When Jack Kells kidnaps the beautiful Joan Randle, he takes her to an isolated canyon where his legion are plotting to acquire a gold fortune. The woman becomes an unexpected accomplice to an intricate robbery. Jack Kells is the cold-hearted leader of a group of mountain bandits. Despite his rough exterior, he develops a soft spot for their latest victim-Miss Joan Randle. She was captured by the men and taken to their hideout where she encounters...

A collection of stories includes "Home," a wryly whimsical account of a soldier's return from war; "Victory Lap," a tale about an inventive abduction attempt; and the title story, in which a suicidal cancer patient saves the life of a young misfit.

When a middle school girl is abducted in broad daylight, a fellow student and witness to the crime copes with the tragedy in an unforgettable way. What happens to the girl left behind? A masked man with a gun enters a sandwich shop in broad daylight, and Meredith Oliver suddenly finds herself ordered to the filthy floor, where she cowers face to face with her nemesis, Lisa Bellow, the most popular girl in her eighth grade class. The minutes tick inexorably...

The Rocky Mountains have cast their spell over the Courtlands, a young family from the plains taking a last summer vacation before their daughter begins college. For eighteen-year-old Caitlin, the mountains loom as the ultimate test of her runner's heart, while her parents hope that so much beauty, so much grandeur, will somehow repair a damaged marriage. But when Caitlin and her younger brother, Sean, go out for an early morning run and only Sean...

That night, Samantha Jones was doing what she always did: just trying to get by. Left to make her own way on the mean streets of East St. Louis, the pretty twenty-three-year-old single mother supported herself and her son as best she could by repo-ing cars. When she hooked her junker of a tow truck up to the BMW she'd been sent to haul in, the last thing she expected was to find a beaten, bloody man in the trunk--or to be catapulted into a terrifying...

In the quiet town of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, a baby vanishes from her bedroom in an opulent lakeside home. Was she abducted, or does her father have a terrible secret to hide? That same night, a young policewoman gets lost in the fog and stumbles into the middle of a horrific crime. Now a sadistic killer wants her to play his deadly game.

"When misguided teenagers Jesse Crawford and Jenny Wheeler are forced to rob Emmett Brown to escape impossible circumstances, what starts as a home invasion quickly turns into a nightmare for the teens. What Jesse and Jenny don't know is that although Emmett is now old, severely obese, and in chronic pain, Emmett was responsible for the kidnapping and deaths of two young women almost twenty years ago, crimes that have never been solved. So Emmett...

Dan Mercer stands accused of being a sexual predator thanks to the ambush journalism of Wendy Tynes, a tabloid TV reporter, who must cope with her husband's death caused by a drunken driver as well as reckon with the possibility of Mercer's innocence. When Tynes finds a link between a father of one of Mercer's alleged victims and others felled by scandal, she could become a killer's next victim.

"Over twenty years ago, the heiress Patricia Lockwood was abducted during a robbery of her family's estate, then locked inside an isolated cabin for months. Patricia escaped, but so did her captors -- and the items stolen from her family were never recovered. Until now. On the Upper West Side, a recluse is found murdered in his penthouse apartment, alongside two objects of note: a stolen Vermeer painting and a leather suitcase bearing the initials...