A year ago, a hit-and-run nearly killed Celeste Cleary. Instead, it left her with a chilling gift: the ability to see the dead. She uses her new power to unravel the mysteries behind the missing and murdered. But now it's time for her to return home to West Virginia, where her own life began, and where her mother abandoned her family decades before. Celeste is about to confront her darkest fears. And some of them might lead her right to the truth about her own past—a truth buried deep, waiting to be unearthed.

A terrible hit and run accident took Celeste Cleary's life until doctors managed to bring her back. But now she's... different. Once a respected scientist, she walks the thin veil between the living and the dead. As she struggles to return to her former life, Celeste receives an email-a heart-wrenching letter from a stranger, a woman begging for help locating her seventeen-year-old sister, Katie, who vanished a year before.

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.

On a sunny August morning in 1935, 13-year-old Sophia Gray finds her friend Rosemary wandering in the woods. Rosemary’s yellow dress is tattered and her eyes are vacant and glassy. She beckons to Sophia, desperate to show her something. In an abandoned cabin, beneath a tattered blanket, Sophia discovers Rosemary’s body. It was not Rosemary who led her there, but Rosemary’s ghost. Twenty years later, Sophia finds herself trapped in the sprawling Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane, in the hands of a malevolent doctor who preys on patients who exhibit paranormal abilities.

In House of Thorns, childhood fears take on monstrous forms in a chilling tale of loyalty, courage, and the unrelenting grip of the past. Will they escape Erimus House once more—or has it been waiting for their return all along?

The cemetery is alive with faint, spectral shapes, led by a woman who died before her time…and Keira, the only person who can see her, has become her new target. Determined to help put the ghost to rest, Keira digs into the spirit's past life with the help of unlikely new friends, and discovers a history of deception, ill-fated love, and murder.

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.

A week's visit to the remote Harob Lake cabin couldn't have come at a better time for Sam. She's battling artist's block ahead of a major gallery exhibition. Staying at the lake house is her final, desperate attempt to paint the collection that could save her floundering career. It seems perfect: no neighbors, no phone, no distractions. But the dream retreat disintegrates into a nightmare when Sam sees a stranger by the lake.

1967: A brutal murder occurs at the Weston State Hospital in West Virginia. To amateur exorcist, Merle Blatty, this shocking story rings of the occult. Fueled by a desire to avenge the deaths of his wife and son, Merle investigates the case, unknowingly stepping into a sinister web spanning decades.

The Summer of Love has been replaced by the Summer of Fear as a sadistic killer prowls the streets of San Francisco. Known only as 'The Gemini,' his brutal murders have the city paralyzed in a merciless grip of terror as he taunts police with a series of cryptic puzzles and the body count rises. As detectives work to unravel the Gemini's chilling clues, the line between nightmare and reality begins to blur when Cassie Kennedy—a newly separated young mother and part-time psychic—discovers that her dreams are foretelling the gruesome deaths of three women.

Josephine began to suspect something was wrong with the crumbling gothic monstrosity next door when its family fled in the middle of the night, the children screaming, the mother crying. They never came back. No family stays at Marwick House for long. No life lingers beyond its blackened windows. No voices drift from its ancient halls. Once, Josephine swore she saw a woman's silhouette pacing through the upstairs room… but that's impossible. No one had been there in a long, long time.

Newly-minted child psychologist Mina has little experience. In a field where the first people called are experts, she’s been unable to get her feet wet. Instead, she aimlessly spends her days stuck in the stifling heat wave sweeping across Britain, and anxiously contemplating her upcoming marriage to careful, precise researcher Oscar. The only reprieve from her small, close world is attending the local bereavement group to mourn her brother’s death from years ago. That is, until she meets journalist Sam Hunter at the grief group one day. And he has a proposition for her.

Derrick Stockton is in his mid-twenties, approaching three years sober, and working a stable job in Ohio. After surviving the seemingly random horrors of his childhood at the hands of a sinister neighbor, he believes he's finally moved on. All that changes when a brutal murder occurs in his home state of West Virginia. His name is written in blood at the crime scene, and the only evidence is a blurry surveillance video offering a glimpse of the killer, one he knows to be long dead.

Remy is a tour guide for the notoriously haunted Carrow House. The old place is a haunt for the superstitious, but Remy hasn't seen any proof of the paranormal yet. So when she's asked to host guests for a week-long stay in order to research Carrow's phenomena, she hopes to finally experience some of the sightings that made the house famous.

Maverick Hall has spent years trying to forget the chilling events of his thirteenth birthday in the summer of 1999. That fateful night, he and his best friends ventured through a seemingly innocuous tunnel on their bikes — a journey from which not all of them returned. Now, as an adult, Maverick is haunted by a sinister force that compels him to return to his old neighborhood, a place shadowed by secrets, deceit, and an unsettling sense of death. Drawn back against his better judgment, he must face the dark forces that have lurked in waiting, eager for his return.

A terrible hit and run accident took Celeste Cleary's life until doctors managed to bring her back. But now she's... different. Once a respected scientist, she walks the thin veil between the living and the dead. As she struggles to return to her former life, Celeste receives an email-a heart-wrenching letter from a stranger, a woman begging for help locating her seventeen-year-old sister, Katie, who vanished a year before.

A year ago, a hit-and-run nearly killed Celeste Cleary. Instead, it left her with a chilling gift: the ability to see the dead. She uses her new power to unravel the mysteries behind the missing and murdered. But now it's time for her to return home to West Virginia, where her own life began, and where her mother abandoned her family decades before. Celeste is about to confront her darkest fears. And some of them might lead her right to the truth about her own past—a truth buried deep, waiting to be unearthed.

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.

On a sunny August morning in 1935, 13-year-old Sophia Gray finds her friend Rosemary wandering in the woods. Rosemary’s yellow dress is tattered and her eyes are vacant and glassy. She beckons to Sophia, desperate to show her something. In an abandoned cabin, beneath a tattered blanket, Sophia discovers Rosemary’s body. It was not Rosemary who led her there, but Rosemary’s ghost. Twenty years later, Sophia finds herself trapped in the sprawling Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane, in the hands of a malevolent doctor who preys on patients who exhibit paranormal abilities.

All Ruby wanted was a fresh start. But after an early retirement and a relocation to a tight-knit community with her husband, Tom, and her daughter, Lily, her new beginning takes a turn. First her troubled daughter and then her husband disappear without a trace. Unsure how to cope, grief-ridden Ruby turns to her neighborhood friends to find a way forward with new hobbies, including a murder club where they try to solve cold cases. But just as unexpectedly as her family vanished, a body floats to the surface of the nearby lake.

From the first moment single mother Nicolette Winchester held her daughter in her arms, she knew she'd do everything in her power to keep her safe. Now 18 years old, Ella is bright, kind, and a cello prodigy headed for Juilliard. Nicolette can't help but feel proud of the young woman her daughter's become. Then Ella calls home one night. There's been an accident. A classmate is dead. And Ella is the only one on the scene. To protect her daughter, Nicolette makes an unthinkable decision.

Family is content for Kaylee Volk. Her vlogs celebrate a happy home with her husband and their three foster children, Bethany, Mason, and Andrea. Everything is perfect until the day the family’s private plane plummets into the ocean. Only Kaylee manages to survive—with a shocking revelation: Andrea did it.

When Lenna gets a call from her old friend Rhiannon, she is startled; Rhiannon disappeared years ago without a trace. But Lenna is even more startled to learn that Rhiannon has a son and that she lives off the grid with a group of women in a community called Halcyon. Rhiannon invites Lenna, a new mother herself, to join them. Why suffer the sleepless nights by yourself? It takes a village, after all. Lenna decides to go and hopefully repair her relationship with Rhiannon, but as she drives into the desert and her cell service gets weaker, she becomes suspicious.

When Alex first began posting unscripted family moments and motivational messages online, she had no intention of becoming an influencer. Overnight it seemed she’d amassed a huge following, and her hobby became a full-time job—one that was impossible to manage without her sharp-as-a-tack personal assistant, AC. But all the good-will of her followers turns toxic when one controversial post goes viral in the worst possible way.

In the course of a single winter’s night, four people vanish without a trace across a small town. Nora’s estranged best friend, Becca, is one of the lost. As Nora tries to untangle the truth of Becca’s disappearance, she discovers a darkness in her town’s past, as well as a string of coded messages Becca left for her to unravel. These clues lead Nora to a piece of local lore: a legendary goddess of forgotten origins who played a role in Nora and Becca’s own childhood games.

After she’s shot in the line of duty, Detective Carolina McKay returns to her hometown hoping to rebuild her life and conquer her demons. But before she can even unpack, a college student is found dead in a ditch. The crime scene looks familiar. Too familiar. Has the madman who terrorized Carolina’s childhood, reemerged? Or is a new killer copying those old murders?

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."

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.

For Jolene “Jo” Baker, the least she can do for her adoring husband, Dominic, is give unwavering support for his North Carolina gubernatorial run. He is not only the love of her life, he's also helping her prove that she's far more than just a pampered trophy wife. With huge crowds showing up at Dominic’s speeches and the polls consistently in his favor, she's never been happier to stand proudly by his side... Until she and Dominic start seeing the same, strangely ominous woman turning up all along the campaign trail.

Rae Dixon is lucky to be alive. Fifteen years ago, she survived being trafficked and abused, escaping her captors to reclaim her life. Now, she’s running a thriving business with her best friend and raising a teenage daughter on her own. Rae’s finally in control—literally. As Mistress V, Rae is the one calling the shots catering to Oklahoma City’s elite in her private dungeon, which is fronted by a spa. But when a client goes missing, Rae’s world spins out of control.