Gothic Horror brings specific images to mind—crumbling castles, dark Parisian alleyways, mad wives in attics, dark and lonely moors, cathedrals where more evil than good exists. Georgia Gothic replaces those locations with antebellum plantations, creatures hidden in backyard sheds, rural folks who might or might not be making pacts with a variety of terrors because that's how it's always been done, city folks hiding their secrets in the trunks of their cars or in their correspondence, hous...

New York Times bestselling author Lee Child and the International Thriller Writers, Inc. present a collection of remarkable stories in First Thrills. Showcasing many of the organization's bestselling authors as well as rising stars in the genre, here are twenty-five brand-new, never-before published, stories packed with murder, mystery, and mayhem.*A cunning criminal thinks he can use a child to take the rap for his crimes.*A hospital intern turned body-snat...

Lee Smith is a "teller of tales for tale tellers to admire and envy . . . [and] a reader’s dream" (Houston Chronicle). A celebrated and bestselling writer with a dozen novels under her name, including Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History, and The Last Girls, she is just as widely recognized for her exceptional short stories. Here, in Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, Smith collects seven brand-new stories along with seven of her favorites f...

Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the CityThe seventh novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga.Nearly two decades after ending his groundbreaking Tales of the City saga of San Francisco life, Armistead Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero Michael Tolliver—the fifty-five-year-old sweet-spirited gardener and survivor of the plague that too...

Some SecretsWhen Liv Dugan ducks out of work for lunch, it's just an ordinary day. When she returns, she stumbles onto a massacre. All her colleagues at Zuma Software have been shot. Only luck has left Liv unscathed, and that might be running out. . .Will Follow YouLiv suspects the shootings are tied to her past--and to the package she recently received from her long-dead adoptive mother. Sensing she's being followed, Liv jumps into...

From bookstores to libraries, mischief and murder is on the rise.Follow 30 sleuths as they tackle the ultimate case, to catch a bookworm red-handed.Will their love of books solve the case before it's too late?Spend the next month solving a mystery a day from the best cozy mystery authors in the industry.In Order of Appearance:Murder in the Stacks by Verena DeLucaBlood Orange Latte by NAK Baldron (Paranormal)De...

This darkly humorous follow-up to the national bestselling anthology from the Horror Writers Association is a heart-pounding collection of stories from acclaimed authors like Heather Graham, Allison Brennan, Kelley Armstrong, Kevin J. Anderson, and many more.Horror fiction is known for testing the limits—diving into visceral violence, graphic imagery, and the darkest sides of human nature. But some of the most successful examples of modern horror also include a lib...

A beautiful reporter. A secret ritual in a graveyard. A disembodied hand on the side of the road. Mike Hammer returns in one of the most shocking cases of his storied career.Private Investigator Mike Hammer may be getting older, but he hasn’t lost his step. So when he spots a brutally destroyed corpse on the side of the road in upstate New York, unrecognizable as human except for the disembodied hand lying next to it, there’s no question of him not taking the case....

Girl Trouble, a Harper Perennial paperback original, is Rona Jaffe Award winner Holly Goddard Jones’s debut short story collection, set around small-town Southerners caught in moral and sometimes mortal quandaries. Written with extraordinary empathy and maturity, and with the breadth and complexity of a novel, these eight beautifully written, achingly poignant, and occasionally heartbreaking stories explore the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence.

Someone in the wealthy Dunbar family has blood on their hands—and only hard-as-nails Mike Hammer has the skills to unmask them—in this page-turner for fans of gritty crime fictionTaking a midnight stroll along the Hudson River, Mike Hammer gets more than he bargained for: a partial corpse on an ice floe. The body is that of a butler who spent the last years of his life working for a millionaire—also now deceased—and his notoriously privileged children.Were ...

"All the heavy hitters, from Michael Connelly in Los Angeles to Joyce Carol Oates in suburban New Jersey . . . an important anthology."— The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)Features Dennis Lehane's story "Animal Rescue," the inspiration for the movie The Drop starring Tom Hardy.Launched with the summer 2004 award-winning bestseller Brooklyn Noir, the groundbreaking Akashic Noir series now includes over...

'Twas the night of the blizzardAnd into the great house,Crept a crazy old madmanWho Wielded an AxeHe butchered twelve peoplebefore the tenth bellAnd After he ate themHe returned to black hell***Andrea D'Allasandra shocked readers around the world in 2000 when she introduced the terrifying mountain madman, Benji, who butchered a weekend house party, in the best-selling Death House.Now, in her stunning new seque...