Book picks similar to
Crystal by Susan Hill


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The Pigeon


Patrick Süskind - 1987
    The novella tells the story of a day in the meticulously ordered life of bank security guard Jonathan Noel, who has been hiding from life since his wife left him for her Tunisian lover. When Jonathan opens his front door on a day he believes will be just like any other, he encounters not the desired empty hallway but an unwelcome, diabolical intruder . . .

Valentine's Day at the Café at the End of the Pier


Helen Rolfe - 2018
    The café is a hub for many people: the single dad who brings his little boy in on a Saturday morning; the lady who sits alone and stares out to sea; the woman who pops in after her morning run.Jo soon realises that each of her customers is looking for love - and she knows just the way to find it for them. She goes about setting each of them up on blind dates - each date is held in the café, with a special menu she has designed for the occasion.But Jo has never found love herself. She always held her grandparents' marriage up as her ideal and she hasn't found anything close to that. But could it be that love is right under her nose...?

Night Terrors III


Theresa DillonPaul Tremblay - 2014
    A wave of sinkholes appears on the anniversary of a rural tragedy, and local residents begin to hear the voices of the dead. A woman encounters a predator from her youth—and a chance to turn the tables. A child’s inner beast takes on a sinister life of its own. An undetectable serial killer raises tensions on a college campus. Experimental physics reveals another world, and it might mean the end of ours. Shrouded in darkness, lurking in the shadows, NIGHT TERRORS III awaits you. The third installment of the chilling Night Terrors anthology series includes stories from Jack Ketchum, Steve Rasnic Tem, Dennis Etchison, Taylor Grant, Eric J. Guignard, Aric Sundquist, Jennifer Brozek, John McNee, Simon McCaffery, Patty Templeton, and many more!

Meat


Bones Monroe - 2016
    When he sees strange individuals coming, but never leaving his neighbor’s house, he begins to suspect that something nefarious is going on. Now that he saw a small child walk in but never walk out, he and his wife Clara need to figure out what is going on. They will stop at nothing to rescue the innocent boy that is trapped inside before it’s too late. Short story: 10,000 words

Domestic Terrorism: A story from the collection Property


Lionel Shriver - 2018
     Lionel Shriver is…‘A brilliant writer’ Sunday Times‘Brilliant, funny and incisive’ Woman and Home‘Breezy, mordantly comic’ Daily Mail‘Eloquent’ ObserverIn ‘Domestic Terrorism’ Shriver examines the decline of the empty nest, in a hilarious and barbed story about an all-too-recognisable modern family.

Rejection (Detective Jack Creed)


C.T. Mitchell - 2015
    He’s become more of a recluse cutting off communication with his parents and most of the outside world. He talks mainly through his YouTube channel “Nic Says” and his cold, spine tingling rants are very disturbing; especially to the young women at his University campus. He does not take rejection well and he’s got sweet revenge on his mind. But what’s even more alarming is that he’s got a sympathiser who’s got even bigger ideas. Are they part of a murder club? Detective Jack Creed needs to stop this attack. He’s got 48 hours to stop the perpetrator or witness Australia’s greatest mass University shooting. Australian author C T Mitchell is Australia's newest detective mystery, suspense and thriller writer with crime fiction plots centred around the seaside town of Cabarita Beach and the Northern Rivers District, in far north New South Wales, Australia.

The Favourite Child


Freda Lightfoot - 2001
    A decade has elapsed since the end of the Great War and running a family planning clinic in Salford is challenging but rewarding work.Bella is grateful for the help of Violet Howarth, a generous-hearted woman who takes her in off the street. Before long, a friendship with Violet’s son, Dan, blossoms into the beginnings of love.But Bella also crosses paths with handsome ne’er-do-well Billy Quinn, leader of an illegal betting ring, and everything she has worked for is suddenly put at risk. This is a bewitching tale of drama, jealousy and the fight for women's rights, perfect for fans of Dilly Court and Nadine Dorries. Praise for The Favourite Child ‘Compelling and fascinating’ Middlesborough Evening Gazette‘A revelation in telling us what it was like before women had rights’ 5* Reader review‘One of those books that you can’t put down, loved it’ 5* Reader review

The Forgotten Life of Evelyn Lewis


Jane Rubietta - 2018
    Determined to get in and get out of the abandoned property, she finds the valuable land tangled in a trust, and wonders who she can really trust, Not the property manager and affable southern gentleman, Taylor Simpson. Caught up in the mechanics of a farm, a legal document she can’t break, and pressure from her company for money, Evelyn turns to her own wiles and willpower…but can she resist the South’s wooing?

The Wolf in the Attic


Paul Kearney - 2016
    Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien... and Anna Francis, a young Greek refugee looking to escape the grim reality of her new life. The night they cross paths, none suspect the fantastic world at work around them.Anna Francis lives in a tall old house with her father and her doll Penelope. She is a refugee, a piece of flotsam washed up in England by the tides of the Great War and the chaos that trailed in its wake. Once upon a time, she had a mother and a brother, and they all lived together in the most beautiful city in the world, by the shores of Homer's wine-dark sea.But that is all gone now, and only to her doll does she ever speak of it, because her father cannot bear to hear. She sits in the shadows of the tall house and watches the rain on the windows, creating worlds for herself to fill out the loneliness. The house becomes her own little kingdom, an island full of dreams and half-forgotten memories. And then one winter day, she finds an interloper in the topmost, dustiest attic of the house. A boy named Luca with yellow eyes, who is as alone in the world as she is.That day, she’ll lose everything in her life, and find the only real friend she may ever know.

The Cuckoo's Gift


Anne Steinberg - 2014
    Her last visit here was twelve years ago when, through whispering mangroves, past flocks of exotic birds, skirting bobcat trails and precious mounds of turtle eggs, four children played in this earthly paradise – as explorers, naturalists, boat-builders... and eventually, as lovers. Over the intervening years, Carrie has tried to forget those summer idylls and the children who were her friends – Phoebe, who believed herself to be a mermaid, her aloof older brother Bradley, and Tristan, son of the Native American wisewoman, Tanta. Now two of them are dead and gone. In the cemetery, however, there is only one grave; in Tanta’s backyard, a mourning cradle hangs, stuffed with black raven feathers; and over at Bud’s Landing lives a small boy who has mysteriously been struck dumb. Legend says that pirates buried treasure on a sister island, but here on Sanibel, where a great storm is gathering, Carries is about to unearth some treasure of her own.

The Fall: Book One of the Last Druid Trilogy


Glen L. Hall - 2017
    A place where the Druids laid down their lives to protect the darkest of all their secrets.

London, the Doggy and Me


Rosen Trevithick - 2012
    The only catch is that she has to look after a pet dog in exchange for board.She soon finds herself trying to juggle auditions, the demise of a long-term relationship and a blossoming fling, all whist hiding a sinister secret concealed within her suitcase.

Delta Green: Extraordinary Renditions


Shane Ivey - 2015
     "PAPERCLIP" by Kenneth Hite. "A Spider With Barbed-Wire Legs" by Davide Mana. "Le Pain Maudit" by Jeff C. Carter. "Cracks in the Door" by Jason Mical. "Ganzfeld Gate" by Cody Goodfellow. "Utopia" by David Farnell. "The Perplexing Demise of Stooge Wilson" by David J. Fielding. "Dark" by Daniel Harms."Morning in America" by James Lowder. "Boxes Inside Boxes" and "The Mirror Maze" by Dennis Detwiller. "A Question of Memory" by Greg Stolze. "Pluperfect" by Ray Winninger. "Friendly Advice" by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan. "Passing the Torch" by Adam Scott Glancy. "The Lucky Ones" by John Scott Tynes. "Syndemic" and an introduction by Shane Ivey. These stories are recommended for mature readers. Excerpted from the introduction: We know a program called Delta Green really existed. You can find a couple of references to it in documents uncovered by Freedom of Information Act requests. Delta Green was a psychological operations unit in World War II, created to take advantage of the bizarre occult beliefs of Axis leaders. The public documents, which may have been released with the name unredacted by mistake, don’t say whether it had any success. The OSS was shut down after the war. Many of its people helped launch the CIA in 1947. We can only speculate whether the OSS’s lessons from Delta Green informed the CIA’s notorious psychological operations in the coming decades.  Conspiracy theorists have done more than speculate. Delta Green came back as a secret project to track down Nazis after the war, they say. Delta Green brought federal agents, spies, and special forces together for missions too secret even for the CIA. Delta Green was the precursor and rival to Majestic-12, the U.S. government conspiracy that allied itself with aliens after Roswell. Delta Green fights otherworldly monsters and evil sorcerers under the cover of the Global War on Terror. Once you climb into the rabbit hole, the fall never ends. In this book we turn up tales from the rabbit hole: Delta Green case histories rendered as short stories. They begin in the Dust Bowl, with a Naval intelligence unit supposedly called “P4” and memories of the abandoned New England town of Innsmouth (another bottomless well of conspiracy theories). They look at the days after World War II when secret agents pursued Nazis all over Europe, the early CIA attempted its first infamous schemes, and anticommunist witch-hunts seized on American terrors back home. They bring us through the Cold War desperation of the Seventies and Eighties, when America was shocked by its own crimes and Delta Green allegedly went underground again. And they come to the present day, and a Delta Green divided after it rebuilt itself in the secret government—but many old outlaws refused to trust the new order.

Strangeville (The Complete Trilogy)


Kenneth Tingle - 2013
    The story is a dark comedy about a suicidal young man named John Campbell who, after a failed suicide attempt, heads to Virginia to visit an aunt he hasn’t seen in ten years. But his rental car runs out of gas deep in the mountains. When he decides to walk in the middle of the night, he winds up in a town that is isolated from the rest of the world—Strangeville. Unable to leave, he meets an assortment of loveable oddball characters—the beautiful Delilah, Klemm Johnson, Clarissa Puddworthy, Biff Flannigan, Jeboriah Varmint, Cleetus McChoparooski, and others.

Follow You Home


Mark Edwards - 2015
    To find their way back to civilisation, they must hike along the tracks through a forest…a haunting journey that ends in unimaginable terror.Back in London, Daniel and Laura vow never to talk about what they saw that night. But as they try to fit back into their old lives, it becomes clear that their nightmare is just beginning…Follow You Home is a chilling tale of secrets, lies and deadly consequences from the author of #1 bestsellers The Magpies and Because She Loves Me.