The prequel to Downing's World War II Berlin-set "Station" series, Wedding Station introduces John Russell, an English crime reporter at a Berlin newspaper whose grim tales of everyday mayhem are increasingly swallowed by the darkness descending upon Germany under new chancellor Hitler. Graham's latest stand-alone, Danger in Numbers, a state police agent links arms with an FBI specialist on cults to solve a ritualistic murder in small-town northern Florida (125,000-copy first printing). In Kayode's Lightseekers, Nigerian investigative psychologist Philip Taiwo travels to a remote town in his country's south to probe the public torture and murder of three university students in what he comes to realize is a lot more than a moment of crowd madness. In her #ownvoices debut, London-based criminal attorney Matheson, of the City University Crime Writing competition, sets DI Anjelica Henley the unenviable task of stopping a criminal imitating The Jigsaw Man before the real hack-up-his-victims killer gets the copycat himself (100,000-copy first printing). In The Red Book, from Patterson and Illinois justice/Edgar Award winner Ellis (Line of Vision), Det. Bill Harney of the Chicago PD's Special Operations Section is fresh on the job and walking the finest of lines when the turmoil surrounding a drive-by shooting turns political (520,000-copy first printing). In Rollins's Kingdom of Bones, Sigma Force faces huge swaths of Africa where the populace has turned quiescent even as plants and animals become cunningly fierce; has the biosphere run amok or is fiendish engineering involved (250,000-copy first printing)?

Baldacci sends private investigator and ex-World War II veteran Aloysius Archer to Los Angeles—that is, Dream Town—for another dangerous case (one million copy first printing). Having crafted two Sam and Remi Fargo adventures with the late Cussler (Pirate and The Romanov Ransom), former California law enforcement officer Burcell takes the daring duo on another far-flung adventure in Clive Cussler's The Serpent's Eye (originally scheduled for Sept. 2021). In the New York Times best-selling Fisher's An Honest Lie, Rainy has been hiding out from her bad-news past atop a remote, fog-cloaked mountain but decides to risk a trip to Las Vegas with some friends, where one of them is trapped by a killer as bait to lure Rainy (10,000-copy hardcover and 200,000-copy paperback first printing). One Crimson Summer, thanks to mega-best-selling Graham, Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent Amy Larson is sent a toy red horse—a sign that she and FBI agent Hunter Forrest didn't wipe out the Doomsday cult that's about to fight a bloody turf war in northern Florida with several South American cartels (75,000-copy first printing). In best-selling Secrets of Midwives author Hepworth's latest, Tully and Rachel have every reason to resent The Younger Wife who's coming on the scene; their father is still married to their mother, now in a care facility for dementia, but plans to divorce her—which leads to the spilling of numerous toxic secrets (250,000-copy first printing). In the latest from the New York Times best-selling Pinborough, has-it-all heroine Emma Averell is beginning to suffer from Insomnia, which she fears may presage a descent into the insanity that destroyed her own mother's life (75,000-copy first printing). In the best-selling, award-winning Reich's Once a Thief, Simon Riske must prove that the Ferrari he's restored and sold for nine figures is not a fake, which brings him in contact with Anna Bildt, whose Swiss banker father has been blown up by a car bomb (75,000-copy first printing). In Rollins's Kingdom of Bones, postponed from March and September 2021, humans have become dullards while flora and fauna are suddenly ascendant; perhaps evolutionary forces have spun out of control, but it could be some fiendish plan (250,000-copy first printing). Letty Davenport, the smart, stubborn daughter of Sandford standby Lucas Davenport, becomes The Investigator, sent by her U.S. senator boss to figure out who's profiting from the theft of Texas crude oil—and why.

Bestseller Rollins's exhilarating 16th Sigma Force novel (after 2020's The Last Odyssey) takes a Sigma Force team, including former Army Ranger Tucker Wayne, to a UN refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has been overwhelmed by a simultaneous invasion of unusually violent insects and animals and an outbreak of a mysterious and devastating sickness. Their mission, which is to identify and combat what officials fear could be another worldwide pandemic, becomes a literal rescue as the camp is attacked by corrupt Congolese forces at the behest of an industrial-mining billionaire with a sinister agenda. Wayne and the other Sigma team members must travel deep into the primeval jungle in search of the Kingdom of Bones, a fabled ancient Shangri-La that might provide the cure to the disease, if they can survive the deadly mutating flora and fauna. Rollins, a former veterinarian, excels in description of animal taxonomy, both real and of his own invention. Fans of Clive Cussler and Michael Crichton won't want to miss this one. Agents: Russ Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency; and Danny Baror, Baror International. (Apr.)