Short Mystery Collection

Detectives and thieves, newshawks and murderers–all ingredients for disaster in this 10th anniversary murder mystery collection. While you might remain in the dark until the final revelation in each story, you will enjoy every twist and turn along the way.

A cursed box unleashes a specter’s wrath on an unsuspecting heir. And a sinister mirror promises its owner eternal youth. But its gifts come at a terrible price. Scare Street is proud to present the best in bone-chilling supernatural horror. This volume contains a double dose of terror, guaranteed to make your skin crawl.

It’s dreaded news for actress Lyla McCord and her husband, Nolan. Their eight-year-old daughter has vanished. To find her, Nolan reaches out to a psychic gifted with uncanny visions about the lost girl. But Lyla thinks she sees right through him. Is he a con artist or the real thing? Either way, he might be telling the truth. And that’s too frightening for Lyla to bear.

Bill Norton might be new to Ketchikan but he’s no tenderfoot. In fact, he’s one of the sharpest FBI agents this side of the Yukon - savvy, tough and resourceful. Norton’s come to this rough-and-tumble town to look into a case of a missing person - his own boss - who vanished investigating a heroin smuggling operation. What Norton finds is a string of corpses, a gallery of rogues, and a fleet of fishing boats that specialize in red herrings. He also finds himself warming up to the heart-stopping halibut heiress Elaine Halloway.

Detective Terry Lane is a standout homicide cop who thought he’d seen it all ... until now. Lane has seen the darkest side of human behavior but he’s never seen a murder spree like this, targeting the wealthy, the powerful and the privileged. For the evidence is clear: the killers have not emerged from the seamy underside of the city ... but from six feet under it. They are the walking dead, spreading terror and showing no mercy.

Sheriff Kyle of Deadeye, Nevada, is headed east to the nation’s capital. Kyle’s about to discover that the law can be even wilder in the big city than in the Wild West. It’s a fact that hits home when he’s the one accused...of murder. Kyle’s come to the city to give a report to his senator on the misdeeds of Nevada’s filthy rich copper kings. But before he has a chance, he’s knocked unconscious, later coming to alongside his senator - now dead, with Kyle’s knife embedded in the corpse.

Imagine that your father is one of New York City’s top gangsters, and that you want nothing to do with him or his criminal empire. Now imagine he’s been murdered...and the only person who gives a damn is you. Meet Mat Lawrence, a stand-up guy who’s got one thing on his mind: revenge. The last place Mat wants to go is back to New York, but that’s where the killers are, and he won’t stop until they’re dead...or he is. And there’s only one man who can help him track them down: his father’s criminal attorney - the Mouthpiece.

Wrongfully accused, Spar has been condemned to suffer the brutality of the guards and the conditions on Devil’s Island. But they haven’t broken his will, and now, escaping, he has one mission in life: revenge. Spar’s out to kill the man who put him into the devil’s hands. But he’ll have to take on a gallery of rogues who are as treacherous as the waters of the Caribbean.

Kurt Reid may be innocent of the murder he's charged with (and of grand larceny, for that matter), but he's got no time to be thrown in jail and defend himself. Instead, Reid flees to pre-Communist China and Shanghai, the exotic city of mystery and death. Reid takes refuge in a tea house where he meets a Russian woman, Varinka Savischna, whom he manages to rescue from certain death. As beautiful as she is smart, she recruits him in her crusade against Chinese intelligence services.

Clark’s investigation begins with cocaine and leads to cold-blooded murder - the discovery of one, and then another, headless corpse. Who is behind the slaughter? Are the killings tied to the drug traffic? Or is a deeper, darker, and even more sinister conspiracy unfolding in the carnival?

When Ama’s straitlaced boyfriend, Nathan, invites her to his secluded upstate New York cabin for the weekend, she can’t say no. It’s a chance for them to escape the city’s distractions, share intimate secrets, and take their relationship to a deeper level. By day, it feels like the perfect love story. But when Ama is awakened by strange events, she starts to wonder if she really wants to know everything about Nathan.

With the possible exception of the expatriate writers living in Paris in the 1920s, no single group of American literary figures has achieved as much fame or notoriety as the New York sophisticates who met to match wits and attempt to outshine each other as members of what came to be called the Algonquin Round Table. The humorists Robert Benchley and S. J. Perelman, playwrights Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman, novelists Edna Ferber and Alexander Woollcott, and most famously, Dorothy Parker, were the literary luminaries who made up this group....

Liz Kelsey promised herself she’d never again spy on her feckless husband, Phil. But then she discovers a string of suggestive texts on his secret burner phone. Even worse, he’s flirting with the woman who shook their unstable marriage once before. But knowledge is power. What’s more dangerous - what Liz knows or what Phil doesn’t know?

The victims are the most popular girls in school, each murdered and arranged in a grim fairy-tale tableau. To find the killer, rookie detective Callum Pederson has gone undercover where the Princes hold court. He’s found enough secrets among the bros to bring them in for questioning - but he could very well get lost in the games the Princes play.

If Lars Marlin had three wishes, two have already been granted: he has escaped from Devil’s Island . . . and he has come face to face with the man who put him there - Paco Corvino. But the third wish - putting a bullet in Corvino - will have to wait. They’re off to sea, and not since Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh set sail on the Bounty have two more heated enemies been in the same boat.

Death and deception: Appearances are often deceiving and that is the underlying premise in this collection of short crime fiction. In "Live Free or Die" naive 21-year-old Emmy falls hard for 31-year-old Jack, an efficiency expert from New Hampshire who is not all what he seems. In "Murder in the Marsh" cyclist Carrie Anne Camack discovers more than she bargained for in the fertile farmlands of Ontario's Holland Marsh. In the final story, "The Cycopaths", a triathlon team's open-water swim training in Collingwood, Ontario, has deadly consequences.

While renovating her Victorian home, Ana Clementine finds an ornate door buried under forty years of earth. Once she restores it to the attic, she starts hearing whispers, her loving husband has become a stranger, and her baby daughter learns a chilling new word. Maybe Ana has unlocked the house’s secrets. Or maybe she’s becoming just a little unhinged herself.

Aunt Gail is magic. Carrie Louise is sure of it, and so she sets out to prove it as she hunts for shells on the beach. With the help of her aunt and a magic sand dollar, Carrie Louise solves the mystery and learns the truth about magic and the reality of love. A perfect, faith-based beach listen for children! A perfect listen anytime!

Enter the spell-binding worlds of best-selling author Robert Stanek and dream a new dream. The book contains two novellas, two short stories and a special feature exclusive.

Diverse, dark-humored, and deliciously bite-sized, you'll love this compelling collection of 16 psychological suspense short stories. If you're a fan of Roald Dahl or Gillian Flynn, you'll love these unsettling stories with a twist in the tale. Are you ready to stay up all night with USA Today best-selling author JT Lawrence?