Mitchard's Still Summer plunges into terror
By Carol Memmott, USA TODAY
Secure your life preserver. Tie yourself to the mast. It's late August, but it's still summer, and Jacquelyn Mitchard is taking you on a thrill ride you won't forget.
Mitchard made her mark in the literary world in 1996 when The Deep End of the Ocean was chosen as the first pick for Oprah Winfrey's now-legendary book club. Since then, she has written...

Lo Blacklock, a journalist who writes for a travel magazine, has just been given the assignment of a lifetime: a week on a luxury cruise with only a handful of cabins. The sky is clear, the waters calm, and the veneered, select guests jovial as the exclusive cruise ship, the Aurora, begins her voyage in the picturesque North Sea. At first, Lo's stay is nothing but pleasant: the cabins are plush, the dinner parties are sparkling, and the guests are...

When Clara Avery, an entertainer working on the Fate, an Alaskan cruise ship, goes to nearby Bear Island, she comes across a scene of bloody mayhem. She also comes across Thor Erikson, who will soon be a member of the FBI's elite paranormal unit, the Krewe of Hunters. Thor's been sent from the Alaska field office to investigate several grotesque killings, with the dead posed to resemble the victims of notorious murderers. The prime suspect is a serial...

When Jenner Redwine wins the lottery, she never imagined how much it would cost her. Luckily she finds an ally-and a guide to the rarefied realm of privilege in a shy, kind-hearted heiress who invites Jenner on a charity cruise. But what should have been a "Love Boat" cruise suddenly turns into a game of dizzying intrigue and harrowing danger, and Jenner finds herself taken hostage by a menacing stranger--a stranger that helps her rediscover feelings...

When her boyfriend leaves her for her best friend, Jade joins a semester long cruise program unaware that the two are also onboard, and when her ex-boyfriend is murdered and his new girlfriend goes missing, Jade must dig into her shipmates' lives to find the murderer and clear her name.

Adler invites you on a decadent Mediterranean cruise--where nothing is what it seems, no one is telling the truth, and murder is on the agenda... When English tycoon Sir Robert Waldo Hardwick dies mysteriously in a car accident, he leaves behind a note naming six people he suspects might have wanted him dead. Daisy Kean and P.I. Harry Montana team up to take the suspects--and also six 'red herrings'--on a fabulous Mediterranean cruise, all expenses...

A Russian billionaire and his state of the art yacht. His beautiful and sexy supermodel girlfriend. And five dynamic, powerful and famous couples invited on the yacht's maiden voyage. A senator and his lovely but unhappy wife. A very attractive movie star and his needy ex-waitress girlfriend. A famous black footballer and his interior designer wife. A male Latin singing sensation and his older English boyfriend. And a maverick writer with his Asian...

There's no evidence of a murder, but a person is missing. And what's a missing person minus a body? Not a murder. Oh, no. Never a murder. It's a disappearance. The day Adam Dunne's girlfriend, Sarah, fails to return from a Barcelona business trip, his perfect life begins to fall apart. Days later, the arrival of her passport and a note that reads 'I'm sorry - S' sets off real alarm bells. He vows to do whatever it takes to find her. Adam is puzzled...

From the award-winning author of Station Eleven, a captivating novel of money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, dragging countless fortunes with it. Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass and cedar palace on an island in British Columbia. Jonathan Alkaitis works in finance and...

"Ingrid works on a gargantuan cruise ship where she spends her days reorganizing the gift shop shelves and waiting for long-term guests to drop dead in the aisles. On her days off, she disembarks from the ship, wasting the hours aimlessly following tourists around, drinking the local alcohol, and buying clothes she never intends to wear. It's not a bad life. At least it distracts her from thinking about the other life--the other person--she left behind...