Jeffery Deaver loves writing short stories. "All bets are off," he says. "Short stories are like a sniper's bullet. Fast and shocking. I can make good bad and bad badder, and most fun of all, really bad seem good." And that is exactly what he does in these 17 superb tales. This is a collection of short stories that is instantly gripping and impossible to leave alone, taking your breath away time and time again. Nothing is as it seems...

This collection of short stories from king of suspense Jeffery Deaver grips with every listen. An aging actor attempts to revive his career by entering a celebrity poker game for a reality TV show. A successful crime writer dies under seemingly natural circumstances, but for one cop, doubts are lingering. Lincoln Rhyme is at the end of the line, or is it just another twist in the tale?

Megan's life isn't going well. It's also about to get worse. A drunken joke has left her having to see a tedious therapist. In his absence, the dynamically different Dr Peters takes over - or so Megan thinks. He manages to shock her innermost secrets out of her, and then he whacks a syringe into her arm before she has time to cry out. Aaron Matthews, alias Dr Peters, isn't having the best of times, either. Chance keeps sabotaging Megan's meticulously planned abduction. If he believed in luck, he'd be cursing his.

Wyatt Gillette, a cyber genius who's never used his phenomenal talent for evil, is sitting in a California jail doing time for a few harmless computer capers when he gets a temporary reprieve - a chance to help the Computer Crimes Unit of the state police catch a super hacker called Phate who's using his ingenious program, Trapdoor, to lure innocent victims to their death by infiltrating their computers.

A highway cop finds a memorial cross on the side of the road and a kidnapped girl in the boot of a car. The victim points Special Agent Kathryn Dance to a vicious online community. When further crosses appear it becomes a race against time to find the attacker before he can carry out his chilling plans in the cyber world and the real.

A killer is changing the rules. One murder at a time. You wake up all alone, in the middle of a forest, miles from anywhere. Beside you lie five objects - a lighter, grease, picture-frame wire, a piece of silk, a bottle of water - which you will need to use if you want to survive. You’ve been taken by the Whispering Man, and there is no escape. He makes the rules, and nobody ever gets out alive. Enigmatic investigator Colter Shaw is fighting to stop the murders. But another victim has been snatched from her family, and he’s running out of time.

After an early morning machinegun attack by a madman called the Digger leaves dozens dead in the Washington, D.C., subway, the mayor’s office receives a message demanding twenty million dollars by midnight or more innocents will die. It is New Year’s Eve, and with the ransom note as the only evidence, Special Agent Margaret Lukas calls upon retired FBI agent and the nation’s premier document examiner Parker Kincaid to join the manhunt for the Digger.

A woman awakes in the morning to find that someone has picked her apartment’s apparently impregnable door lock and, terrifyingly, rearranged personal items, even sitting beside her while she slept. The intrusion, the police learn, is a message to the entire city of carnage and death to come. Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs are brought in to investigate and soon learn that the brilliant, sociopathic intruder, who calls himself 'the Locksmith', can break through any lock or security system ever devised. 

A trio of desperate convicts has hijacked a bus carrying a group of deaf and mute schoolgirls who are now being held hostage in a disused slaughterhouse. FBI agent Arthur Potter is flown in to negotiate with the men, as are local police, state troopers, politicians and the media. Not everyone has the same agenda. And the killers will kill one innocent child an hour, on the hour, until their demands are met.

Young and athletic, London cycle courier Astrid Bell is bad luck - for other people. First Astrid's neighbour Peggy Farrell accidentally knocks her off her bike - and not long after is found bludgeoned to death in an alley. Then, a few days later, Astrid is asked to pick up a package from a wealthy woman called Ingrid de Soto, only to find the client murdered in the hall of her luxurious home. For the police, it's more than coincidence. For Astrid and her six housemates, it's the beginning of a nightmare.

Kim and Mia Timmers were just 11 years old when they were imprisoned in a local psychiatric institution, accused of murdering the man they believed to be responsible for the death of their family. Now, 10 years later, they are due for release. Detective Pieter Vos is given cause to reopen the case when the girls disappear. His investigation takes an unexpected turn when it becomes clear that someone is posing as Little Jo - Kim and Mia's other sister, who was killed along with their parents.

When Jack Swyteck's estranged father becomes governor, Jack's career as a defense attorney becomes a deadly conflict of interests. As governor, his father refuses Jack's last-minute request for a stay, and Jack's client is executed. Later, Jack is accused of a murder he didn't commit and the governor faces political ruin, the climax of a revenge campaign waged by someone connected to Jack's former client. Neither father nor son can help the other without harming himself.

When minor league baseball comes to White Sands Beach, not everyone welcomes the club. Birders are upset by the location of Sand Skeeter Ballpark, but will they resort to murder to protect the birds nesting areas? When a woman dies at the ballpark, during the final game of the season, tabloid reporter and amateur sleuth Cassie O'Malley finds herself on the case. Tag along as Cassie and her unusual band of cohorts attempt to untangle the clues in A Minor Case of Murder.

At last recovered from a near-fatal gunshot wound, Lieutenant Abe Glitsky is back at work. But instead of returning to his old job as chief of homicide detail, he's assigned a desk job in the payroll department, where he has no business investigating murders -until his father's closest friend is shot dead in a downtown pawn shop.

When best-selling thriller writer Andrew Danner wakes up in a hospital bed with no idea how he got there, he is horrified to be told that he is responsible for the murder of his ex-fiancee.