Thriller

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

The things we want are so very rarely the things we need. Clifton Heights, a modest Adirondack town, offers many unique attractions. Arcane Delights sells both paperbacks and hard-to-find limited editions. The Skylark Diner serves the best home-cooked meals around, with friendly service and a smile. Every August, Mr. Jingo’s County Fair visits, to the delight of children and adults. In essence, Clifton Heights is the quintessential small American town. Everyone knows everyone else, and everyone is treated like family. It is quiet, simple, and peaceful. But shadows linger here. Flitting in dark corners, from the corner of the eye. If you walk down Main Street after dark, the slight scrape of shoes on asphalt whispers you're not alone, but when you look over your shoulder, no one is there. The moon shines high and bright in the night sky, but instead of throwing light, it only seems to make the shadows lengthen. Children disappear. Teens run away. Hunters get lost in the woods with frightening regularity. Husbands go mad, and wives vanish in the dead of night. And still, when the sun rises in the morning, you are greeted by townspeople with warm waves and friendly smiles, and the shivers pass as everything seems fresh and new... Until night falls once more. Handy's Pawn and Thrift sits several blocks down from Arcane Delights. Like any thrift store, its wares range from the mundane to the bizarre. By daylight, it seems just another slice of small town Americana. But in its window hangs a sign which reads: We Have Things You Need. And when a lonely traveling salesman comes looking for something he desperately wants, after normal visiting hours, after night has fallen, he will face a harsh truth among the shelves of Handy’s Pawn and Thrift: the things we want are rarely the things we need. ©️ 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

What if you were held captive by your own family? Emma Rawlins has spent the last year a prisoner. The months following her mother's death dragged her father into a paranoid spiral of conspiracy theories and doomsday premonitions. Obsessing him, controlling him, they now whisper the end days are finally at hand. And he doesn’t intend to face them alone. Emma finds herself drugged and dragged to a secluded cabin, the last refuge from a society supposedly due to collapse. Their cabin a snowbound fortress, her every move controlled, but even that isn't enough to weather the end of the world. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing Everything she knows is out of reach, lost beyond a haze of white. There is no choice but to play her father's game while she plans her escape. But there is a force far colder than the freezing drifts. Ancient, ravenous, it knows no mercy. And it's already had a taste...

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

When a child mysteriously disappears from a small town and even his mother seems indifferent, it’s time for the new sheriff to step in. Meet Chris Baker, the new sheriff of the quiet Adirondack town of Clifton Heights. As one inexplicable case after another forces him to confront the townsfolk in The Skylark Diner, it’s the furtive Gavin Patchett that hands Chris a collection of not-so-fictional short stories that tumbles him into a world of monsters, ageless demons, and vengeful citizens. As Chris reads through the stories the veil starts to lift, and he soon questions what is real and what’s not, and whether he really wants to know. Nothing will ever be the same again. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

Patrick and Clare wake up trapped in a basement, a thin wall separating their cells. Their captor is mysteriously absent, which at first seems like a blessing. As more time passes with no food or water, they begin to realize a clock is ticking for their survival.They know their captor is still out there, and it is only a matter of time before he returns.©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

Coincidence is a gamble, a deck of cards with loads of probabilities. Coincidence leads them into an experience that haunts them still after so many years.Coincidence drags them into decisions that scar their consciences forever.Coincidence drags them into the drama that ensues as a resultant effect.But no, it is not the regular drama.For the country is on fire, the government is burning and lives are in chains, ravaged by the demon of their past - Medusa.But lo, Medusa is not a demon.It is not an ancient Greek myth.It is not a god or goddess.It is not a religion.It is not alive.BUT IT IS HERE!

Welcome back to Clifton Heights. Sheriff Chris Baker and Father Ward meet for a Saturday morning breakfast at The Skylark Diner to once again commiserate over the weird and terrifying secrets surrounding their town. Sheriff Baker shares with Father Ward the story of a journal discovered in the ruins of what was once an elaborate koi pond and flower garden, which regales a tale of regret, buried pain, and unfulfilled debt: “Sophan” – Jake Burns has always been a bit...off. Rude, awkward, sometimes brutish, he's tolerated by Nate Slocum and his friends because he hits a mean line drive, and because they all know but don't discuss the abuse he faces at the hands of his troubled father, a Vietnam veteran consumed by his demons. But Jake is suffering something far worse than domestic abuse, and when Nate discovers what, he faces an impossible choice: help Jake and put himself in the path of evil, or abandon him, only to damn himself in the process. ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing

Sarah Killian is not your average thirty-year-old single woman. Foul-mouthed, mean-spirited, and a text-book-case loner. Also, she is a Professional Serial Killer. But a wrench is thrown into the clockwork of Sarah's comfortable lifestyle when, on her latest assignment, she is forced to take on an apprentice, Bethany—a bubbly, perky, blonde with a severe case of verbal-vomit. In short, Bethany is everything Sarah is not. Will Sarah be able to adjust and work with her new apprentice, or will she break her contract with T.H.E.M. and murder the buxom bimbo? ©️ Crystal Lake Publishing