Patricia MacDonald Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Unforgiven (1981)
  2. Stranger in the House (1983)
  3. Little Sister (1986)
  4. No Way Home (1989)
  5. Mother’s Day (1994)
  6. Secret Admirer (1995)
  7. Lost Innocents (1998)
  8. Not Guilty (2002)
  9. Suspicious Origin (2003)
  10. The Girl Next Door (2004)
  11. Married to a Stranger (2006)
  12. Stolen in the Night (2007)
  13. From Cradle to Grave (2010)
  14. Cast into Doubt (2010)
  15. Missing Child (2011)
  16. Sisters (2012)
  17. I See You (2014)
  18. Don’t Believe a Word (2016)
  19. The Girl in the Woods (2018)
  20. Safe Haven (2018)

Novels Book Covers

Patricia MacDonald Books Overview

The Unforgiven

She swore she was innocent. Maggie Fraser has tried to forget. The body of the man she loved. The blood seeping into the snow. The scandalous murder trial. The twelve agonizing years in prison for a crime she did not commit. But now Maggie is free and ready to start a new life. Alone. Unknown. On a quiet island off the coast of New England, she accepts a job with the local newspaper. And slowly, she tries to put the past behind her, opening her heart to the paper’s ruggedly handsome editor, Jess Herlie. Then the nightmare begins…
again. Now she must pay. Someone is watching Maggie’s every move and waiting for revenge. Someone who refuses to forgive and forget. Someone who would do anything, even destroy innocent lives, to teach the guilty that there is no sanctuary, no escape, for…
The Unforgiven

No Way Home

With chilling echoes of a notorious, real life murder in Connecticut, Patricia MacDonald’s gripping novel unwraps the layers of fear and guilt in a small town where nothing bad ever happens until a pretty teenager disappears…
. Founder’s Day in Felton, Tennessee, should be a joyous occasion. But it’s the day Michele Burdette never returns home from the festivities…
the day Michele is found murdered. Now, as her mother Lillie tries to heal her shattered life, haunting questions emerge about the identity of Michele’s killer and Lillie realizes no one in her family or in Felton can be presumed innocent. A ring of suspicion is tightening around Michele’s father, stepfather, and her football hero brother, and Lillie’s quest for justice will reveal the deadly lies hidden behind the closed doors of her town, and her past…
.

Mother’s Day

Sweethearts since high school, Karen and Greg Newhall have lived in Bayland, Massachusetts, all their lives. They trust each other. They know their neighbors. Bayland had been the perfect place to raise their adopted daughter, Jenny. Then a young girl is found dead in the nearby woods, and everything changes. Thirteen year old Jenny fails to appear for the family’s traditional Mother’s Day lunch; Karen is frantic. And when Jenny’s birth mother suddenly appears on their doorstep, both Karen and Greg are outraged. Jenny rushed to embrace the stranger and the peaceful world of the Newhalls starts to shatter, revealing cruel secrets that make Greg a prime suspect in a brutal murder…
bitter secrets that make Karen doubt she knows the people closest to her…
and dangerous secrets that make every member of the Newhall family the hunted prey of a ruthless killer.

Secret Admirer

Laura Reed feels safe and happy in Cape Christian, a little jewel of Victorian architecture and quiet streets on New Jersey’s southern tip. The children’s books she writes are earning her modest fame; her husband Jimmy’s art gallery is flourishing; and Cape Christian is the right kind of small town in which to raise their little boy, Michael. She never dreams that this New Year’s Eve her nearly perfect life will end. That a man in a ski mask will break into her house, knock her out, and shoot her husband dead. That it will be nearly one hour before she revives and calls 911. That those missing minutes before her call will convince the police that she committed the crime. Although there is too little evidence to arrest her, Laura feels the eyes of the entire community including her in laws’ accusing her. Even her lawyer, Jimmy’s business partner, doesn’t seem to believe her. Her only ally is Gary, a young wheelchair bound painter. His faithful devotion and the bouquets he sends brighten Laura’s days. Then Ian Turner docks his sailboat in Cape Christian, and a chance meeting brings him into Laura’s life. His marriage, too, has ended in tragedy, and he not only believes Laura, but falls in love with her. For the first time since Jimmy’s murder, Laura dares to feel alive. Until she begins to sense that danger is near.

Lost Innocents

Maddy Blake is a wife, a mom, and a stained glass artist who is just getting over a very bad year. Her husband Doug, a high school teacher, has been acquitted of sexual misconduct with a student, but the trial has left the Blakes depleted of their finances and their self respect. When a 15 year old babysitter turns up dead and the toddler she was watching is nowhere to be found, all eyes look to Doug. Plagued by doubts of Doug’s innocence and intrigued by a priest for whom her feelings are anything but spiritual, Maddy is all too preoccupied with her efforts to keep her life from falling apart, and realizes too late that she is in mortal danger.

Not Guilty

When Keely Bennett’s world is shattered by the suicide of her beloved husband, Richard, she and her nine year old son Dylan have to start over. Her late husband’s childhood friend, Mark Weaver, helps Keely settle Richard’s affairs and sweeps her into a whirlwind romance and eventually a comfortable suburban lifestyle that includes marriage and a beautiful baby girl. The darkness that clouded Keely’s past has all but vanished. Yet Dylan, now a teenager, remains distant, brooding and resentful of his stepfather and baby sister, Abby. Then history repeats itself, and her life is once again thrown into chaos. But Keely’s nightmare is just beginning for the authorities are looking for a murderer, and they already have a prime suspect: Dylan. Refusing to believe her son is a killer, Keely vows to clear his name. But the prosecutor has a personal stake in seeing Dylan convicted and her pleas for help from the police fall on deaf ears. To save her son, Keely must rely on herself. But she is far from alone; someone is watching her every move. When her investigation threatens to uncover a conspiracy of secrets and corruption, she is suddenly plunged into the path of danger and into the sights of a ruthless killer who will stop at nothing to ensure the truth stays buried forever…
. Seamlessly weaving a psychological portrait of the bond between a mother and son with the breathless intrigue of a murder mystery, Not Guilty is a novel that finds Patricia MacDonald at the height of her celebrated powers.

Suspicious Origin

Patricia MacDonald has captivated readers worldwide with her page turning suspense novels that are filled with surprising twists and turns and psychologically perceptive characterizations. Now MacDonald delivers her most masterful work to date a chilling thriller about a woman who, while investigating her sister’s death in a house fire of Suspicious Origin, uncovers the work of a twisted killer who has taken refuge in an idyllic Vermont town.

When Boston cable television news producer Britt Andersen learns of the death of her beautiful sister, Greta, she heads straight for her sister’s hometown. Estranged from Greta since their father died, Britt meets for the first time her attractive brother in law, Alec Lynch, the owner of a successful snowmobile dealership, and her eleven year old niece, Zoe, who narrowly escaped the fire with her life. Surprised by the emotional bond that springs up between her and Zoe, Britt decides to spend time with her sister’s family to help her niece recover from the tragedy. But soon Britt clashes with her brother in law and picks up clues about her sister’s unhappy marriage and Alec’s likely infidelity.

When the fire marshal discovers the house fire was set deliberately, Britt pushes the police to question Alec more closely. An outsider in a small town whose ways she doesn’t understand, Britt finds it difficult to sort the truth from the gossip and the innuendos. Why does Dr. Olivia Farrar, with whom Greta worked, hold a grudge against Alec? Is pretty Lauren Rossi merely Alec’s devoted employee or ‘the other woman’? And what do the Carmichaels, Alec’s former neighbors, really know about the events that led to the deadly conflagration? When Britt learns a closely guarded family secret she begins to question everything she believed about her sister’s life and death…
and unwittingly places herself on a collision course with a killer.

With a vibrant cast of memorable characters, unerring insight into the dark side of human nature and exciting twists of plot, Suspicious Origin holds readers engrossed as it races to its stunning, emotionally charged conclusion.

The Girl Next Door

Patricia MacDonald has won a worldwide audience of readers with her page turning novels of domestic suspense that twist and turn with surprises. Now she presents a riveting thriller about a young woman who finds her life threatened when she returns to her picture perfect suburban hometown where a brutal crime shattered her family when she was a teenager. The affluent town of Hoffman, New Jersey reeled in disbelief when highly esteemed physician Duncan Avery stabbed his wife Marsha to death one spring evening. The two Avery sons turned their backs on their father but his daughter Nina never stopped believing in his innocence. Now, fifteen years later, Nina, a struggling actress in New York City, returns to Hoffman when her father is paroled and insists on re settling there. Not only does Dr. Avery want to repair his relationships with his sons and meet his grandchildren, he claims he wants to find out who killed his wife. But neither Nina’s brother Patrick, a successful investment banker with a wife and twin sons, nor Jimmy, a recovering drug addict who has adopted a new family, can bear to acknowledge their father’s return. Then, as suddenly as before, another act of violence overturns the Averys’ lives. No longer certain if she can trust her family, her neighbors, or her old friends, Nina finds she can rely only on herself and a surprising new ally in her life as she searches for the truth behind crimes past and present. If she digs deep down into the secrets of her family’s and her neighbors’ lives she stands a chance of catching a killer before she becomes his next victim. With psychologically perceptive characterizations, emotional realism, and a gripping story line, The Girl Next Door exposes the dark impulses and fierce passions that can rule seemingly ordinary people and showcases Patricia MacDonald at the height of her celebrated powers.

Married to a Stranger

Patricia MacDonald, whose finely honed suspense novels have won her a worldwide audience of readers, delivers a stunning new novel inspired by the headline making murder case of Laci Peterson the chilling story of a young wife and mother to be who must confront the possibility that her husband is trying to kill her. Twenty six year old Emma Hollis has it all a fortune she inherited from her father, a job she loves as a counselor at an adolescent crisis center, good friends, and a boyfriend who is crazy about her. Emma met sexy freelance journalist David Webster at a dinner party. Romantic, free spirited, and a perfect lover, David sweeps Emma off her feet. Now a baby is on the way. Emma expects David to say goodbye, but David enjoys surprises. At their beautiful, impromptu wedding at a historic inn, Emma and David promise to love and cherish each other for the rest of their lives. The only shadow over Emma’s happiness is cast by her stepfather, who is furious that David failed to sign a prenuptial agreement. As the newlyweds set off for their honeymoon at an idyllic cabin in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, Emma has no idea that her life is about to turn into a wife’s worst nightmare. With keen psychological insight and a storytelling style that thrills and surprises, Patricia MacDonald explores the dark, violent impulses that compel people to betray the one person they supposedly love most. Gripping and emotionally powerful, Married to a Stranger evidences Patricia MacDonald writing at the height of her celebrated powers.

Stolen in the Night

Patricia MacDonald has won a worldwide audience of readers with her pageturning crime novels that expertly blend riveting suspense and powerful family drama. Now, she delivers the chilling story of a woman who discovers that her own eyewitness testimony about her sister’s abduction led to the conviction and execution of the wrong man and that the real killer is still at large. When Tess DeGraff was nine years old and on a camping trip in New Hampshire with her family, a stranger kidnapped and killed her sister Phoebe. Thanks to Tess’s eyewitness testimony, a man named Lazarus Abbott was arrested and convicted for the heinous crime. But twenty years later, a test reveals that Abbott’s DNA does not match that of Phoebe’s murderer. Driven by her fear that she may have sent an innocent man to his death, Tess and her adopted son, Erny, return to the New Hampshire town in which it all happened years ago. Stone Hill, New Hampshire, is still an idyllic New England town. Tess’s courageous mother, Dawn, who suffered the violent loss of her daughter and the early death of her heartbroken husband, now runs the charming Stone Hill Inn. Tess’s older brother, Jake, lives nearby with his wife, a local girl he fell in love with during the trial of his sister’s killer. While Tess’s family stands by her account of the crime, nerves are frayed throughout Stone Hill, and others in town accuse her of lying and view her as a murderer. In a race against time to untangle the truth about her sister’s murder, Tess encounters an anti death penalty lawyer, Ben Webster, who infuriates her but who also might open her eyes and her heart; a biased police chief related to the Abbotts; and an unknown killer who has Tess and Erny in his sights. With fascinating characters and a host of shocking surprises, Stolen in the Night displays Patricia MacDonald’s storytelling powers at an impressive new level.

From Cradle to Grave

A nail biting novel of domestic suspense from a best selling author When Morgan Adair arrives at the small seaside town of West Briar on the Long Island shore, she is looking forward to attending the baptism of her new godson, Drew. Morgan and Drew’s mother, Claire, have been friends since childhood, and Morgan was delighted when Claire married the handsome Guy Bolton. But a few days after the christening, Morgan receives a devastating phone call from her friend…

Cast into Doubt

A gripping novel of domestic suspense – Shelby Sloan, a successful Philadelphia businesswoman in her early forties, has one child, a daughter whom she raised on her own. She gives her daughter, Chloe, and son-in-law, Rob, a Caribbean cruise as a gift, while she takes the opportunity to mind her four-year-old grandson. But life becomes a nightmare when Rob calls to tell her that Chloe has disappeared overboard. The police decide it was an accident, but Shelby refuses to accept the official verdict…

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