Mystery Fiction Books

Eidolon Avenue: Where the secretly guilty go to die. One building. Five floors. Five doors per floor. Twenty-five nightmares feeding the hunger lurking between the bricks and waiting beneath the boards. The sequel to Eidolon Avenue: The First Feast (“a great read...powerful and jarring” - Cemetery Dance) returns to the voracious Eidolon as it savors The Second Feast. A narcoleptic man in apartment 2A battles a vengeful past determined to rob him of everything as he runs from the barbaric disaster of a delusional love. A woman in 2B, reinventing herself to please a callous boyfriend, discovers the horrors that wait in the shadows of her self-renovation. The man in 2C, a teacher at the nearby Catholic girl’s school, collapses beneath the brutal consequences of his lecherous desires. An older woman in 2D, after decades dedicated to the church, is cornered at last by the grisly carnage beating at the hollow center of her faith. And a college student in 2E, hungry to escape an ignored life of invisible anonymity, finds herself captured between the pages of a ravenous book. All thrown into their own private hell as every cruel choice, every drop of spilled blood, every silent, complicit moment of cowardice is remembered, resurrected and relived to feed the ancient evil that lives on Eidolon Avenue. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

Bill is a nobody, a health inspector who’s not above taking a few dollars to overlook a restaurant’s mouse problem, and hated by nearly everyone except his long-suffering girlfriend. His nephew, Trent, isn’t much better: sexually and morally confused, he’s probably the worst teenage con artist on the East Coast. But today, these two losers harbor a sentient parasite with a sarcastic sense of humor and a ravenous appetite. As the parasite figures out how to control its new human hosts, the focus of its desires grows from delicious cheeseburgers and beer to something much darker and more dangerous.©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

As Jason and I try to stay one step ahead of the Marching Tides and their nefarious associates, we draw ever closer to the shocking truth of who the mastermind behind the Marching Tides really is. Something tells me I’ll regret learning the answers at the end of my journey.©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

Richard Franklin has left his Midwestern roots behind to live on the coast of Maine with his family. But in the autumn of the year 2000, he must return to his Illinois birthplace on a sorrowful journey. His wife Michelle has been killed in New England by a hit-and-run driver who is never found, so back home he comes with her cremated remains, to fulfill a final wish and on her birthday scatter her ashes in the park along the river in Blackwater Valley—simply Blackwater Val to locals—the small town where they both grew up and fell in love. With him he brings his six-year-old daughter Katie who still grieves for her lost mother: Katie, who can sometimes guess who’s going to be on the phone before it rings. Who can stop all the clocks in the house, and break up clouds in the sky with her mind, and heal sicknesses, and who sometimes sees things that aren’t there...people who are no longer alive. All gifts she inherited from her mother. Only something isn’t quite right in the Val. Sinkholes are opening up, revealing the plague pits the sleepy hamlet was built over in the 1830s, when malaria and cholera outbreaks ran riot. Mysterious bird and fish die-offs begin to occur, and Katie can see ghosts of the dead gathering all around. But what she can’t see is the charred, centuries-old malevolence which has been waiting for her, and wants her for its very own. Or the pale Sallow Man who haunts the town’s nighttime streets...or the river witch—another Blackwater Val, of sorts—each of whom will be drawn one by one into the nightmarish bloodletting about to take place. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

‘It’s not that there aren’t good people in the world. It’s that the bad ones are so much easier to find.’ A teen mother raises her daughter on a looping road trip, living hand-to-mouth in motel rest stops and backwater towns, stepping occasionally into the heat and chaos of the surrounding cities. A life without permanence, filled with terrors and joys, their stability is dependent on the strangers—and strange men—they meet along the way. But what is the difference between the love of a mother, and the love of a friend? And in a world with such blurred lines, where money is tight and there’s little outside influence, when does the need to survive slide into something more sinister? ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

Her mama always said she was special. His daddy called him a demon. But even monsters can fall in love. Montessa Tovar is walking home alone when she is abducted by Lu, a serial killer with unusual talents and a grudge against the world. But in time, the victim becomes the executioner as 'Apocalyptic' Montessa and her doomed lover, 'Nuclear' Lulu, crisscross the country in a bloody firestorm of revenge. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

Fire and plague. Certainly no strangers to London Town.But when legions of living dead rise from the Thames’ fetid waters to feast upon the living, the city teeters on the brink of antihalation. And while floaters seek blood, another army takes advantage of the chaos. Boiling out of their rookeries of crime, marauders swarm through London’s affluent neighborhoods looting and burning.©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

Beatrice is back to face her greatest threat since. . .well, the last time! In Cooper’s Cove a hapless team of archaeologists unleash the vengeful spirit of a 16th Century witch on the sleepy seaside town of Dorsal Finn. Hexes and curses fly as Beatrice and her friends must find out what links the appearance of this incredible foe and The Spirit of the Ocean, a super-yacht hosting the biggest celebrity charity event the town has ever seen. As the population of Dorsal Finn succumbs to witchcraft, so Beatrice must gate-crash the party with her motley-crew of friends and allies in the hope of stopping the witch's sinister plan, and save everyone from endless oblivion. . . Again. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

This award-winning, psychological experience is back in print, and includes the exclusive sequel The Sound of his Bones Breaking, a novella that will leave you truly shaken. Board for free. But the cost might be your life. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

So . . . what am I told? A familiar small town. A wrathful, metamorphic killer with supernatural abilities. A young girl whose time has come—angel of life, and death—is the only one who can stop his unspeakable deeds. Katie Franklin has turned twenty-one at last, and been released from the Ransom Sanitarium. And hell has been released with her. Now it’s back to the Val, where monsters are real . . . Something evil is stalking the shadows of Blackwater Val, and it wants lifeblood and flesh. What she finds waiting in the unhallowed darkness there will forever haunt her—and you. Return with her if you dare. To see the dead children. Feel their torment. To face the old terror. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing