One year ago Alex Towne's body was found. One month ago his mother saw him on the street. One week ago David Raker agreed to look for him. Now he wishes he hadn't. Mary Towne's son, Alex, went missing six years ago. Five years later he finally turned up - as a corpse in a car wreck. Missing persons investigator David Raker doesn't want the work: it's clearly a sad but hopeless case of mistaken identity brought to him by a woman unable to let go of her son.

A lifetime ago, a patient escaped Nazareth mental asylum. They covered their tracks carefully. Or so they thought. Thirty years ago, Marianne Smy committed a crime then fled from her home to leave the past behind. Or so she thought. Now, Marianne has been forced to return. Nazareth asylum has been converted to luxury flats, but its terrible hold on her is still strong. A successful academic, a loving mother and a loyal wife, she fears her secret being revealed and her world shattering. She is right to be scared.

Kieran Elliott's life changed forever on a single day when a reckless mistake led to devastating consequences. The guilt that haunts him still resurfaces during a visit with his young family to the small coastal town he once called home. Kieran's parents are struggling in a community which is bound, for better or worse, to the sea that is both a lifeline and a threat. Between them all is his absent brother, Finn. When a body is discovered on the beach, long-held secrets threaten to emerge in the murder investigation that follows.

Still devastated after the loss of his wife, Tom Kennedy and his young son, Jake, move to the sleepy village of Featherbank, looking for a fresh start. But Featherbank has a dark past. Fifteen years ago a twisted serial killer abducted and murdered five young boys. Until he was finally caught, the killer was known as 'The Whisper Man'. Of course, an old crime need not trouble Tom and Jake as they try to settle in to their new home. Except that now another young boy has gone missing, stirring up rumours that the original killer was always known to have an accomplice.

A trusted colleague and friend. A mother. A wife. Neve Connolly is all these things. She has also made mistakes: some small, some unconsciously done, some large, some deliberate. She is only human, after all. But now one mistake is spiralling out of control, and Neve is bringing those around her into immense danger. She can’t tell the truth. So how far is she prepared to go to protect those she loves? And who does she really know? And who can she trust? A liar. A cheat. A threat. Neve Connolly is all these things. Could she be a murderer?

Alison has it all. A doting husband, adorable daughter, and a career on the rise - she's just been given her first murder case to defend. But all is never as it seems. Just one more night. Then I'll end it. Alison drinks too much. She's neglecting her family. And she's having an affair with a colleague whose taste for pushing boundaries may be more than she can handle.

In 1606, the grand city of Prague hides an ugly secret: the emperor’s bastard son, Don Julius, is afflicted with a madness that pushes the prince to unspeakable depravity. Banished to a remote corner of Bohemia, Don Julius comes under the care of a bloodletter who works to purge the vicious humors coursing through the young royal’s veins. When the prince meets the bloodletter’s daughter Marketa, his madness sparks a frenzied - and dangerous - obsession.

When Helen, finally pregnant after years of tragedy, attends her first antenatal class, she is expecting her loving architect husband to arrive soon after, along with her confident, charming brother Rory and his pregnant wife, the effortlessly beautiful Serena. What she is not expecting is Rachel. Extroverted, brash, unsettling single mother-to-be Rachel, who just wants to be Helen’s friend. Who just wants to get know Helen and her friends and her family. Who just wants to know everything about them. Every little secret.

In the hushed aftermath of a total eclipse, Laura witnesses a brutal attack. She and her boyfriend, Kit, call the police, and in that moment it is not only the victim's life that is changed forever. Fifteen years on, Laura and Kit live in fear. And while Laura knows she was right to speak out, the events that follow have taught her that you can never see the whole picture: something - and someone - is always in the dark....

For some people, trouble just finds them. Thirty years ago, Vincent King became a killer. Now, he's been released from prison and is back in his hometown of Cape Haven, California. Not everyone is pleased to see him. Like Star Radley, his ex-girlfriend and sister of the girl he killed. Duchess Radley, Star's 13-year-old daughter, is part-carer, part-protector to her younger brother, Robin - and to her deeply troubled mother.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, Southern black community and running away at age 16, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same Southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white and her white husband knows nothing of her past.

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour, and wit. Maybe Adrian was more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is retired.

What was it like? Living in that house. Maggie Holt is used to such questions. Twenty-five years ago, she and her parents, Ewan and Jess, moved into a rambling Victorian estate called Baneberry Hall. They spent three weeks there before fleeing in the dead of night, an ordeal Ewan later recounted in a memoir called House of Horrors. His tale of ghostly happenings and encounters with malevolent spirits became a worldwide phenomenon. Now, Maggie has inherited Baneberry Hall after her father's death.

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to Scripture - is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

Lee, southeast London. A young girl has disappeared. There are no witnesses, no leads, no clues. The police are tracking a shadow, and time is running out.... DI Ellen Kelly is at the top of her game - at least she was, until she took the law into her own hands and confronted her husband's killer. Now she's back at work, leading the investigation into the missing child. Her superiors are watching her; the distraught family is depending on her. Ellen has a lot to prove. And she knows it.