Short Thrillers Suspense

For more than 30 years, Ellen Datlow has been at the center of horror. Bringing you the most frightening and terrifying stories, Datlow always has her finger on the pulse of what horror fans crave. Now, with the 11th volume of the series, Daltow's back again to bring you the stories that will keep you up at night. With each passing year, science, technology, and the march of time shine light into the craggy corners of the universe, making the fears of an earlier generation seem quaint. This light creates its own shadows. The Best Horror of the Year chronicles these shifting shadows.

Though she cannot entirely discount the effects of the head injuries they were both suffering at the time, Mary Russell is delighted by Sherlock Holmes' proposal of marriage. After all, they have become partners in crime, and she has recently come into her inheritance: What remains but to confirm the union with her mentor-turned-partner with the piece of paper?

Running from a world which wants him dead, ex-detective Sergeant Jake Pettman journeys to the isolated town of Blue Falls, Maine, home of his infamous, murderous ancestors. But Jake struggles to hide from who he is, and when a child disappears, he finds himself drawn into an investigation that shares no parallels to anything he has ever seen before. Held back by a chief of police plagued and tormented by his own secrets, Jake fights for the truth. All the way to the door of Jotham MacLeoid. An insidious megalomaniac who feeds his victims to a killing pit.

Amor Towles selects the best mystery short stories of the year, including tales by Andrew Child, Jeffrey Deaver, and T. C. Boyle. Under the auspices of New York City's legendary mystery fiction specialty bookstore, The Mysterious Bookshop, and aided by Edgar Award-winning anthologist Otto Penzler, New York Times bestseller Amor Towles has selected the twenty most puzzling, most thrilling, and most mysterious short stories from the past year, collected now in one entertaining volume.

With an all-new Sookie Stackhouse story and 12 other original tales, editors Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner bring together a stellar collection of tour guides who offer vacations that are frightening, funny, and touching for the fanged, the furry, the demonic, and the grotesque. Learn why it really can be an endless summer - for immortals.

Once a privileged heiress, Annabelle Ross is now struggling to hold her home and her life together through the devastation of the War Between the States. But with a forced marriage and a desolate future on the horizon, her hopes are beginning to dwindle. When she discovers an encrypted note on a dying soldier, she seizes the opportunity to use it to deliver a message of her own. Instead, she’s mistaken for a spy and captured. Can she unravel a conspiracy before her secrets cost a man his life? The complete trilogy of exciting Accidental Spy novels.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson traverse the British Isles and the Italian peninsula in a rousing new series of adventures. After a thrilling jaunt in the Far East, Holmes and Watson return to England to address an inheritance left by one of Watson's relatives in Cornwall, half of which he gave to his dear friend, Sherlock Holmes. Financially secure, the two are now free to spend as much time on Baker Street and the Continent as they please - until clues surface that Holmes' great nemesis, Professor Moriarty, might still be alive….

Even if you think you don't know him, you know him. Few in the Hollywood orbit have had greater influence; few have experienced more humiliating failure in their lifetime. Thanks in part to the biopic directed by Tim Burton, starring Johnny Depp, and bearing his name, Ed Wood has become an icon of Americana. Perhaps the purest expression of Wood's théma - pink angora sweaters, over-the-top violence, and the fraught relationships between the sexes - can be found in his unadulterated short stories.

Esther is getting old. No, she is old. Aging with every blink, with every breath. After a life full of power and purpose, she is met with the harsh reality that she is now obsolete, and her fragile moments are short. On the eve of the last night in the city she has called home for years, Esther and her lover Jacob share their fears and their romance for this world over one last meal, as they wait in fearful unrest for what is coming.

Murder comes in two familiar forms. Whether as a crime of passion with high emotions or a cold dispassionate plot to take life in order to gain in some way, the act strikes us all as somehow inhuman. Beneath us as civilised beings. But however we cloak our animal instincts the need to remove a human being and gain relief from abuse or gain from money, the term is just the same – MURDER. Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, J M Barrie, W W Jacobs and many others bring their literary heft to bear in as calculating a way as any killer could.

Before I Wake is a thriller fan's dream, a rich, resonant collection that reminds us, once again, of its author's enduring and unmistakable importance. This is popular fiction as it should be written. It doesn't get better than this.

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, poet, editor and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre, and is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story and considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction.

Exit Wounds is a thrilling anthology of crime stories written by masters of the genre, including Dean Koontz, Val McDermid, Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, Elly Griffiths, Dennis Lehane, Joe R. Lansdale, and others.

One of the worst blizzards in years hits Cherringham, cutting off the village from the rest of the world. Just outside of town, Broadmead Grange is a struggling retirement home, housed in a gothic mansion behind towering walls. One of the home's residents, poor old Archy, becomes Cherringham's latest victim after he loses himself amongst the snow drifts. Did Archy really just fall victim to the elements, or was there foul play involved? Jack and Sarah take on the case to dig up the truth.

Back in the harness after his abortive retirement to Florida, Rumpole glories in the mushroom pie, rainy day life of the Old Bailey. Here he spars with some old familiars like the venomous Judge Bullingham, and makes the acquaintance of some fresh foes. Six stories.

Meet the young widows. Together, they’ve shared their grief and emotional healing in the wake of losing their husbands. But whilst these meetings are the only places, they feel they can open up, all is not as it seems. Each woman is hiding something, but one is not who she says she is. In fact, she’s never even been married.

Eight deliciously talented mystery authors have lent their skills of crafting murder and suspense to this collection of gripping short stories. Each of these eight provocative tales is designed to entertain and mystify—and maybe even chill you to your core. Get lost in the wild imaginations of such New York Times bestselling writers as Andrew Child, Heather Graham, Reed Farrel Coleman, and John Gilstrap, plus authors Rick Bleiweiss, Jennifer Graeser Dornbush, Amanda Flower, and Don Bruns.

A fourth floor room, a door locked with the key inside, no way in, no way out. Edgar Allan Poe is the true grandfather of the murder mystery. Decades before Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot, Poe gave us C. Auguste Dupin, a man able to solve mysteries through observation and deduction.

Peyton knows the first suspect is always the husband, but Jake Ryder isn't acting like a typical suspect. Jake truly loved his wife. So what went wrong? Stepping into the circle of the social elite, Peyton finds that things work differently when you're at the top. And Jake Ryder seems to be caught in the epicenter. Ultimately, Peyton finds that you never know what darkness lurks in the human mind and that some will murder to keep that darkness hidden.

This new Cyanide Publishing edition contains three classic audiobooks by Maurice LeBlanc as well as background articles.Follow the exploits of Arsene Lupin, the greatest of all white-glove thieves and the original gentleman burglar. Mystery and tension build, but humor prevails throughout as Monsieur Lupin and Chief Inspector Guerchard try mightily to outwit each other. Slapstick humor, witty asides, and some unexpected twists.