Some art takes on a life of its own. A beautiful house. A loving family. Two kids, a dog, and a tenure-track professorship teaching art at the local university. Dan Rineheart is living the dream. But all dreams must end. When an anonymous painting arrives at the university, Dan is tasked with uncovering the artist. No title. No name. No signature or frame. It’s a disturbing work of grotesque perfection. A work of art...that changes with each viewing. So begins the nightmare. Where painted clocks tick-tock in the dark hours before dawn.

For years, the abandoned MacKenzie mansion remained hidden in rural Wisconsin. Rumors and stories of apparitions, odd noises, accidents, and strange deaths in or near the property were enough to convince the townsfolk it was haunted, and they stayed away. Lucas MacKenzie and his brother, Nate, know nothing of this when they inherit the property and decide to bring their families to Wisconsin for a major renovation project with HGTV stardom in mind. As they tear out old fixtures and open shuttered windows, the house begins to reveal secrets of a terrible past.

It’s the day of his ex-wife’s wedding when Dan makes the winding mountain journey to a remote cabin for an escape from the life that another man has stepped into. Less than 48 hours into his reprieve, the forest tranquility is shattered when he looks through a telescope and witnesses the violent abduction of a young woman. Dan springs into action, but there’s no evidence of an abduction nor reports of a missing woman. That is, until Dan sees the missing person’s poster for Ivy Trent.

It’s Halloween night, 1984, in Coventry, Massachusetts, and two families are unraveling. Up and down the street, horrifying secrets are being revealed, and all the while, mixed in with the trick-or-treaters of all ages, four children who do not belong are walking door to door, merging with the kids of Parmenter Road. Children in vintage costumes with faded, eerie makeup. They seem terrified, and beg the neighborhood kids to hide them away, to keep them safe from The Cunning Man.

In the tourist town of Wharton, on the coast of Lake Superior, Tess Bell is renovating her old family home into a bed-and-breakfast during the icy dead of winter… As the house’s restoration commences, a shuttered art studio is revealed. Inside are paintings Tess’s late grandfather, beloved and celebrated artist Sebastian Bell, hid away for generations. But these appear to be the works of a twisted mind, almost unrecognizable as paintings she and others familiar with his art would expect.

Eric Ross is on the run from a mysterious past with his two daughters in tow. Having left his wife, his house, his whole life behind in Maryland, he's desperate for money—it's not easy to find steady, safe work when you can't provide references, you can't stay in one place for long, and you're paranoid that your past is creeping back up on you.

For nearly two decades, Jamie Warren has been running from darkness. He's haunted by a traumatic childhood and the guilt at having disappeared from his disabled brother's life. But then a series of unusual events reunites him with his estranged brother and their childhood friends, and none of them can deny the sense of fate that has seemingly drawn them back together. Nor can they deny the memories of that summer, so long ago—the strange magic taught to them by an even stranger man, and the terrible act that has followed them all into adulthood.

St Philomena's military hospital has been abandoned for over three years. Now Lilian Chesterfield, who works for one of the most successful building companies in England, is in charge of developing it into a luxury housing complex. But as soon as she and her colleagues start work in the Jacobean-style mansion, their dream turns into a nightmare. They hear screaming from wards full of empty beds. They hear doors slamming and find cutlery scattered over the kitchen floor. Then they see faces peering at them from the mullioned windows.

When Louise finds out her parents have died, she dreads going home. She doesn’t want to leave her daughter with her ex and fly to Charleston. She doesn’t want to deal with her family home, stuffed to the rafters with the remnants of her father’s academic career and her mother’s lifelong obsession with puppets and dolls. She doesn’t want to learn how to live without the two people who knew and loved her best in the world. Most of all, she doesn’t want to deal with her brother, Mark, who never left their hometown, gets fired from one job after another, and resents her success.

Emmie's spring break just started. Her idyllic getaway by the ocean is everything she dreamed of. Solitude. Friends. Sunshine. A chance to get away from her psychic past. But things take a chilling turn when she’s confronted by the ghost of a murdered girl. As the restless spirit haunts her every step, Emmie soon realizes that delving into the past is attracting unwelcome attention. A mysterious presence stalks her, their intentions sinister and unknown. The darkness within Shine House is suffocating, and Emmie is holding the last candle for the family that was brutally slain there.

When Archivist Andrea Kelley scores a sweet rental in Charleston, WV, she discovers it’s already occupied. But the early rising, bacon-loving ghost of six-year-old Billie Mae makes for a tolerable roommate. Until two bodies turn up nearby and Billie Mae launches a full-fledged haunting offensive.

It’s the house of their dreams. Former marine Harry and his wife, Sasha, have packed up their life and their golden retriever, Dash, and fled the corporate rat race to live off the land in rural Idaho. Their breathtaking new home sits on more than forty acres of meadow, aspen trees, and pine forest in the Teton Valley. Even if their friends and family think it’s a strange choice for an up-and-coming pair of urban professionals, Harry and Sasha couldn’t be happier about the future they’re building, all by their lonesome.

For three years, Detective Jude Fontaine was kept from the outside world. Held in an underground cell, her only contact was with her sadistic captor, and reading his face was her entire existence. Learning his every line, every movement, and every flicker of thought is what kept her alive. After her experience with isolation and torture, she is left with a fierce desire for justice - and a heightened ability to interpret the body language of both the living and the dead.

At sixteen, Sadie Young had a brush with death, and as a result she became more sensitive to the supernatural. Rather than embrace this gift, she spent years running from it, and from the darkness that once preyed upon her. Now twenty-five and working as a librarian, Sadie is called upon by a desperate family friend to look into a strange series of events. A teenaged girl has entered a reputedly haunted house in town and has gone mad. Committed, the girl attempts suicide and claims to be terrorized at all hours by a horrific specter known as "Mother Maggot."

Before he was considered a CIA superagent, before he was thought of as a terrorist's worst nightmare, and before he was both loathed and admired by the politicians on Capitol Hill, Mitch Rapp was a gifted college athlete without a care in the world...and then tragedy struck.

There's nothing strange about bodies buried in cemeteries - unless they don't belong there. And when six murdered women are discovered in other people's graves, the hunt for a sadistic serial killer begins before he can claim a seventh victim. Agent Cam Prescott of Iowa's Division of Criminal Investigation is leading the search alongside forensic psychologist Sophia Channing, who knows the minds of psychopaths inside and out. And after a brief but passionate affair, she knows Cam almost as well.

Elena Michaels is the world’s only female werewolf. And she’s tired of it. Tired of a life spent hiding and protecting, a life where her most important job is hunting down rogue werewolves. Tired of a world that not only accepts the worst in her–her temper, her violence—but requires it. Worst of all, she realizes she’s growing content with that life, with being that person.

Regulars at Nadia’s nature lodge don’t ask what she does in the off-season. And that’s a good thing. If she told them, she’d have to kill them. She’s a hit woman for a Mafia family. Tough and self-sufficient, Nadia doesn’t owe anyone any explanations. But that doesn’t mean she always works alone. One of her contacts has recruited her in the hunt for a ruthlessly efficient serial killer cutting a swath of terror across the country. The assassin is far too skilled to be an amateur - and the precision of the killings is bringing the Feds much too close to the hit man community for comfort.

The Dead Eyes killer lurks in the backyard of the FBI's famed Behavioral Analysis Unit. His brutal murders, unlike any others previously encountered, confound the local task force, despite the gifted skills of Special Agent Karen Vail, the first female ever promoted to the profiling unit. But along with her keen insight, Vail brings considerable personal and professional baggage—both of which threaten to derail the investigation, destroy her storied career and get her killed.

Bigfoot wants revenge! Just as Jaws terrified people right out of the water, The Shadowkiller will keep readers out of the woods...for good.

All ATF Agent Jack Donovan wants out of life is to do his job and work on his strained relationship with his daughter Jessie after a nasty divorce. But in a ruthless act of revenge by a charismatic madman, Jessie is kidnapped and buried alive, with barely enough oxygen to sustain her. Now the only man who can save her, the only man who knows where to find her, has just been shot dead - and the clock is ticking... So what's a father to do?

When Amanda travels east to Orlando on a hunch, she's met with the worst news possible. Kingdom Keeper Finn Whitman is missing. Calling on her own gift (she's telekinetic), her sister Jess' ability to dream the future, and their fellow Fairlie Mattie Weaver's unexplained ability to read minds through physical contact, the three gifted girls must navigate treachery, deception, and the stubborn, unwilling parents of the missing Keepers if they're to save their friends.

If you've never read a Repairman Jack novel, this is the place to begin. It's 1990. A twenty-one-year-old named Jack has dropped out of college, leaving his old life behind to build a new one in New York City. Manhattan's rough edges are jagged enough to shred any unwary newcomer, but perhaps not one who is determined to stay off the grid, at any cost, in the busiest metropolis on earth. And to do so, he'll have to take jobs of a less than legal nature.

Lt. Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont, police force has a serious problem: in a community where a decade could pass without a single murder, the body count is suddenly mounting. Innocent citizens are being killed - and others set up - seemingly orchestrated by a mysterious ski-masked man. Signs suggest that a three-year-old murder trial might lie at the heart of things, but it's a case that many in the department would prefer remained closed. A man of quiet integrity, Lt. Gunther knows that he must pursue the case to its conclusion, wherever it leads.

It begins with a phone call that Nora Watts has dreaded for 15 years - since the day she gave her newborn daughter up for adoption. Bonnie has vanished. The police consider her a chronic runaway and aren't looking, leaving her desperate adoptive parents to reach out to her birth mother as a last hope. A biracial product of the foster system, transient, homeless, scarred by a past filled with pain and violence, Nora knows intimately what happens to vulnerable girls on the streets.

Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.

FBI agent Jessica Blackwood believes she's left her complicated life as a gifted magician behind her - until a killer with seemingly supernatural powers puts her talents to the ultimate test. A hacker who identifies himself only as "Warlock" brings down the FBI's website and posts a code in its place that leads to a Michigan cemetery, where a dead girl is discovered rising from the ground - as if she tried to crawl out of her own grave.

Ten years ago... Special Agent Jess Harris has closed another tough case, and now she's determined to make it home to spend Christmas with her only family, her sister. Jess needs a break, and taking it far away from work is the only way to keep her mind off the many faces of evil waiting in the stack of case files on her desk. Running into the past wasn't part of the plan... Daniel Burnett was Jess' first love. She'd fallen hard for him in high school. Together they'd gone off to college with big dreams.

Steven James' Christy Award-nominated crime thriller pits FBI Special Agent Bowers against a serial killer who enjoys torturing women. After visiting the mountain vistas where the murderer posed his dead victims, Bowers receives a taunting call from the "Illusionist." Although Bowers gets close, his insidious foe continues to elude him.

As a boy, Will Klein had a hero: his older brother, Ken. Then, on a warm suburban night in the Kleins’ affluent New Jersey neighborhood, a young woman—a girl Will had once loved—was found brutally murdered in her family’s basement. The prime suspect: Ken Klein. With the evidence against him overwhelming, Ken simply vanished. And when his shattered family never heard from Ken again, they were sure he was gone for good.

Crowford, a sleepy coastal town in England, might seem like an oasis of calm and tranquillity. Having finally decided to leave the hustle of London, Daisy and Richard Johnson buy two houses on Nelson Street. One house is perfect and ready to move into while the other is a fire-ravaged wreck that needs a lot of work. They figure they have plenty of time to work on the damaged house while Daisy recovers from a traumatic event. Soon, they discover that the two houses share a common link to the past. Something awful once happened on Nelson Street, something that shook the town to its core.

They didn't know it was the last day of normal. Liam - husband, father - the rock who anchored them in a comfortable life in sunny Miami had been gunned down by a hit man. The wounds of losing him are raw when Lydia and her two children are snatched for their own protection. The FBI scoop the family into the Witness Protection Program. Their safety from the drug cartel is assured.

For years, the abandoned MacKenzie mansion remained hidden in rural Wisconsin. Rumors and stories of apparitions, odd noises, accidents, and strange deaths in or near the property were enough to convince the townsfolk it was haunted, and they stayed away. Lucas MacKenzie and his brother, Nate, know nothing of this when they inherit the property and decide to bring their families to Wisconsin for a major renovation project with HGTV stardom in mind. As they tear out old fixtures and open shuttered windows, the house begins to reveal secrets of a terrible past.

At first, life at Blackthorn Manor is wonderful. But as Emily explores the grounds and rooms, she stumbles upon a mysterious girl named Kat, who appears to be similar in age, and the two become fast friends. That's when things take a turn for the worse. Kat seems to know a curious amount about the estate, and strange things happen whenever she's around. In one case, Emily narrowly avoids getting toppled by a bookcase in the library; in another, the fire erupts in the fireplace, nearly burning Emily's hands. It's almost as if someone - or something - wants Emily dead.

Pain, horror, fear - these are the things that have comprised best-selling novelist Lance Metzger's life. His childhood remains a riddled wasteland of abuse by a sadistic father and abandonment by an apathetic mother. In turn his only refuge became his writing. When Lance loses his ability to write and becomes haunted by a nightmare that he'd thought was buried, he is drawn inexplicably to a house on the shores of Lake Superior, where he finds his muse once again - but something is waiting for him when he arrives.