Margaret Belle

Margaret Belle's The Granddaughters: Always returns to the Orange Lake Mystery series with a premise that earns its hook: three older women take in a terrified eight-year-old who can identify a killer but cannot speak a word. The case centers on the child, not the dead mother, and the warmth here comes with a real undercurrent of risk.

Margaret Belle's The Granddaughters sends three older women back to the family lake house, where a decades-old crime turns a research trip into something dangerous. It's an amateur-sleuth mystery built on the idea that being dismissed for your age can be a tactical edge, and it lets its heroines go further than you'd expect.

A propulsive supernatural medical thriller that trades plausibility for momentum, carried by a heroine you actually root for.

Margaret Belle's The Jigsaw Priest is a contemplative religious mystery built on the weight of the confessional seal. As aging Father John Doyle absorbs fragments of a chilling story from his parishioners, the tension comes less from a chase than from a man caught between sacred duty and the human urge to intervene.

Margaret Belle wraps up the story of identical twins Melanie and Madison Allen in The Hunter's Wife, the sequel to THE PROCEDURE. It's a brisk thriller about two sisters whose existence makes them prey, and about the family that gives them something worth losing. If you read book one and wanted the door closed, Belle closes it.

Margaret Belle's Brainstorm runs its suspense through an anxious witness: Audrey Dory, who could identify a bank robber from a decade ago but never spoke up, and whose returning panic disorder now muddies every choice she makes. If you like a thriller where the heroine's own judgment is the wild card, this one's worth a look.