On an isolated farm in the United Kingdom, a woman is trapped by the monster who kidnapped her seven years ago. When she discovers she is pregnant, she resolves to protect her child no matter the cost, and starts to meticulously plan her escape. But when another woman is brought into the fold on the farm, her plans go awry. Can she save herself, her child, and this innocent woman at the same time? Or is she doomed to spend the remainder of her life captive on this farm? Intense, dark, and utterly gripping The Last Thing to Burn is a breathtaking thriller from an author to watch.

    Some houses are never at peace. England, 1917  Reeling from the death of her fiancé, Stella Marcham welcomes the opportunity to stay with her pregnant sister, Madeleine, at her imposing country mansion, Greyswick – but she arrives to discover a house of unease and her sister gripped by fear and suspicion.Before long, strange incidents begin to trouble Stella – sobbing in the night, little footsteps on the stairs – and as events escalate, she finds herself drawn to the tragic history of the house.Aided by a wounded war veteran, Stella sets about uncovering Greyswick’s dark and terrible secrets – secrets the dead whisper from the other side…

    Within minutes, she and her family hastily pack up their belongings and abandon their home. Where did the family go and why? Det. Roberta Hobbs has been assigned to uncover the family's whereabouts. Hobbs is a confident, intelligent police veteran. However, each passing day brings her closer to her unresolved past. When Hobbs digs deeper into the mystery, all leads point to her own longtime ex-boyfriend - a former drug dealer turned philanthropist named Steven Vance -- as the primary suspect. This riveting dual-timeline suspense novel takes us back to 2004 -- the year Greta Carpenter first realizes something is wrong with her young son, John. Over the course of his childhood, John's learning disabilities become apparent. Greta's unfaltering advocacy on his behalf puts her at odds with the school system and strains her relationship with her husband Griffin. Eventually Greta and Griffin's marriage falls apart, and during the divorce trial, Greta reveals that she was a teenage runaway, and a local entrepreneur named Steven Vance rescued her from the streets. Vance is certainly a man of many shades - a local celebrity for his philanthropy, a cunning CEO who sits atop a questionable mini-empire, a benevolent former father figure to Greta and a lying, evasive former companion to Hobbs. It seems that only Vance has the power to make people disappear in this small town and he emerges as the most obvious suspect...but Hobbs remains uncertain of his role. While her colleagues question whether she can truly be impartial, Hobbs realizes she has a reason to suspect them as well. Nothing is obvious in this thrilling mystery...except that Hobbs must race to solve the mystery before it's too late.

    Before Britt can explore her feelings for Calvin, an unexpected blizzard forces her to seek shelter in a remote cabin, accepting the hospitality of its two very handsome occupants—but these men are fugitives, and they take her hostage.Britt is forced to guide the men off the mountain, and knows she must stay alive long enough for Calvin to find her. The task is made even more complicated when Britt finds chilling evidence of a series of murders that have taken place there…and in uncovering this, she may become the killer’s next target.But nothing is as it seems, and everyone is keeping secrets, including Mason, one of her kidnappers. His kindness is confusing Britt. Is he an enemy? Or an ally?

    This is what happens after happily ever after.Everyone thinks seventeen-year-old Noah Shaw has the world on a string.They’re wrong.Mara Dyer is the only one he trusts with his secrets and his future.He shouldn’t.And both are scared that uncovering the truth about themselves will force them apart.They’re right.

    Check in for the night with New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger.Eve has a fake ID, a .38, and a violent lover receding in the rearview mirror. He’ll never find her at the isolated motel, and its kindly manager is happy to ease her fears. But if Eve is the only guest, whom does she keep hearing on the other side of the wall? Eve won’t get a good night’s rest until she finds out.Lisa Unger’s The Sleep Tight Motel is part of Dark Corners, a collection of seven heart-stopping short stories by bestselling authors who give you so many new reasons to be afraid. Each story can be read in a single sitting. Or, if you have the nerve, you can listen all by yourself in the dark.

    As a dark serial killer – The Axeman – stalks the city, three individuals set out to unmask him…Though every citizen of the ‘Big Easy’ thinks they know who could be behind the terrifying murders, Detective Lieutenant Michael Talbot, heading up the official investigation, is struggling to find leads. But Michael has a grave secret – and if he doesn’t find himself on the right track fast – it could be exposed…Former detective Luca d’Andrea has spent the last six years in Angola state penitentiary, after Michael, his protégée, blew the whistle on his corrupt behaviour. Now a newly freed man, Luca finds himself working with the mafia, whose need to solve the mystery of the Axeman is every bit as urgent as the authorities’.Meanwhile, Ida is a secretary at the Pinkerton Detective Agency.Obsessed with Sherlock Holmes and dreaming of a better life, Ida stumbles across a clue which lures her and her trumpet-playing friend, Lewis ‘Louis’ Armstrong, to the case and into terrible danger…As Michael, Luca and Ida each draw closer to discovering the killer’s identity, the Axeman himself will issue a challenge to the people of New Orleans: play jazz or risk becoming the next victim. And as the case builds to its crescendo, the sky will darken and a great storm will loom over the city…

    Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at the prison, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. But her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.

    One glimpse of it, and a person is driven to deadly violence. No one knows what it is or where it came from.Five years after it began, a handful of scattered survivors remains, including Malorie and her two young children. Living in an abandoned house near the river, she has dreamed of fleeing to a place where they might be safe. Now that the boy and girl are four, it's time to go, but the journey ahead will be terrifying: twenty miles downriver in a rowboat—blindfolded—with nothing to rely on but her wits and the children's trained ears. One wrong choice and they will die. Something is following them all the while, but is it man, animal, or monster?Interweaving past and present, Bird Box is a snapshot of a world unraveled that will have you racing to the final page.

    Exactly one week after watching the tape, four teenagers die one after another of heart failure. Asakawa, a hardworking journalist, is intrigued by his niece's inexplicable death. His investigation leads him from a metropolitan tokyo teeming with modern society's fears to a rural Japan--a mountain resort, a volcanic island, and a countryside clinic--haunted by the past. His attempt to solve the tape's mystery before it's too late--for everyone--assumes an increasingly deadly urgency. Ring is a chillingly told horror story, a masterfully suspenseful mystery, and post-modern trip.

    Whoever settles, never leaves. Welcome to Black Spring, the seemingly picturesque Hudson Valley town haunted by the Black Rock Witch, a seventeenth century woman whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. Muzzled, she walks the streets and enters homes at will. She stands next to children's bed for nights on end. Everybody knows that her eyes may never be opened or the consequences will be too terrible to bear. The elders of Black Spring have virtually quarantined the town by using high-tech surveillance to prevent their curse from spreading. Frustrated with being kept in lockdown, the town's teenagers decide to break their strict regulations and go viral with the haunting. But, in so doing, they send the town spiraling into dark, medieval practices of the distant past. This chilling novel heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice in mainstream horror and dark fantasy.

    The group’s leader, Naomi Perrault, is a beautiful geneticist who Jack believes conspired to kill his friend, and is claiming that a major international conglomerate developing genetically engineered crops is plotting a sinister transformation of our world that will lead humanity to extinction. As Jack is drawn into a quietly raging war that suddenly explodes onto the front pages of the news, he discovers that her claims may not be so outrageous after all. Together, the two of them must battle a horror Jack could never have imagined, with the fate of all life on Earth hanging in the balance…

    'They said that twenty-five percent of the population would catch the flu. Between seventy and eighty percent of them would die. He had been directly exposed to it, and the odds weren't good.' A CITY IN QUARANTINE London, the epicenter of a global pandemic, is a city in lockdown. Violence and civil disorder simmer. Martial law has been imposed. No-one is safe from the deadly virus that has already claimed thousands of victims. Health and emergency services are overwhelmed. A MURDERED CHILD At a building site for a temporary hospital, construction workers find a bag containing the rendered bones of a murdered child. A remorseless killer has been unleashed on the city; his mission is to take all measures necessary to prevent the bones from being identified. A POWERFUL CONSPIRACY D.I. Jack MacNeil, counting down the hours on his final day with the Met, is sent to investigate. His career is in ruins, his marriage over and his own family touched by the virus. Sinister forces are tracking his every move, prepared to kill again to conceal the truth. Which will stop him first - the virus or the killers?

    People thirst for it; the entire country is mad with desire for it...” A dying man’s cryptic letter to an enigmatic professor launches student Steven Roberts on an unwitting quest, shrouded in mystery, into the war-torn labyrinth of a disintegrating Eastern European country. Steven plunges into the maelstrom to unearth long-forgotten documents holding clues to an ancient Emperor’s deeply buried secret, an inconceivable and long-forgotten evil that has slumbered for centuries. Steven’s perilous journey stretches from Southern California’s sunny beaches, to the exotically dystopian city-scapes of Budapest, Belgrade, and Bosnia, as it plays out against a backdrop of events that occurred centuries before in the Balkans.Kirkus Reviews wrote: “In the glut of vampire-themed novels now on the market, Lyon’s debut stands out… skillful… authentic… fascinating… inspired… Lyon executes it perfectly... vivid... engaging... highly promising... sophisticated...”Meticulously researched and set against the background of collapsing Yugoslavia, “Kiss of the Butterfly” weaves Balkan folklore together with intricate historical threads from the 15th, 18th and 20th centuries to create a rich phantasmagorical tapestry of allegory and reality. It is about passion and betrayal, obsession and desire, the thirst for life and the hunger for death. And vampires – which have formed an integral part of Balkan folklore for over a thousand years – are portrayed in their original folkloric form, which differs dramatically from today’s pop culture creations.“Kiss of the Butterfly” is based on true historical events. In the year of his death, 1476, the Prince of Wallachia -- Vlad III (Dracula) -- committed atrocities under the cloak of medieval Bosnia’s forested mountains, culminating in a bloody massacre in the mining town of Srebrenica. A little over 500 years later, in July 1995, history repeated itself in Srebrenica, when nearly 8,000 people were slaughtered, making it the worst massacre Europe had seen since the Second World War. For most people, the two events seemed unconnected…From Kirkus ReviewsAs Yugoslavia disintegrates, an American bent on investigating Balkan vampire folklore becomes caught up in evils both supernatural and political.In Yugoslavia on a scholarship to study Balkan ethnography, graduate student Steven Roberts finds his research being directed toward vampires, which have a rich folkloric history in the region. Vampires, he learns, aren’t what Bram Stoker, Anne Rice and Hollywood said they were. For example, the folklore suggests that only newly made vampires are nocturnal, meaning that older ones should be harder to spot—though one of Steven’s professors notes that in 1992 Yugoslavia, it might be hard to tell the vampires from the thugs: “Haven’t you seen all the black jeeps and limousines with darkened windows? If I were a vampire, that would be the ideal way to travel around during daytime.” As Steven delves further into crumbling archives and into an underground labyrinth hiding vampiric secrets, he and his friends get caught up in a perilous confluence of events. Steven must confront his past, his loss of faith and how he might regain it, and his attraction to a mysterious, dangerous woman. He learns the truth about his professor Slatina, who in turn faces a crucial decision that will affect not just vampires but all of the Balkans. In the glut of vampire-themed novels now on the market, Lyon’s debut stands out for its skillful integration of authentic, fascinating myth with the political events of the early 1990s. Linking the horror of the supernatural with the horror of human violence is an inspired idea, and Lyon executes it perfectly. He evidently knows the area, its history and its languages, giving the reader vivid details not just of long-ago history but of the 1990s Balkans: socialist-chic shabbiness, ever-present cigarette smoke, the way every Serb that Steven meets has a cousin in Chicago, and the corrupt Milosevic government. “Slobo keeps prices low so people won’t complain,” a character nicknamed Bear says. “It’s okay if we don’t have gas, just so the gas we don’t have is cheap.” Steven can be irritatingly slow on the uptake, and the ending is less satisfying than it could be, since Lyon is apparently leaving room for sequels. Still, it’s a highly promising start with an engaging cast of characters.No capes, no glitter: a vampire novel for readers who value sturdy mythology and a sophisticated understanding of history, along with warmblooded, human connections.ReviewPublishers Weekly"A fast-pacedadventure into a modern heart of Balkan darkness... A truly original take on theblood-sucking undead." -Publishers Weekly "In the glut ofvampire-themed novels now on the market, Lyon's debut stands out... skillful... authentic...fascinating... inspired... Lyon executes it perfectly... vivid... engaging... sophisticated.... No capes, no glitter: a vampire novel for readers who value sturdymythology and a sophisticated understanding of history, along withwarmblooded, human connections." -Kirkus Reviews "A wonderfulsurprise...the modern day vampire mythos is completely shattered and restructuredas a truth, backed by historical fact...My heart and spirit stirred." -Horror-Web "A denouement ofaction and heart-pounding resolution... It was a wild ride to the ending,... If youliked "The Historian", you'll love Kiss of the Butterfly." -Vampire Romance Books"Immediately gratifying...a worthy addition to any vampire enthusiast's collection." -Vampires.com

    Others take a more literal view... Kate Bennett, presenter of paranormal investigation cable TV show, Where the Dead Walk, isn't sure what she believes, other than she seems cursed to lose all those closest to her. After investigating a neglected cliff-top house, empty for a decade because its "haunted", Kate is left convinced a spirit within holds the answers to a childhood she can't remember and an unimaginable crime. What she can't know is that the house's owner, Sebastian Dahl, is searching for something too, and he intends to get it, whatever the cost.