Top Ten Macabre Novels Box Set

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Top Ten Macabre Novels Box Set

 

Every Dead Thing by John Connolly

Tortured and brilliant private detective Charlie Parker stars in this thriller by New York Times bestselling author John Connolly.

Former NYPD detective Charlie “Bird” Parker is on the verge of madness. Tortured by the unsolved slayings of his wife and young daughter, he is a man consumed by guilt, regret, and the desire for revenge. When his former partner asks him to track down a missing girl, Parker finds himself drawn into a world beyond his imagining: a world where thirty-year-old killings remain shrouded in fear and lies, a world where the ghosts of the dead torment the living, a world haunted by the murderer responsible for the deaths in his family—a serial killer who uses the human body to create works of art and takes faces as his prize. But the search awakens buried instincts in Parker: instincts for survival, for compassion, for love, and, ultimately, for killing.

Aided by a beautiful young psychologist and a pair of bickering career criminals, Parker becomes the bait in a trap set in the humid bayous of Louisiana, a trap that threatens the lives of everyone in its reach. Driven by visions of the dead and the voice of an old black psychic who met a terrible end, Parker must seek a final, brutal confrontation with a murderer who has moved beyond all notions of humanity, who has set out to create a hell on earth: the serial killer known only as the Traveling Man.

In the tradition of classic American detective fiction, Every Dead Thing is a tense, richly plotted thriller, filled with memorable characters and gripping action. It is also a profoundly moving novel, concerned with the nature of loyalty, love, and forgiveness. Lyrical and terrifying, it is an ambitious debut, triumphantly realized.

 

Niceville by Carsten Stroud

 

Rainey Teague disappears on his way home from school, literally vanishing into thin air. He’s there one moment and gone the next, captured on security cameras. After he is found, the nightmare only gets deeper, especially for detective Nick Kavanaugh and his wife, Kate, a family practice lawyer. They have all been drawn into a shadow world between life and death–a world where a man killed on Friday night is in a duel on Sunday, where an armed robbery triggers a disastrous cascade of events that ricochets across twenty different lives, and where Nick and Kate will come face to face with the ancient force of anger and evil that lurks beneath Niceville.

Carsten Stroud is the author of the New York Times bestselling true crime accountClose Pursuit. His novels include Sniper’s Moon, Lizard Skin, Black Water Transit, Cuba Strait, and Cobraville. He lives in

Toronto.

 

Pig Island by Mo Hayder

 

Mo Hayder, who writes dark, perfect thrillers . . . now spins a shivery tale about a cult on the west coast of Scotland, where the weather nourishes bleak menace.”Sherryl Connelly,New York Daily News

Another astonishing mutation of the crime thriller . . . [Pig Island] masterfully exposes not only the horror but also the human frailty at the story’s core.”Anna Mundow,The Boston Globe

 

From Edgar Award winner and internationally bestselling author Mo Hayder, Pig Island is a riveting, disturbing thriller of religious fanatics, hoax debunkers, and the dark side of belief. Journalist Joe Oakes makes a living exposing supernatural hoaxes, but when he visits a secretive religious cult on a remote Scottish island, everything he thought he knew is overturned. While investigating a strange apparition caught briefly on film wandering the lonely beaches of Pig Island, so deformed it can hardly be human, Oakes crosses a border of electrical fencing, toxin-filled oil drums, and pigs’ skulls to infiltrate the territory of the group’s isolated founder, Malachi Dove. The violent consequences of Oakes’s transgression are so catastrophic that it forces him to question the nature of evil and to face a terrible reality: was Dove responsible for one of the bloodiest crimes Scotland has seen in years? And, worse, have his actions set into motion a killing machine that will stop at nothing?

 

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Harper Curtis is a killer who stepped out of the past. Kirby Mazrachi is the girl who was never meant to have a future.

Kirby is the last shining girl, one of the bright young women, burning with potential, whose lives Harper is destined to snuff out after he stumbles on a House in Depression-era Chicago that opens on to other times.

At the urging of the House, Harper inserts himself into the lives of the shining girls, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. He’s the ultimate hunter, vanishing into another time after each murder, untraceable-until one of his victims survives.

Determined to bring her would-be killer to justice, Kirby joins the Chicago Sun-Times to work with the ex-homicide reporter, Dan Velasquez, who covered her case.Soon Kirby finds herself closing in on the impossible truth . . .

 

The Supernatural Enhancements by Edgar Cantoro

Europeans arrive in Virginia to take possession of the estate. A. is the 23-year-old unforeseen scion; Niamh is the mute punk teen girl he refers to as his associate or his bodyguard. Both are ready to settle into their new cushy lifestyle, and the rumors about the mansion being haunted add to their excitement. But ghosts are not in any way the deepest secret of the house.

Through journals, letters, security footage, audio recordings, and ciphers, we follow A. and Niamh as they delve into Wells’ dubious suicide, the secret society he founded and its mysterious Game —a “bourgeois pastime” of global proportions— in Edgar Cantero’s dazzling and original gothic adventure.

Inheriting an eerie estate in the Virginia woods, a skeptical man wonders about his family member’s suicide and realizes that the house harbors both ghosts and terrible secrets, in a story told through journal entries, scrawled notes, security footage, audio recordings and advertisements.

 

 

The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville

The best first novel I’ve read in years…It’s a flat-out terror trip.”—James Ellroy

“Not only one of the finest thriller debuts of the last ten years, but also one of the best Irish novels, in any genre, of recent times.”—John Connolly

“The Ghosts of Belfast is the book when the world finally sits up and goes WOW, theIrish really have taken over the world of crime writing. Stuart Neville is Ireland’s answer to Henning Mankell.”—Ken Bruen

“Sure to garner attention and stir lively pub discussions.”—Library Journal

“Neville’s debut novel is tragic, violent, exciting, plausible, and compelling. . . . The Ghosts of Belfast is dark, powerful, insightful, and hard to put down.”—Booklist

“Neville’s debut is as unrelenting as Fegan’s ghosts, pulling no punches as it describes the brutality of Ireland’s ‘troubles’ and the crime that has followed, as violent men find new outlets for their skills. Sharp prose places readers in this pitiless place and holds them there. Harsh and unrelenting crime fiction, masterfully done.”—Kirkus

 

The Faces of God by Mallock

Murder and depravity are Police Commissioner Amédée Mallock’s daily bread. As far as he is concerned, mankind has been thoroughly abandoned by God, and the visions that haunt him do nothing to disabuse him of this notion. But nothing he has encountered has prepared him for the sudden appearance of a serial killer dubbed the Make-up Artist.” The bodies of the killer’s first victims, found in four separate neighborhoods of Paris, are monstrous works of art, baroque masterpieces of depravity, demented expressions of corrupted piety. These crimes are unprecedented in their ferocity and their intricacy, and the deeper Mallock investigates the greater the mysteries and the enigmas. Foremost among them: is a solution to a series of crimes behind which the devil himself seems to lurk even conceivable?

 

Devil-Devil by Graeme Kent

It’s not easy being Ben Kella. As a sergeant in the Solomon Islands Police Force, as well as an aofia, a hereditary spiritual peacekeeper of the Lau people, he is viewed with distrust by both the indigenous islanders and the British colonial authorities. In
the past few days he has been cursed by a magic man, stumbled across evidence of a cargo cult uprising, and failed to find an American anthropologist who had been scouring the mountains for a priceless pornographic icon. Then, at a mission station, Kella discovers an independent and rebellious young American nun, Sister Conchita, secretly trying to bury a skeleton. The unlikely pair of Kella and Conchita are forced to team up to solve a series of murders that tie into all these other strange goings-on. Set in the 60’s in one of the most beautiful and dangerous areas of the South Pacific, Devil-Devil launches an exciting new series.

 

The Hotel of the Three Roses by August De Angelis

The shady Hotel of the Three Roses is home to an assortment of drunks and degenerates. Inspector De Vincenzi receives an anonymous letter, warning him of an imminent outrage at the guest house, and shortly after a macabre discovery is made–a body is found hanging in the hotel’s stairwell. As De Vincenzi investigates, more deaths follow, until he finally uncovers a gothic and grotesque story linking the Three Roses’ unhappy residents to each other.

This intensely dramatic mystery from the father of the Italian crime novel, Augusto de Angelis, features his most famous creation–Inspector De Vincenzi.

 

A Matter of Blood- The Forgotten Gods by Sarah Pinborough

In a world steeped in darkness, a new breed of evil has fallen…

London’s ruined economy has pushed everyone to the breaking point, and even the police rely on bribes and deals with criminals to survive. Detective Inspector Cass Jones struggles to keep integrity in the police force, but now, two gory cases will test his mettle. A gang hit goes wrong, leaving two schoolboys dead, and a serial killer calling himself the Man of Flies leaves a message on his victims saying “nothing is sacred.”