Every year on his birthday, Ned Dunstan is cursed with visions of horror committed by a savage figure he calls "Mr. X". This year, Ned's visions will become flesh and blood. A dreadful premonition brings Ned home to find his mother on her deathbed. She reveals the never-before-disclosed name of his father and warns him of grave danger. Driven by a desperate sense of need, Ned explores his dark past and the astonishing legacy of his kin.

First setting: an all-male prep school in Arizona, where two sensitive freshmen form a bond based on their interest in magic tricks. Second setting: the labyrinthine house of a weird magician uncle in New England, where the two boys spend a memorable summer being trained in the art of illusion. Or is it real magic? Third setting: an alternate world where dark forces are at play - forces that first show up at the school, but intensify their power the summer.

A woman commits suicide for no apparent reason. A week later, her son- fifteen-year-old Mark Underhill - vanishes. His uncle, novelist Timothy Underhill, searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help unravel this horrible dual mystery. He soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before his mother's suicide, Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge.

For four aging men in the terror-stricken town of Milburn, New York, an act inadvertently carried out in their youth has come back to haunt them. Now they are about to learn what happens to those who believe they can bury the past - and get away with murder. Peter Straub's classic best seller is a work of "superb horror" ( Washington Post Book World) that, like any good ghost story, stands the test of time - and conjures our darkest fears and nightmares.

One summer night, a boy and his beautiful cousin plunge naked into the moonlit waters of a rural quarry. Twenty years later, the boy, now grown, flees the wreckage of his life and returns to Arden, Wisconsin, in search of everything he has lost. But for Miles Teagarden, the landscape he knew so well has turned eerie and threatening. And the love he shared has become very, very deadly....

Real estate agent Anthony Graham has his family on the run after witnessing a murder at the hands of the powerful Costello crime family. They’re forced to hide at one of Anthony’s properties, a deserted campground with a sinister past. No one is safe from the men that hunt them, or the terrors that await them inside The Devil’s Nest.

Charles Cullen, a brilliant university professor and ruthless killer, makes a daring escape from a hospital for the criminally insane. Dr. Joseph Kallinger, the psychologist who examined Cullen, is called in to help find him with a burnt-out cop who thinks Kallinger’s diagnosis is to blame for the situation they’re in.

Back in the 1960s, Mary Terrell shot and killed a man. A former member of the fanatical Storm Front Brigade - a splinter group of the notorious Weathermen - Terrell has stayed one step ahead of the FBI for decades. Living with numerous identities and menial jobs, Terrell's only constants in life have been LSD, psychotic delusions of motherhood, and murderous rage.

World-renowned Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to a Swiss research facility to analyze a cryptic symbol seared into the chest of a murdered physicist. What he discovers is unimaginable: a deadly vendetta against the Catholic Church by a centuries-old underground organization, the Illuminati. Desperate to save the Vatican from a powerful time bomb, Langdon joins forces in Rome with the beautiful and mysterious scientist Vittoria Vetra.

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.

No one could understand why Colin and Roy were best friends. Colin was so shy; Roy was so popular. Colin was fascinated by Roy - and Roy was fascinated by death. Then one day, Roy asked his timid friend: “You ever killed anything?” From that moment on, the two were bound together in a game too terrifying to imagine - and too irresistible to stop.

Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite.... Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter....

Dr. Morton Handler practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion, and sexual manipulation. Handler paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have one possible witness: seven-year-old Melody Quinn.

Successful author Todd Klein and his wife Rosita live a quiet small town life. Todd's latest novel is selling well and despite recent budget cuts, Rosita relishes her job at the local library. After years of marriage, they're still in love, the mortgage to their suburban home is paid off, and their future is bright. Until, that is, Todd makes an appointment at the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew his license.

A Signature Performance: Kenneth Branagh plays this like a campfire ghost story, told by a haunted, slightly insane Marlow.

Laguna: a place where a crazed killer has turned paradise into a Disneyland of depraved violence - with a fiery vengeance - and where homicide cop Tom Shephard unravels a grisly mystery. It reaches back across 40 years of sordid sex, blackmail, and suicide into the dark corners of his own past.

Private investigator Jack Pellum has spent two years searching for the man he believes murdered his wife - a man he last saw wearing a peacoat and a fedora. Months of posting flyers and combing through crime records yields no leads. Then a local writer commits suicide, and he leaves a bewildering message that may be the first breadcrumb in a winding trail of unsolved murders....

Tim Hess is a semiretired veteran cop staring at a death sentence - his own. Detective Merci Rayborn, young enough to be his daughter, is brash, impatient, and not someone from whom Hess wants to be taking orders. He certainly isn't planning on falling in love with her. Together, they must track down a psychopathic killer who's been abducting beautiful young women from the malls of Orange County.

A woman commits suicide for no apparent reason. A week later, her son- fifteen-year-old Mark Underhill - vanishes. His uncle, novelist Timothy Underhill, searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help unravel this horrible dual mystery. He soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before his mother's suicide, Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge.

The men in the tan-and-cream Chrysler came with guns blazing. When Ray Kelly woke up in the hospital, it was a month later, he was missing an eye, and his father was dead. Then things started to get bad. From the mind of the incomparable Donald E. Westlake comes a devastating story of betrayal and revenge, an exploration of the limits of family loyalty and how far a man will go when everything he loves is taken from him.

What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway? Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.

In number-one New York Times best-selling author Charlaine Harris’s "Dahlia Underground,” venerable vampire Dahlia Lynley-Chivers survives an attack by an anti-vampire terrorist group, only to show them they tried to blow up the wrong bloodsucker. Bailey Ruth Raeburn, a ghost assigned to assist humans in trouble, steps into the middle of a marital dispute with surprising twists in Carolyn Hart’s “Riding High”....

With novels like Mystic River and Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane has dramatically altered the landscape of the crime thriller—while boldly overstepping the boundaries that have long separated mystery from literature. Now two of his sensational early novels have been combined in a single volume—two gritty and mesmerizing masterworks of suspense featuring the private eye duo of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro.

You probably haven't noticed them. But they've noticed you. They notice everything. That's their job. Sitting quietly in a nondescript car outside a bank making note of the tellers' work habits. Lagging a few car lengths behind the Brinks truck on its daily rounds. Surreptitiously jiggling the handle of an unmarked service door at the racetrack. They're heisters.

A mind-bending, genre-twisting debut novel. In West Akron, there lived a reclusive elderly man who always wore mittens, even in July. He had no friends and no family; all over town, he was known only as The the Man from Primrose Lane. And on a summer day in 2008, someone murdered him.

Thirteen bodies are found in a Louisville restaurant. When the police can find no suspect or motive, the family of one of the victims seeks the services of the enigmatic and solitary specialist Roy Prescott, known for his ability to find people who don't want to be found.

New York City, 1954. The Cold War is heating up, Senator Joe McCarthy is running a witch hunt for communists in America, the newly formed CIA is fighting a turf battle with the FBI to see who will be the primary United States intelligence agency, and the bodies of murdered young men are turning up all over the city.

It is three days before Christmas, and two young girls have disappeared from the local academy. This hasn't happened for 15 years, since Rouge Kendall's twin sister was murdered. The killer was found, but now Rouge, 25 and a policeman, is forced to wonder: was he really the one? Also wondering is a former classmate named Ali Cray, a forensic psychologist with scars of her own. The pattern is the same, she says: a child called out to meet a friend.

Private Investigator Smokey Dalton works for Memphis, Tennessee’s black community. He has almost no interaction with the white hierarchy, even though they exist only blocks away. So he’s surprised the day a white woman walks into his Beale Street office. Laura Hathaway has sought him out because he’s a beneficiary in her mother’s will, and Laura wants to know why. So does Smokey. He’s never heard of the Hathaways, but his search will take him on a journey that will change everything he’s ever known.

Thomas Perry's Edgar Award-winning debut novel follows a professional hitman on the run from both the mafia and the government.

KOKO. Only four men knew what it meant. Now they must stop it. They are Vietnam vets — a doctor, a lawyer, a working stiff, and a writer. Very different from each other, they are nonetheless linked by a shared history and a single shattering secret. Now, they have been reunited and are about to embark on a quest that will take them from Washington, D.C., to the graveyards and fleshpots of the Far East to the human jungle of New York.

First setting: an all-male prep school in Arizona, where two sensitive freshmen form a bond based on their interest in magic tricks. Second setting: the labyrinthine house of a weird magician uncle in New England, where the two boys spend a memorable summer being trained in the art of illusion. Or is it real magic? Third setting: an alternate world where dark forces are at play - forces that first show up at the school, but intensify their power the summer.

The incomparable master of horror and suspense returns with a powerful, brilliantly terrifying novel that redefines the genre in original and unexpected ways. The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body - and the shattered souls of all who were present.

They are dying, one by one. Wealthy, middle-aged women in an exclusive Connecticut suburb. Their murderer remains at large. Nora Chancel, wife of publishing scion Davey Chancel, fears she may be next. After all, her past has branded her a victim.... Then Davey tells Nora a surreal story about the Hellfire Club, where years before he met an obsessed fan of Chancel House's most successful book, Night Journey - a book that has a strange history of its own.

Every year on his birthday, Ned Dunstan is cursed with visions of horror committed by a savage figure he calls "Mr. X". This year, Ned's visions will become flesh and blood. A dreadful premonition brings Ned home to find his mother on her deathbed. She reveals the never-before-disclosed name of his father and warns him of grave danger. Driven by a desperate sense of need, Ned explores his dark past and the astonishing legacy of his kin.

A woman commits suicide for no apparent reason. A week later, her son- fifteen-year-old Mark Underhill - vanishes. His uncle, novelist Timothy Underhill, searches his hometown of Millhaven for clues that might help unravel this horrible dual mystery. He soon learns that a pedophilic murderer is on the loose in the vicinity, and that shortly before his mother's suicide, Mark had become obsessed with an abandoned house where he imagined the killer might have taken refuge.

From the incomparable master of horror and suspense comes an electrifying collection of contemporary literary horror, with stories from 25 writers representing today’s most talented voices in the genre. Horror writing is usually associated with formulaic gore, but New Wave horror writers have more in common with the wildly inventive, evocative spookiness of Edgar Allan Poe than with the sometimes-predictable hallmarks of their peers. Showcasing this cutting-edge talent, Poe’s Children now brings the best of the genre’s stories to a wider audience.

Willy Patrick, the author of the Caldecott-winning young-adult novel In the Night Room, thinks she is losing her mind again. Two weeks before her second marriage, on her way home one day, Willy is drawn into the parking lot of a warehouse. Knowing that her daughter, Holly, is being held in that building, she wants to rescue her. But what she knows is impossible, for her daughter is dead.

Brad Woods has performed a lot of autopsies, but never one like this. The body is purged of all blood. Fear has made Sue Wing run from the darkened school and into night, a fear so powerful she can only name it using the Cantonese myths of her grandmother: Cup-hu-girngsi, the corspe who drinks blood. Reporters like Rich Carter don't believe in the supernatural, but all the signs are pointing to the same conclusion: a vampire is stalking the streets of Rio Verde. No, Rich Carter doesn't believe in such things. Not yet.

His touch can heal or harm. His fate is solitary. His agony belongs to us all…He was born on a day of pain: November 22, 1963. He came of age in agony: that moment of tragedy when fun-loving rock-and-roll deejay Paul Handler discovered the inexplicable power in his own hands. It is the power to make the wounded whole again. The power to make the lame walk and to heal the sick. It is a power that will sap his soul and plunge him into the world of a famous faith healer. It is a power that can turn to rage, even murder. It is a gift that makes Paul Handler a living, breathing human sacrifice. For thousands of years, a secret cabal has guarded the lineage to which Paul is heir — scapegoats who have been forced to bear humanity's anguish upon themselves. Now, while the cabal searches for him, and one man seeks to destroy him, Paul makes a lonely, frightening journey to the core of his identity and to his destiny … to all the pain his soul can bear, to all the redemption he can give, to the freedom that is death.

Two monstrous evils. The quiet suburban town of Hampstead is threatened by two horrors. One is natural. The hideous, unstoppable creation of man's power gone mad. The other is not natural at all. And it makes the first look like child's play.

In a house in London, a woman starts a new life, trying to put tragedy behind her. Then a pretty blonde child runs into view, bringing with her an inexplicable suggestion of evil. Once, Julia Lofting had a husband and a daughter. But everything has changed since she bolted from her marriage, in flight from the unbearable truth of her daughter's death. For Julia, there is no escape. Another child awaits, another mother suffers, and a circle of the damned gathers around her. The haunting has begun....

When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost.