It spreads like a plague but it’s not a disease. Medical science is helpless against the deadly autoimmune reaction caused by the bite of the swarming African flies. Billions are dead, more are dying. Across the world, governments are falling, civilization is crumbling, and everywhere those still alive fear the death carried in the skies. Some say the flies are a freak mutation, others say they’re manmade, but as hope of beating them fades, most turn to the only comfort left and see the plague as God’s will. He sent a deadly deluge the last time He was upset with mankind. This time He has darkened the sky with deadly flies. And perhaps that is true, for so many of the afflicted speak with their dying breaths of seeing God coming for them. But not everyone dies. A very few seem immune. They call themselves mungus and preach acceptance of the plague, encouraging people to allow themselves to be bitten by “the flies of the Lord” so that they may join Him in the afterlife. Nigel, an investigative reporter, searches the apocalyptic landscape of plague-ravaged England in search of Bandora, a kidnapped African boy. On a quest for personal redemption as well as the truth, his search takes him away from the troubles he can no longer face at home, and into the world of the head mungu, a man who speaks truth in riddles and has no fear of the African flies. A Necessary End is about apocalypse, about love, about the fragile bonds that hold marriages and civilizations together. But mostly it’s about truth — how we find it, how we embrace or reject it, and how we must face the truths within ourselves.Sarah Pinborough is a critically acclaimed award-winning author of horror, crime and YA fiction. She has also written for "New Tricks" on the BBC, and has a horror film and an original TV series in development. She lives in London. F. Paul Wilson is an award-winning, NY Times bestselling author of over 50 novels in many genres and numerous short stories translated into twenty-four languages. He is best known as creator of the urban mercenary Repairman Jack.Maelstrom Volume 4, Book 3

    Sol Thatcher is a Guardener, a seasoned member of the psych police, trained to track down aberrants who present a danger to the State and recondition them as stable productive citizens. When Richard Thorne becomes involved with not one, but two slum dwellers, a compulsive gambler and an uncommon prostitute, his descent into aberrance begins, leading to the ultimate crime, the murder of a high government official. Sol Thatcher will know it all. He will examine the case of Richard Thorne backward and forward, but it will make no sense to him. Even his most sophisticated tools, including the mind probe of the cyberscan, will leave him baffled. Richard Thorene is that rarest of occurences, the incuarble abberant, and Sol Thatcher must be deal with him accordingly.

    Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying strangers, toward an apocalyptic resolution.

    Located beyond life, The Library of Lost Childhood Memories holds the answer. The Librarian is Mr. Wicker—a seductive yet sinister creature with an unthinkable past and an agenda just as lethal. After committing suicide, Alicia finds herself before the Librarian, who informs her that her lost memory is not only the reason she took her life, but the cause of every bad thing that has happened to her. Alicia spurns Mr. Wicker and attempts to enter the hereafter without the Book that would make her spirit whole. But instead of the oblivion she craves, she finds herself in a psychiatric hold at Bayford Hospital, where the staff is more pernicious than its patients.Child psychiatrist Dr. James Farron is researching an unusual phenomenon: traumatized children whisper to a mysterious figure in their sleep. When they awaken, they forget both the traumatic event and the character that kept them company in their dreams—someone they call "Mr. Wicker."During an emergency room shift, Dr. Farron hears an unconscious Alicia talking to Mr. Wicker—the first time he's heard of an adult speaking to the presence. Drawn to the mystery, and then to each other, they team up to find the memory before it annihilates Alicia for good. To do so they must struggle not only against Mr. Wicker's passions, but also a powerful attraction that threatens to derail her search, ruin Dr. Farron’s career, and inflame the Librarian’s fury.After all, Mr. Wicker wants Alicia to himself, and will destroy anyone to get what he wants. Even Alicia herself.

    A week later, her son -- fifteen-year-old Mark -- vanishes. The boy's uncle, novelist Timothy Underhill, searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help unravel this horrible dual mystery. He soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before Nancy's suicide, Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge. No mere empty building, the house whispers from basement to attic with the echoes of a long hidden true-life horror story, and Tim comes to fear that in investigating its unspeakable history, Mark stumbled across its last and greatest secret: a ghostly lost girl who may have coaxed the needy, suggestible boy into her mysterious domain.

    The harder you struggle, the more you suffer. Your words mean nothing, your actions backfire, and one by one everybody you know is sucked down with you. You are: 1) Nick 2) cursed 3) afraid all the time That's because: a) someone or b) something is after you with a vengeance. Even with the help of other cursed people, you don't stand a chance because you're all, you know, cursed. That means you and everyone you know will: 1) suffer 2) die 3) amuse your tormentor That is, unless you figure out how to manipulate the person behind this and turn their power against them. Check your list a second time because they're probably on it. The only thing left to do is scratch them off.

    In the orderly, pleasant world Barbara inhabited, nice children -- and they were nice children — didn't hold an adult captive.But what Barbara didn't count on was the heady effect their new-found freedom would have on the children. Their wealthy parents were away in Europe, and in this rural area of Maryland, the next house was easily a quarter of a mile away. The power of adults was in their hands, and they were tempted by it. They tasted it and toyed with it -- their only aim was to test its limits. Each child was consumed by his own individual lust and caught up with the others in sadistic manipulation and passion, until finally, step by step, their grim game strips away the layers of childishness to reveal the vicious psyche, conceived in evil and educated in society's sophisticated violence, that lies always within civilized men.More than a terrifying horror story, Let's Go Play at the Adams' is a compelling psychological exercise of brooding insights and deadly implications.

    Shady, tree-lined streets, well-tended lawns and cozy homes. A nice, quiet place to grow up. Unless you are teenage Meg or her crippled sister, Susan. On a dead-end street, in the dark, damp basement of the Chandler house, Meg and Susan are left captive to the savage whims and rages of a distant aunt who is rapidly descending into madness. It is a madness that infects all three of her sons and finally the entire neighborhood. Only one troubled boy stands hesitantly between Meg and Susan and their cruel, torturous deaths. A boy with a very adult decision to make.

    But Ashbourough has a deep, dark secret . . . and it's living in the woods behind his home. "One of the best and most refreshing horror novels you're likely to read this year."

    It is an act he cannot excuse--a mistake that will change his life forever. Now Dan is on the run, heading south toward the Louisiana bayous. On his trail are police officers and bounty hunters, including the most memorable and bizarre team ever paired in modern fiction: Pelvis Eisley, an Elvis impersonator of the worst kind, and Flint Murtaugh, a fastidious, ruthluss loner and freak-show refugee who carries the body of his unformed twin brother on his side.As Dan heads down into the swampland in search of his own salvation, he meets a young woman who is on a similar journey. Like Dan, Arden Halliday bears a great burden--a disfiguring purple birthmark that blankets half her face. Wounded by the stares, by the pity and revulsion, she is making her way into the bayous to search of the Bright Girl--a legendary faith healer who will rid her of her birthmark and her suffering. Though on separate missions, Arden and Dan come to respect each other's quest for freedom, for a touch of simple kindness in a world grown cruel. Thrown together by circumstance, bound by a loyalty stranger than love, they set off on a journey of relentless suspense and impassioned discovery...an odyssey over dark, twisting road and waterways into the beautiful and mysterious depths of the human heart.

    She knows about pain and how to inflict it, she knows about guilt and she knows about survival. And because of her own experiences, she knows what these things can do to a child. So when she and a nine-year-old boy are the only ones left alive in a freezing Glasgow tenement after a Special Branch undercover operation she was spearheading has gone disastrously wrong, there's no way Orla McLeod's going to hand Jamie Buchanan over to social services. Not when Jamie's the sole witness to Tord Svensen committing an act of savagery so awful it's rapidly turning him into one of the most feared criminals in Europe. Especially since Svensen knows a lot about survival too.

    But Paul has a dark past, and a dark inheritance. The ghost of Martin Henninger has returned to make sure his son, Paul, delivers on his apocalyptic charge, the result of Martin's black magic, and he’s killing everyone in his path. With his two worlds colliding, and the body count stacking up, Paul soon finds himself the lead suspect in a series of grisly cult-style killings, and in an emotional standoff between duty, the truth, his wife, and his dead family. Meanwhile, Keith Anderson, San Antonio's best homicide detective, is hot on Paul's heels. His investigation takes him deep into the secrets of Paul's family. But what he finds there just might kill them both.“When I started reading Inheritance, my first reaction was one word—WOW! I kept reading, and I was blown away. Police procedural? Yeah. Horror novel? That, too. But most importantly—one helluva novel. Joe tells a roaring good tale, and when you finish it, you’ll have a lot to say, but WOW will be the first word out of your mouth.”—Rick Hautala, author of Glimpses and Indian Summer“An artful haunting with the gloomy quality of a Terrance Malick crime drama”—Weston Ochse, author of SEAL Team 666“With Inheritance, Joe McKinney delivers a first-rate supernatural thriller with edge-of-your-seat suspense, a high-octane plot, and pitch-black horror. Add to this mix strong characterization and an insider’s knowledge of law enforcement, and you have one of the best novels I’ve read in ages. I loved it!”—Tim Waggoner, author of The Harmony Society and Like Death“Joe McKinney has proven, yet again, that he is a true literary genius. Inheritance is a breath-taking thrill ride masterfully crafted to grip the reader, pulling them deep into the nightmares of its characters with a level of suspense that steals the breath from your lungs. Brilliant!”— Gabrielle Faust, author of Revenge and Eternal Vigilance“Joe McKinney delivers. Inheritance is a brisk, wry and deliriously creepy tale of family secrets and black magic that is guaranteed to get your goat!”—Harry Shannon, author of Dead and Gone and The Hungry

    Gabriel Blackstone is a cool, hip, thoroughly twenty-first century Londoner with an unusual talent. A computer hacker by trade, he is also a remote viewer: able to 'slam a ride' through the minds of others. But he uses his gift only reluctantly - until he is asked to find a young man last seen months earlier at Monk House, in the company of two mysterious women. Gabriel becomes increasingly bewitched by the house, and by its owners, the beautiful Monk sisters. But even as he falls in love, he suspects that one of them is a killer. But which one? And what is the secret they are so determined to protect? * World Book Day: Book to Talk About Award 2009

    Every morning when he awakes, he discovers something strange--like blood on his hands--a bizarre mystery that tortures his soul. Two investigators have been hired to follow the haunted man. But only one person--a young man with Down's Syndrome--can imagine where their journeys might end. That terrible place from which no one ever returns.

    If only the nightmare had ended when she was rescued. Instead, her real father exploited her tabloid-ready story for fame and profit—until Charlotte finally broke free from her ghoulish past and fled. Just when she thinks she has buried her personal hell forever, Charlotte is swept into a frightening new ordeal. Secretly dosed with an experimental drug, she’s endowed with a shocking new power—but pursued by a treacherous corporation desperate to control her.Except from now on, if anybody is going to control Charlotte, it’s going to be Charlotte herself. She’s determined to use the extraordinary ability she now possesses to fight the kind of evil that shattered her life—by drawing a serial killer out from the shadows to face the righteous fury of a victim turned avenger.