25. Two Little Girls in Blue, Mary Higgins Clark

322 páginas

Returning home from a black-tie dinner in New York, Margaret and Steve Frawley find the police in their house and their twin daughters gone. The kidnapper, who calls himself the "Pied Piper", soon makes his terms known: on delivery of a ransom, a phone call will reveal the girls' whereabouts. The ransom is delivered but, when the call comes, only Kelly is in the car parked behind a deserted restaurant. The driver is dead from a gunshot wound and has left a suicide note, confessing to killing Kathy and dumping her body in the ocean. When strange occurrences begin to suggest that Kathy may still be alive, and communicating with Kelly, Margaret finds herself alone in wanting to continue the search for her daughter. But as Kelly's warnings become increasingly specific and alarming, the FBI agents set out to search for Kathy. As they close in on the Pied Piper and his accomplices, Kathy's life hangs by a thread...

24. A Máscara de Desonra, Minette Walters

375 páginas

An old woman is found dead in her bath, her wrists slashed: an apparent suicide. But she is wearing a scold's bridle on her head, adorned with a crown of nettles. What could have driven her to such a desperate act? Then rumours start to spread that her death wasn't suicide but murder.

23. Perfect Match, Jodi Picoult

389 páginas

What happens when you do all the right things for all the wrong reasons?

As an assistant district attorney, Nina Frost prosecutes the sort of crimes that tear families apart. She helps clients navigate their way through a nightmare – even though the legal system is not always the faultless compass they want and need it to be. She learns that the easiest way to cross this devastating minefield time and time again is to offer compassion, battle fiercely for justice, and keep her emotional distance. But when Nina and her husband discover that their five-year-old son Nathaniel has been sexually abused, that distance is impossible to maintain. The world Nina inhabits now seems different from the one she lived in yesterday; the lines between family and professional life are erased; and answers to questions she thought she knew are no longer easy to find.

Overcome by anger and desperate for vengeance, Nina ignites a battle that may cause her to lose the very thing she’s fighting for. Jodi Picoult’s stunning novels about the complexities of contemporary family life are written with delicacy and wisdom. They are also impossible to put down, and Perfect Match is no exception.

22. Velocity, Dean Koontz

397 páginas

The new fast-moving thriller from Dean Koontz is the story of an innocent man forced by a serial killer to choose who will be murdered next. William Wiles is an easygoing thirty-something, a bartender who lives a quiet life alone until a serial killer singles him out - not to kill him, but to force him to decide who the next victim will be. On his SUV Billy finds the first note: 'If you don't take this note to the police and get them involved, I will kill a lovely blonde schoolteacher. If you do take this note to the police, I will instead kill an elderly woman active in charity work. You have four hours to decide. The choice is yours.' Billy pays an informal visit to an acquaintance, Lanny Olson, who is a policeman, and who thinks the note is a prank. The schoolteacher dies. The next note reverses the choices: if Billy takes the note to the police, a mother of two young children will die. If he doesn't, an unmarried man who won't be much missed will die. Lanny has to take this note seriously but the deadline runs out before he can decide how to make his involvement official. Billy doesn't hear from him again because Lanny himself, unmarried, who will not be much missed, has become the next victim. There will be more communications from the killer, more hideous choices, with ever tighter decision times, and with each choice Billy is drawn deeper into an accelerating nightmare, which steadily becomes more personal, more confrontational, until he is isolated, with no one to turn to and no one to rely on but himself. Finally he must risk everything to save the intended victims.

21. Hide and Seek, James Patterson

429 páginas

Maggie Bradford is one of the most beloved singer/songwriters anywhere. She's also the devoted mother of two children. She seems to have it all. And so, how could she have murdered not just one, but two of her husbands? With unrelenting suspense, James Patterson answers that question.

20. Extremamente Alto e Incrivelmente Perto, Jonathan Safran Foer

425 páginas

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies. When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre, Oskar sets out to solve the mystery of a key he discovers in his father's closet. It is a search which leads him into the lives of strangers, through the five boroughs of New York, into history, to the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, and on an inward journey which brings him ever closer to some kind of peace.