Twisted Thrillers

Tyson is a survivor, and he wants an exotic companion. An email relationship with a young lady in Romania forces him to verbalize his desire. Intrigued by the powerful emotional connection that happens, he decides to make the journey to Bucharest. When they meet, unexpected feelings begin to contaminate their prose.

Dark and Twisty promises a collection of short, succinct, sometimes quirky short stories with a dark, emotive edge and intriguing twist.

That bullet wasn't meant for me. Or was it? Who would want to kill me? I make friends, not enemies. I live in the coziest, sweetest town on Earth, and I own a yarn store. I’m a knitter for goodness sake! Knitters are like the Golden Retrievers of humankind. Everybody loves us. At first, I was sure it was a case of mistaken identity. Now I’m not as sure. My friends and family are rallying around me to keep me safe. Does someone really want me dead? Who? Why? Is it someone I know? The police think it might be. Can I follow my instincts and unravel the clues before they try again?

Bonnie’s life is fairly conventional until a nasty bout of writer’s block threatens to derail the cushy life she’s built for herself. She’s convinced she’ll never write again—until she meets an unusual typewriter with a talent for romance novels. Once she publishes the best novel of her career—thanks entirely to the typewriter’s efforts—a suspicious book critic’s curiosity launches a chain of events that gets the author arrested for a murder she would have been happy to commit, but didn’t.

A baby girl is stolen, and tightly woven webs of deception encase her and two families for eight traumatic years. The stunningly beautiful and elegant Ashleigh Taylor gives birth to twin daughters while she's in Long Beach visiting her father figure, Charles Stuart, the founder of Bentley's Royale. Hours later, a parent's worst nightmare occurs: Cassie is kidnapped. Twisted Webs unravels the mystery of the abduction of Callie's identical twin. There is plenty going on all the way to the end.

With a sting set for a downtown bar, Special Agent Lara Grant and her team are on high alert to snare the most dangerous man in Manhattan. No one tears their team apart and gets away with it. Their aim: to get the perp's DNA from his shot glass.... Mission accomplished, but each step forward in the case takes them two steps back into Lara's past - this time to the years before her undercover assignment and a family torn apart by a brutal murder. But Lara knows she can focus only on the present.

In May 1934, outside of Hugo, Oklahoma, a homeless man and his 13-year-old daughter are befriended by a charismatic drifter, newly released from the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. The drifter, Clint Palmer, lures father and daughter to Texas, where the father, Dillard Garrett, mysteriously disappears, and where his daughter, Lucile, begins a one-year ordeal as Palmer’s captive on a crime spree - culminating in the notorious Greenville, Texas, "skeleton murder" trial of 1935.

From the warped mind who brought you Zombies Don’t Surf and the rest of the Guardians of the Apocalypse saga comes a twisted tale of blood and death and magic in a mythical place called The City. Think The Dresden Files meets Sin City, while hanging out with The Warriors in 1947, then crank it up to 11 and hang on for the ride.

Nothing's ever easy when Sherlock Holmes is involved. Joanna Watson needs sports and academic scholarships if she is going to make it all the way to med school. That means keeping out of trouble, and her school record squeaky clean. But upon befriending the mysterious New Girl, Joanna has her perfect record ruined, skips school for the first time in her life, and finds a blackmailer aiming a gun in her direction. All she knows is that she's going to get grounded...if they get out of this alive.

Someone to watch over Rose. Losing her husband in a small plane crash last year has forced Rose to get on with her life. But when a storm rolls in, her world is shattered with the discovery of a body buried deep within her own walls. Now, as all fingers point in her direction, a mistress steps out of the shadows, along with a dark family scandal that might shed some light on motive. As people around her drop like flies, the real killer gets too close, and Rose seeks the help of the police officer who knocked on her door one rainy night a year ago.

Troublesome dreams plague Tulsa police detective Kenny Elliot, who grew up in the small town of Porter, Oklahoma. When a bizarre murder catapults Elliot into his past, he's brought face-to-face with the fabric of his nightmares.

Hunter has no idea what he has just got himself into when hiring a young, attractive female to be his secretary. He is just trying to get himself caught up on the workload in the office now that his wife is dealing with cancer, and can no longer take care of that side of the family business. Teagan seems to be a great choice for a secretary. She is early to work and goes the extra mile to help out. But underneath that sweet smile is a very cunning woman who is out to get what she feels she deserves....

The compelling small-town series continues with an escalating body count in the hundreds while the aftermath of the discovery of cave kids and another serial killer stirs up more secrets, conflict, guilt, and irony. A new arrival introduces new tension for the Farmer family.

From Book 1: Warning cliffhangers and jaw-droppers ahead! Perfect for fans of The Leftovers, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Gone Girl...a chilling pause-resister with delicious dialogue and a plot that creeps and crawls! Home, Syd West’s twisted thriller series, will get under your skin!

Software super geek James Forrest becomes unexpectedly embroiled in a murder case when he is hired to investigate the software at Distributed Nanotech Inc., a Berkeley supercomputer software company. James tells Susanne Anderson, the CEO, that DNI's murdered Chief Scientist copied his code from an artificial intelligence project; this makes her life even more complex. While she struggles to keep the company’s venture financing on track and James struggles to understand the software, they become murder suspects.

THE MAN WHO WAS TWISTED BUT HIP. It is 1897 and France is torn apart by The Dreyfus Affair, a disgraceful episode of anti-Semitism that plagued France for a decade and brought out the worst of behavior in far too many French men and women. Westminster needs help from Sherlock Holmes to make sure that the evil tide of anti-Semitism that has engulfed France will not spread. While spending an uneventful morning searching for his nephew, Dr. Watson finds Sherlock Holmes and together they watch as a man is murdered, a direct consequence of the anti-Semitic conflict that is raging just across the Channel.

Misfortune seemed to follow us psychologists. Through my observations of my two colleagues Jillian and Kendal, I lost all hope for normalcy in my own life. My patient’s problems and disturbed interpretation of life began to cloud my mind. It took years for them to get inside my head. But they did it. It wasn’t one that got to me, but all contributed to my undoing.

FEAT DESC

Neville St. Clair, a respectable businessman, has disappeared and his wife claims she saw him at the upper window of an opium den. Rushing upstairs to the room she found only a beggar who denied any knowledge of St. Clair – whose clothes are later found in the room, and his coat, laden with coins, in the River Thames outside the window. The beggar is arrested, but a few days later St. Clair's wife receives a letter from her husband. Holmes concludes, then proves, that the beggar is actually St. Clair in disguise; he confesses that he has been leading a double life as a beggar, making more money that way than in his nominal work.

Tess McBray was dying. The solstice syndrome had no cure, and she resigned herself to an early grave. But just when she gave up on survival, all her symptoms mysteriously disappeared. All but one symptom, anyway. Something is wrong with Tess’ hands. They absorb any material they touch, and her skin turns to wood, steel, or concrete. It doesn’t take this comic book obsessed 21-year-old long to figure out what’s going on: somehow, she’s developed super powers. And she’s not the only one; across the country, people are coming forward and sharing their gifts with the world.