What could be more restful than a weekend getaway with family and friends? An isolated luxury cabin in the woods, spectacular views, a hot tub and a personal chef. Hannah’s generous brother found the listing online. The reviews are stellar. It'll be three couples on this trip with good food, good company and lots of R & R. But the dreamy weekend is about to turn into a nightmare.

The summer in question started out with hot, fun-filled days and new friendships. We had just turned thirteen and had our whole lives ahead of us. But that was before her. Before we became known as the Hixton Five and our lives become defined by one night. It’s hard to believe twenty years have passed since she was locked away. But now she’s free and strange things have started to happen. When I close my eyes, the creeping anxiety and fear is overwhelming and all too real. Because the monster is back, and I know she has a score to settle with us.

In a frantic late-night phone call, Ben learns his wife, Mia, has killed a man. And she needs his help. When Ben arrives at Mia's hotel room, the scene is horrific – but over the course of the night it will get much worse. All their secrets will be uncovered, and they will discover how far they'll go to protect themselves and each other… will they kill for love? Or will they die for it? One phone call. Twelve hours to save their marriage. And their lives.

Childhood sweethearts Nicole and Tom are a normal, loving couple—until a massive lottery win changes their lives overnight. Soon they’ve moved into a custom-built state-of-the-art Glass Barn on the stunning grounds of Lancaut Manor in Gloucestershire. They have fancy cars, expensive hobbies, and an exclusive lifestyle they never could have imagined. But this dream world quickly turns into a nightmare when Tom is found dead in the swimming pool. Was Tom’s death a tragic accident, or was it something worse?

Twenty years after a baby is stolen from a stroller, a woman is murdered in a care home. The two crimes are somehow linked, and a good bad girl may be the key to discovering the truth. Edith may have been tricked into a nursing home, but at eighty-years-young, she’s planning her escape. Patience works there, cleaning messes and bonding with Edith, a kindred spirit. But Patience is lying to Edith about almost everything. Edith’s own daughter, Clio, won’t speak to her. And someone new is about to knock on Clio’s door…and their intentions aren’t good.

Lilian and Rosie were once the closest of sisters, but the untimely death of their parents pulled them apart. Now, three years on, Rosie has reached out to her big sister, asking to meet. Driving on an icy road in the middle of a snowstorm, Rosie admits that she has something important to tell Lilian—a secret she describes as a matter of life and death. But before she has a chance to tell Lilian, a car careens into theirs, with devastating consequences. Lilian is convinced that someone deliberately rammed Rosie’s car. But why?

Joanne knows how lucky she is—Richard is a wonderful husband, Evie is the most gorgeous baby girl, they live in a beautiful house—life couldn't be better. But then Richard's twenty-year-old daughter Chloe turns up. Chloe hasn’t spoken to her father since the day he married Joanne two years ago. But with the arrival of her baby sister Evie, Chloe wants to make peace. Richard is delighted, and since Joanne is struggling with the new baby, he suggests Chloe could move in and help.

It’s the holiday season and Harriet Reed, a novelist on the brink of literary stardom, is newly engaged to Edward Holbeck, the heir of an extremely powerful family. And even though Edward has long tried to sever ties with them, news of the couple’s upcoming marital bliss has the Holbecks inching back into their lives with one invite after another.

In this “outstanding debut thriller” (Booklist, starred review), Helen’s idyllic life—handsome architect husband, gorgeous Victorian house, and cherished baby on the way—begins to change the day she attends her first prenatal class. There, she meets Rachel, an unpredictable single mother-to-be who doesn’t seem very maternal: she smokes, drinks, and professes little interest in parenthood.

Like any enterprising woman, Bea knows what she’s worth and is determined to get all she deserves—it just so happens that what she deserves is to marry rich. Filthy rich. After years of forced instruction by her mother in the art of swindling men, a now-solo Bea wants nothing more than to close and lock the door on their sordid partnership so she can disappear safely into old-money domesticity, sealing the final phase of her escape. When Bea chooses her ultimate target in the fully loaded, thoroughly dull and blue-blooded Collin Case, she’s ready to deploy all of her tricks one last time.

Arcade and Daffodil are twins born one minute apart. With their fiery red hair and thirst for escape, they form an unbreakable bond nurtured by their grandmother’s stories. Together, they disappear into their imaginations and forge a world all their own.

The doorbell rings, just days after my beloved husband’s sudden death. I don’t recognise the woman on our doorstep, with her blonde highlights, a diamond bracelet identical to my own and a bouncing baby boy in her arms. As I show her inside, I notice her eyes grow wide as she takes in our spacious hallway, and the big squashy sofas that we all used to pile on. She glances at the silver-framed family photos and my little daughter hiding behind my skirts. She looks at me, her blue eyes serious. ‘I’m sorry’ she says. ‘I am your husband’s girlfriend. And this is his son.'

Jamie and Victoria are off for a last quick vacation before the arrival of their first baby. The remote country guesthouse Victoria chose seems like the perfect retreat—miles away from the distractions of work and their regular life. And the older couple that runs the establishment, Barry and Fiona, is more than accommodating. But when Jamie and Victoria awake on their first morning, they find the house deserted. Barry and Fiona are nowhere to be seen. All the doors are locked. And their cell phones and car keys have disappeared.

Everyone who lives at 23 Beulah Grove has a secret. If they didn't, they wouldn't be renting rooms in a dodgy old building for cash - no credit check, no lease. It's the kind of place you end up when you you've run out of other options.The six residents mostly keep to themselves, but one unbearably hot summer night, a terrible accident pushes them into an uneasy alliance. What they don't know is that one of them is a killer. He's already chosen his next victim, and he'll do anything to protect his secret.

When Anna Blackwell opens an email from an unknown sender, the shocking image attached shatters her perfect world. A woman has been killed. And Anna knows who did it. The past is catching up with her. Is it her turn next? To protect herself and her husband, Will, she must tell him the terrible truth about her first love. But as the secrets of her life unravel, Anna begins to realize that she is not the only one who has been living a lie.

He lives in your community, in a nice house with a well-tended garden. He shops in your grocery store, bumping shoulders with you and apologizing with a smile. He drives beside you on the highway, politely waving you into the lane ahead of him. What you don't know is that he has an elaborate cage built into a secret basement under his garage. And the food that he's carefully shopping for is to feed a young woman he's holding there against her will - one in a string of many, unaware of the fate that awaits her.

Everyone who lives at 23 Beulah Grove has a secret. If they didn't, they wouldn't be renting rooms in a dodgy old building for cash - no credit check, no lease. It's the kind of place you end up when you you've run out of other options.The six residents mostly keep to themselves, but one unbearably hot summer night, a terrible accident pushes them into an uneasy alliance. What they don't know is that one of them is a killer. He's already chosen his next victim, and he'll do anything to protect his secret.

The Feed is accessible everywhere, by everyone, at any time. It instantaneously links us to all information and global events. Tom and Kate use the Feed, but Tom has resisted its addiction. The Feed's collapse, taking modern society with it, leaves people scavenging to survive. Tom and Kate have managed to protect themselves and their family. But then their six-year-old daughter, Bea, goes missing. Who has taken her? How do you begin to look for someone in a world without technology?

Neve comes across a troubled woman called Isabelle on Waterloo Bridge late one night. Isabelle forces a parcel into Neve's hands and jumps to her death in the icy Thames below. Two weeks later, as Neve's wreck of a life in London collapses, an unexpected lifeline falls into her lap - a charming cottage in Cornwall left to her by Isabelle, the woman on the bridge. The solution to all her problems.

Evie and her uncle Jim have just moved to an isolated cabin in a remote beach town - a far cry from their hometown of Melbourne. But Evie isn't her real name. And Jim isn't really her uncle. Jim tells Evie she did something terrible back home, that he's hiding her to protect her. But Evie can't remember anything about that night - for all she knows, he's lying. As fragments of her memory return, she starts to wonder if Jim is really her savior...or her captor.

In his debut collection of short stories, Robert Sheehan disappears into characters, challenging the complacencies of everyday experience, often from entirely unexpected angles. Informed by the author’s peripatetic life, Disappearing Act reflects on the absurdity of human behaviour. Sheehan delves deep into his characters’ streams of self-talk and self-imposed delusions, exploring the dark impulses that lurk below the shiny surfaces of many outwardly normal lives.

December 2018, and free-spirited Influencers Bo Loxley and her partner, Zac, are living a life of wanderlust, travelling the globe and sharing their adventures with their millions of fans. Booked to spend Christmas in the Norwegian fjords, they set up home in a remote farm owned by enigmatic mountain guide Anders and his fierce grandmother, Signy. Surrounded by snowy peaks and frozen falls, everything should be perfect. But the camera can lie, and with every new post, the ‘perfect’ life Zac and Bo are portraying is diverging from the truth.

There came an elastic aftershock of creaks and groans and then, softly softly, a chinking shower of rubbled cement. Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene. Where, not a minute before, there had been a suburb, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins. There is no warning. No chance to prepare. They arrive in the night: thundering up through the ground, transforming streets and towns into shadowy forest. Buildings are destroyed.

With tales from Laird Barron, Stephen King, John Langan, Peter Straub, and many others, and featuring Datlow’s comprehensive overview of the year in horror, now, more than ever, The Best Horror of the Year provides the petrifying horror fiction readers have come to expect - and enjoy.

Kit has been projecting into other species for seven years. Longer than anyone else at ShenCorp. Longer than any of the scientists thought possible. But lately she has the feeling that when she jumps, she isn't alone.... Since she was 12, Kit has been a phenomenaut, her consciousness projected into the bodies of lab-grown animals for the purpose of research.

Gideon Frayne has spent his whole working life as a policeman in the village of Dark on Bodmin Moor. His first missing-child case is eating him alive. When his own boss sends in a psychic to help with the case, he's gutted - he's a level-headed copper who doesn't believe in such things, and he can't help but think that the arrival of clairvoyant Lee Tyack is a comment on his failure to find the little girl. But Lee is hard to hate, no matter how Gideon tries. At first Lee's insights into the case make no sense, but he seems to have a window straight into Gideon's heart.

The dictionary doesn’t contain every word. Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, knows this better than most. She grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention. Her mother disappeared when Gretel was a teen, abandoning her to foster care, and Gretel has tried to move on, spending her days updating dictionary entries. One phone call from her mother is all it takes for the past to come rushing back. To find her, Gretel will have to recover buried memories of her final, fateful winter on the canals.

It was just a party. But it turned into a nightmare. When Rachel wakes up in a strange room the morning after a neighbour’s party, she has no memory of what happened the night before. Why did her husband leave her alone at the party? Did they row? Why are Rachel’s arms so bruised? And why are her neighbours and friends so vague about what really happened?

Crime reporter Eve Singer's career is on the downward slope when a spate of bizarre murders - each carefully orchestrated and advertised like performance art - begin in her territory. Covering these very public crimes revives her byline, and when the killer contacts Eve to discuss her coverage of his crimes, she is suddenly on the inside of the biggest murder investigation of the decade. But as the killer becomes increasingly obsessed with her, Eve realizes there's a thin line between inside information and becoming an accomplice to murder.

The sudden rising waters of a climate apocalypse have destroyed most of the planet…yet out of these waters, Dinétah, a former Navajo reservation, has been miraculously reborn. Listen along as Tanis Parenteau's impeccable narration, capturing the rhythms of Navajo speech, fully envelopes you into the Sixth World. Trail of Lightning follows our heroine as she walks the land alongside gods, heroes of legend, and monsters alike.

Hannah awakens to carnage, all mangled metal and shattered glass. After she was evacuated from a secluded boarding school during a snowstorm, her coach careered off the road, trapping her with a handful of survivors. They’ll need to work together to escape—with their sanity and secrets intact. Meg awakens to a gentle rocking. She’s in a cable car stranded high above snowy mountains, with five strangers and no memory of how they got on board.

It feels like a fairy tale when Alberta ”Bert” Monte receives a letter addressed to “Countess Alberta Montebianco” at her Hudson Valley, New York, home that claims she’s inherited a noble title, money, and a castle in Italy. While Bert is more than a little skeptical, the mystery of her aristocratic family’s past, and the chance to escape her stressful life for a luxury holiday in Italy, is too good to pass up.

Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It’s locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear. The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteader.

Amber Glass has spent her entire adult life putting as much distance as possible between her and her hometown of Baltimore, where she fears she will forever be known as “Prom Mom”—the girl who allegedly killed her baby on the night of the prom after her date, Joe Simpson, abandoned her to pursue the girl he really liked. But when circumstances bring Amber back to the city, she realizes she can have a second chance—as long as she stays away from Joe, now a successful commercial real estate developer, married to a plastic surgeon, Meredith, to whom he is devoted.

Jenny Kristal was six years old when she was snatched off the sidewalk from her quiet suburban neighborhood. Twelve years later, she's miraculously returned home after escaping her kidnappers - but as her parents and older brother welcome her back, the questions begin to mount. Where has she been all these years? Why is she back now? And is home really the safest place for her...or for any of them?