyll is threatened they discover their new lives are worth preserving. But at what cost?

IN A CITY OF BEAUTY AND HISTORY, A LITTLE NIGHT MURDER IS BEING COMPOSED… For world-class musicians, Bath is no mecca. But to cellist Sara Selkirk it is home, now invaded by an unbearably sexy Czech composer and his unheralded protégée, who is scoring an opera for a local company. Between the notorious composer and his untried student, Sara does not expect great music. Nor, however, does she expect murder…. With Sara caught up in a stormy relationship with a music-loving and very married police officer, she is privy to the investigation into the first killing. The next victim she knows personally, and Sara is sure of a connection. Alas, someone has composed a perfect score for murder. And she who can detect its melody first—will be the next to die…. From the Paperback edition.