Mystery/Crime

"You sure dispatch called this... natural causes?" I gripped the steering wheel, staring at the perfect suburban house.
"That's what they said," Gates muttered. The victim's father, Arthur, stood at the door in pressed khakis, weeping.
He swore his daughter, Grace, died in her sleep last night after eating vanilla pudding.
But the moment we stepped inside, a suffocating cocktail of cheap lavender...

Everyone thought the disfigured obsessive fan was stalking actress Sophia Brown.

No one believed I was the real Sophia.

My twin sister, Lily, slept beside my husband, Don Jason. She used my face to star in my movies. She even took over my social media accounts and posted under my name.

I wanted an explanation. But Jason only looked at my scarred face with cold disgust and said he had always tho...

To end two years of a long-distance marriage with my husband, Sutton Brennan, I quit my job and moved halfway across the state to join his top-tier medical center.
But from the moment I clocked in on day one, a nightmare awaited me.
IV pain pumps violently popped open in my hands, medication cabinets rejected my fingerprints, coffee machines sprayed me with boiling water, microwaves exploded in pu...

I grew up alongside my next-door neighbor, ice hockey prodigy Lachlan, silently paving the way for his future. In my past life, he planned to quit his crucial scout game for his girlfriend Tamsin.
Fearing he would ruin his career, I tipped off his parents to stop him. After graduation, I joined his sports agency and spent three years cleaning up his messes, clinging to the hope that my devotion w...

My brother Miles blames me for our parents' deaths.
So he chose to adopt the deaf Vivian instead of keeping me.
Later, I met Sullivan.
He gave me a grand confession. He chose me, resolutely.
He also said I hired someone to assault Vivian—that I didn't deserve sympathy.
Five years after being cast out of my family, a dismembered female body was found inside a carnival mascot costume.
Miles, now a p...

On our wedding night, my husband confessed that he had been unfaithful with my sister.

In response, I revealed that I had murdered my stepfather.

He laughed and said, "My dear, your story is so convincingly crafted."

It was only when he discovered—

Every detail within the narrative was, indeed, a stark reality.

Including the poison that was now coursing through his veins.

Did you slaughter your roommates?" the detective sneered. "No!" I screamed. The polygraph technician stared at the flawless readouts confirming I told the absolute truth. I was innocent. But if a human didn't tear those girls apart in our locked dorm... then what exactly is hunting me now?

I don't realize how badly I've been wronged until they're strapping me to the gurney.

My name is Camille Brooks. I'm one of the best cardiothoracic surgeons in the city, and I have never lost a patient on my table.

My fiancé, Adrian Vance, is the golden boy of the entire hospital. We're supposed to get married next month.

It's a stormy night when he calls, telling me to get to the hospital righ...

"Someone is right behind you."
It's the most common comment I get in the chat during my late-night streams.
But when that exact phrase abruptly hijacked my screen, spammed in bold, blood-red letters, my blood ran completely cold.
Because deep down, I knew. This time, they weren't joking.
It was real.

They say the dead go where they belong.

But I didn't.

I drift through the cold winds, watching my husband—the detective who once swore to protect me with his life—diligently investigating a dismemberment case.

He doesn't know that the broken body lying in the morgue is his wife.

He doesn't know that the gentle, caring "psychologist" who brings him lunch every day is the one who killed me.

He ...

My best friend Tiffany was obsessed with those novels where a mafia don spoils his woman rotten.

She was convinced she was the type of girl who could make a ruthless boss go soft, so she went after Vincent, the heir of a crime family, and got him.

His bodyguards, his dirty money, even the way he told her not to ask questions and just sit tight. She read all of it as devotion. And of course she h...

On the day I gave birth to my daughter, Iris, my husband Hollis pushed open the hospital room door, dragging a four-year-old boy by the arm. Eyes red and welling with tears, he said, "Look who I brought home."
My mother-in-law wept tears of joy. My son, Felix—who supposedly died in the winery fire five months ago—had returned "from the dead."
The whole room was crying over this miracle, but my blo...

Someone posted a positive pregnancy stick next to my student ID on the school's anonymous forum.
By first period, eight hundred people thought I was the campus slut. By lunch, the lacrosse captain stood up in the cafeteria and told everyone he was the father. By Friday, my full-ride scholarship was frozen and the dean told me to "keep a low profile."
I've never even kissed anyone.
Margaux Aldridge...

Ten years ago, I sat in the witness stand and told the court my beloved Uncle Arthur was a monster.

My testimony sent him away for twenty years and made my father Robert a hero.

For a decade, I lived inside the perfect world my father built around me — safe and warm and suffocating. Then one afternoon, digging through boxes in the basement, I found Buster's old collar. My golden retriever. The d...

I caught my husband sleeping with my sister, so I burned it all down.
The fire burned fierce, swallowing that abandoned cabin in the woods, along with my shattered marriage.
With the stench of gasoline still lingering on my fingertips, I thought I had finally buried the man who betrayed me.
Until the next morning, when he walked through the front door without a single scratch.
My mind reeled. ...

In my last life, my boyfriend's childhood best friend handed out jars of homemade sunscreen on the boat ride to the island. I'm a marine bio major — one sniff and I knew the mix had something in it that could drive the island's feral hogs into a frenzy. I told everyone to throw them out.
They did. But Brynn didn't look at the group. She looked at me. Eyes red, jaw tight. "You just can't stand seei...

I am Catherine Holloway, CEO of a tech company in Seattle.
It was just an ordinary rainy night. I was driving my Porsche Cayenne toward the airport when a beat-up Ford pickup rear-ended me on the off-ramp.
I never imagined that this seemingly routine accident would drag me into a serial murder case — turning me from a witness into the police's prime suspect.

I accompanied my husband, Kieran, down to the Antarctic station’s underground quarantine zone to rescue an ice-bacteria sample at negative forty degrees. Halfway there, he asked me to fetch some data. I was gone for exactly three minutes. When I came back, he had vanished.
The institute staff told me I had gone insane, wandering the halls searching for a husband who had been dead for three years.
...

Married for five years, my husband, Reid, constantly played the poverty card. He’d blame crashing company revenues, claiming we couldn't even afford to upgrade to a house with a small yard. His favorite excuse was that we had to subsidize his chronically ill, adopted sister, Vivienne.
Yet, he frequently went out late at night, his phone practically glued to his hand. I suspected he was having an a...

My husband told me our daughter was brain-dead. He put a pen in my hand and told me to sign the organ donation form. He said it was the merciful thing to do.
I signed.
Then I watched her heart get cut out and transplanted into another child — his mistress's son.
He'd been planning it for months. The fake diagnosis, the doctor who happened to be his college girlfriend, the night his mother lured me...