USA Today best-selling author and master storyteller Dan Alatorre brings you a collection of dark stories. Included in this book are: "The Jemwaju", "Best Monday Ever", and "Dark Questions". Enjoy these eerie, dark short stories from master storyteller and USA Today best-selling author Dan Alatorre, and be sure to leave the lights on!

Deputy Shelby Lake was abandoned as a baby, saved by a stranger who found her in the freezing cold. Now, years later, a young boy is missing - and Shelby is the one who must rescue a child. The only evidence of what happened to 10-year-old Jeremiah Sloan is a bicycle left behind on a lonely road. After a desperate search fails to locate him, the close bonds of Shelby’s hometown begin to fray under the weight of accusations and suspicion. Everyone around her is keeping secrets.

Zane Bigelow grew up in a beautiful, perfectly kept house in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Strangers and even Zane’s own aunt across the lake see his parents as a successful surgeon and his stylish wife, making appearances at their children’s ballet recitals and baseball games. Only Zane and his sister know the truth, until one brutal night finally reveals cracks in the facade, and Zane escapes for college without a thought of looking back....

Your phone rings. A stranger has kidnapped your child. To free them you must abduct someone else's child. Your child will be released when your victim's parents kidnap another child. If any of these things don't happen: Your child will be killed. You are now part of the chain.

Richard Coulter is a man who has everything. His beautiful new wife is pregnant, his upstart airline is undercutting the competition and moving from strength to strength, his diversification into the casino business in Macau has been successful, and his fabulous Art Deco house on an Irish cliff top has just been featured in Architectural Digest.

Twenty years ago, ex-beauty queen Didi Storm worked the Vegas strip as a celebrity impersonator. Now, in death, she’s finally getting the publicity she always craved. To the police, it looks like suicide, or a stunt gone wrong. Her estranged daughter, Remmi, knows the answer isn’t so simple. Though dressed in Didi’s clothes and wig, the broken body on the sidewalk isn’t Didi...

Joshua Mason has been alive for thousands of years. He doesn't know how or why it happened, only that he can die like any man, but will always return. When you live forever, everything you love will die, so he decided long ago to not become attached. That all changed when he met Doreen. With her, he found something more than the woman he loves, after thousands of years of wandering, he found his place in the world. Now she's dying of old age. Distraught, Joshua promises to look after Charlie, Doreen's grandson, who is thirty-six, but forever a child due to a terrible brain injury.

FBI Agent Nell Flynn hasn't been home in 10 years. Nell and her father, Homicide Detective Martin Flynn, have never had much of a relationship. When Martin Flynn dies in a motorcycle accident, Nell returns to the house she grew up in so that she can spread her father's ashes and close his estate. At the behest of her father's partner, Detective Lee Davis, Nell becomes involved in an investigation into the murders of two young women in Suffolk County. The further Nell digs, the more likely it seems to her that her father should be the prime suspect.

On a beautiful October morning in rural Maine, a homicide investigator from the state police pulls into the hard-luck town of Copper Falls. The local junkyard is burning, and the town pariah Lizzie Oullette is dead - with her husband, Dwayne, nowhere to be found.

Teaming up with New York Times best-selling author Jeffery Deaver, Suspense Magazine offers up a nail-biting anthology titled Nothing Good Happens After Midnight. This thrilling collection consists of 13 original short stories representing the genres of suspense/thriller, mystery, sci-fi/fantasy, and more.

Lee Child selects the 20 best mystery short stories of the year, including tales by Stephen King, Sara Paretsky, and many more. Under the auspices of New York City's legendary mystery fiction specialty bookstore, The Mysterious Bookshop, and aided by Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler, international best seller Lee Child has selected the 20 most suspenseful, most confounding, and most mysterious short stories from the past year, collected now in one entertaining volume.

Set against the backdrop of an eerie island town in the dead of winter, The Wife and the Widow is an unsettling thriller told from two perspectives: Kate, a widow whose grief is compounded by what she learns about her dead husband’s secret life; and Abby, an island local whose world is turned upside when she’s forced to confront the evidence of her husband’s guilt. But nothing on this island is quite as it seems, and only when these women come together can they discover the whole story about the men in their lives.

Throughout the annals of fiction, there have been many celebrated detective teams: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Nick and Nora Charles. Hercule Poirot and Arthur Hastings. Thomas and Charlotte Pitt. That last pair is the creation of beloved mystery writer Anne Perry, who, as the editor of Odd Partners and in conjunction with Mystery Writers of America, has enlisted some of today’s best mystery writers to craft all-new stories about unlikely duos who join forces - sometimes unwillingly - to solve beguiling whodunits.

Each tale is a magic trick, luring you toward the light while leading you down an ever-darkening path. There is hope mingled with horror, and that s Chizmar s secret power. His storytelling always beats with a huge, passionate heart. Stephen King says he writes terrific stories served with a very large slice of disquiet pie, and with The Long Way Home, Richard Chizmar has taken his evocative and compelling storytelling to an entirely new level.

A chilling anthology in tribute to the genius of Shirley Jackson. Shirley Jackson is a seminal writer of horror and mystery fiction, whose legacy resonates globally today. Chilling, human, poignant, and strange, her stories have inspired a generation of writers and listeners. This anthology, edited by legendary horror editor Ellen Datlow, brings together today’s leading horror writers to offer their own personal tribute to the work of Shirley Jackson.

It's been said that all great literature boils down to one of two stories—a man takes a journey, or a stranger comes to town. While mystery writers have been successfully using both approaches for generations, there's something undeniably alluring in the nature of a stranger: the uninvited guest, the unacquainted neighbor, the fish out of water. In the newest collection of stories by the Mystery Writers of America, each author weaves a fresh tale surrounding the eerie feeling that comes when a stranger enters our midst, featuring stories by prolific mystery writers.

Twenty years ago, ex-beauty queen Didi Storm worked the Vegas strip as a celebrity impersonator. Now, in death, she’s finally getting the publicity she always craved. To the police, it looks like suicide, or a stunt gone wrong. Her estranged daughter, Remmi, knows the answer isn’t so simple. Though dressed in Didi’s clothes and wig, the broken body on the sidewalk isn’t Didi...

Sam Acquillo is at the end of the line: he's a middle-aged corporate dropout living in a ramshackle cottage in Southampton's North Sea. But then the old lady next door ends up floating dead in her bathtub, and it seems that Sam is the only one who wonders why.

Ex-St. Paul cop Rushmore McKenzie has more time, and more money, than he knows what to do with. In fact, when he’s willing to admit it to himself (and he usually isn’t), Mac is downright bored. Until he decides to do a favor for a friend facing a family tragedy: Nine-year-old Stacy Carlson has been diagnosed with leukemia, and the only one with the matching bone marrow that can save her is her older sister, Jamie. Trouble is, Jamie ran away from home years ago.

In a riveting debut thriller that has drawn comparisons to masters of the genre like Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly, Brian Freeman weaves obsession, sex, and revenge into a story that grips the reader with vivid characters and shocking plot twists from the first minute to the last.

Melanie Turner has made quite a name for herself remodeling historic houses in the San Francisco Bay Area. But now her reputation may be on the line. At her newest project, a run-down Pacific Heights mansion, Mel is visited by the ghost of a colleague who recently met a bad end with power tools. Mel hopes that by nailing the killer, she can rid herself of the ghostly presence of the murdered man - and not end up a construction casualty herself....

In this mystery series by Dana Stabenow, the Edgar Award-winning author returns to the Alaskan setting she's famous for, with a wonderful character - state trooper Liam Campbell. Liam's just been transferred from Anchorage to the small fishing village of Newenham, Alaska - where a local pilot seems to have lost his head.

The town of Northfall, Minnesota, will never be the same. Meteors cratered hardwood forests and annihilated homes, and among the wreckage a new metal was discovered. This “omnimetal” has properties that make it world-changing as an energy source…and a weapon. John Frontier returns for his sister’s wedding to find his family embroiled in a cutthroat war to control mineral rights and mining operations. His father rightly suspects foreign leaders and competing corporations of sabotage, but the greatest threat to his legacy might be the US government.

Secrets and lies can’t stay buried forever in Cedar Valley. In the summer, hikers and campers pack the small Colorado town’s meadows and fields. And in the winter, skiers and snowboarders take over the mountains. Season by season, year after year, time passes, and the lies, like the aspens and evergreens that surround the town, take root and spread deep. Now, someone has uncovered the lies, and it is his murder that continues a chain of events that began almost 40 years ago.

Ever come across a situation that simply wasn't right - where someone was getting the dirty end of the stick and you wished you could make things right but didn't know how? Fourteen-year-old Jack knows how. Or rather he's learning how. He's discovering that he has a knack for fixing things. Not bikes or toys or appliances - situations...It all starts when Jack and his best friends, Weezy and Eddie, discover a rotting corpse - the victim of ritual murder - in the fabled New Jersey Pine Barrens. Beside the body is an ancient artifact carved with strange designs.