Showing results by publisher "Crossroad Press" in Literature & Fiction

Evil Grows & Other Thrilling Tales collects nine offbeat tales of murder written by best-selling author Loren D. Estleman.

Seventeen-year-old Sharissa Walker is beauty personified, decency incarnate and a joy to behold - the apple of her father's eye. By anyone's standards, Greg Walker is the perfect father. He'll do anything to protect her and keep her safe. But in this novel of terror and suspense, nothing is as it seems. Nothing. Not youthful innocence. Not daughterly devotion. Not a father's love...

Chloe Marsh is found dead at the scene of an accident and pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. Half an hour later, as she is being taken to the morgue, Chloe suddenly sits up. But this isn't the first time Chloe has died, and it certainly won't be the last.

A golden time - that's what Chris Anderson, his brother Aaron, and their friends expected of that final summer. Freedom, and lazy, pleasure-filled days before the responsibilities of college and career. An idyll in their newfound private place on the shores of three small lakes. But Tri-Lakes is no oasis. A millennium ago it became the focal point of a powerfully malevolent force, and the remnants of an ancient Viking bloodfeud. Hatred is its source. Blood gives it power. And only sacrifice can banish it.

Jack Erthmun does not believe that the dead actually speak to him. But in their own way they tell him so much. Jack is a New York City police detective with his own very peculiar ways of solving homicides, and those ways are beginning to frighten his colleagues. He gets results, but at what cost? What's happening to Jack Erthmun? This may be Jack's last case - he's assigned to a series of unspeakable killings, gruesome murders with details that make even seasoned detectives queasy.

When Cletus J. Diggs gets a visit from his buddy Jasper and learns about the dead man sticking boot-first out of the fishing hole, he has no idea what it will lead to. How could he? Old Mill is famous for a lot of things - good fishing, barbecue, oversized satellite dishes and disappearing beer; it is not known for genetic research, ancient rituals, or alien abduction. From the moment Cletus and Sheriff Bob drag the corpse from the fishing hole to the final moments of terror, the action is nonstop, tense, and filled with surprises.

One hot summer afternoon a quarter century ago, a wealthy socialite and her young lover, a private school teacher, were gunned down in a cheap hotel room on the outskirts of the Midwestern city of Calista. Now, forensic sketch artist David Weiss has returned to his hometown to cover a routine celebrity murder trial for ABC. For someone who has earned a reputation for cracking high-profile cases with his portraits of suspects based on eyewtiness accounts, chruning out courtroom sketches is merely pedestrian work.

H. J. Mavity, painter of paperback romance covers, has a perplexing riddle to solve when her ex-boyfriend, Rick Dell, collapses at her feet after telling her that the words "ninety-nine clop clop" hold the clue to a lot of money. Although Dell has clearly been murdered, H. J.'s avarice gets the better of her and she determines to risk the ire of whoever has killed Dell to go after the money. First, however, she must understand the riddle and who better to help her than her ex-husband, Ben Spanner, a gifted mimic whose voice is known to millions through TV and radio commercials.

Something is happening to the children of Morgantown... One by one, they are claimed by a strange illness that cannot be identified. Night after night, they are haunted by terrifying creatures that invade their dreams. Moment to moment, they dread the final hours of daylight.

Retirement does not agree with former lieutenant Thomas Mullin. So when he receives a whiskey-stained letter detailing the disappearance of his friend's daughter Abby, he jumps on the first train to Arizona. Folks around town think Abby has gone back to the reservation where she was raised, yet the more Mullin investigates, the more suspicious he becomes. But even his agile mind and gift for deduction can't prepare him for the wild legends of the Papagos or the terrifying truth of what's really in store for Abby.

Down on the bayou, folks called the creature Zergopha. It had been around for quite a spell, slithering through the swamp, chowing down on the odd tourist here and there. Lately, though, it seemed to be after something more than a one-night snack. Affection, maybe. Possibly even...commitment. Now it's spring, and an immortal monster's bizarre fancy has turned to thoughts of weird love. Only one man is the unlucky object of Zergopha's affections.... Kent Montana.

It all begins innocently enough. Woody Robinson, a successful musician, gathers his baby-boomer friends and recreates an evening in 1969 out of nostalgia for his long dead love, Tracy. The party quickly becomes a wake for lost ideals, and then something more, as time and fate play wonderful and terrible tricks on the celebrants. By the evening's end, Tracy is back in Woody's life as though she had never left. But there is another change as well, a shocking one.

When the end came, it wasn’t zombies, asteroids, global warming, or nuclear winter. It was something that escaped from a lab. Something small, and very hungry. It starts with deadly rain that delivers death where it falls, but soon the whole planet is under threat as the infection spreads, consuming everything before it. A band of survivors on the Eastern coast of Canada watch as their world falls and crumbles to ruin. The infection seems relentless. More than that, it seems to be learning, adapting, and evolving faster than they can fight it.

The Earth is doomed. A sinister alien race, disguised as giant rotary phones, is planning to blow up the world and sell whatever is left as collectibles! It’s up to our hero Lenny and his team of paranormal investigators - a ghost hunter, a psychic, a vampire, a werevole, and a pooka named Bob - to save the day. They must survive Yetis, vampire brides, a robot swami, and being shot into the depths of space. But they must succeed, or Earth will be no more!

Thirteen dark tales from the author of Saint Sadist and Gods of the Dark Web. The disappearance of his son brings a rock star home to atone for past sins. A bartending ex-preacher faces a terrible destiny when an former congregation member walks into his bar wearing a bloody shirt. A blizzard traps a suicidal writer at the Jersey Shore with a cult and its strange goddess. A woman shoots a pornographic video and the act shatters her reality. The zombie apocalypse forces three teenagers to take refuge with the school bully. And more.

In 1712, Johann Bessler unveiled the perpetuum mobile, a wheel that continually spun after being set into motion until it was stopped with no mechanical input. Bessler's secret died with him. Except that it didn’t. Elly Kassel is the granddaughter of Evelyn Kassel. Elly is called into the offices of eminent London solicitors where she discovers that her grandmother was a rich woman. She also receives a trunk and an envelope, which she is not to open until she reaches New York City. In New York, she is told, all her questions about her grandmother and her inheritance will be answered.

He finds her crying in the lobby of a movie theater and takes her home to his apartment, a strange, beautiful woman with no last name, a mysterious past, and a powerful sexual allure. He wants her, and she wants him. There's only one problem: the men upstairs. She used to belong to them—and they'll do anything to get her back.

Bran Hatten is big, mean and unpredictable. He'll pound any guy that crosses his path, and he's a complete jerk to girls who spurn his affections. Tess Ryan and her friends are looking for options, even those the mysterious new girl at Pembrook High might offer. Charisse Bienville lives in the old dark house at the edge of town, and she's hinted that she commands powerful magical forces. Tess and her friends join Charisse in a ritual to end Bran's reign of terror, but they don't count on what might come afterward.

Welcome to the hard streets. These are four of the nastiest stories I have ever written: "Leftovers", "Statistic", "Soul Survivor", and "Dopple Dribble".

Based on the Kinsey reports, in which Dr. Alfred Kinsey conducted interviews with thousands of men and women on their sexual habits, Irving Wallace's blockbuster novel The Chapman Report concerns the interviewing of a number of society ladies from a community in California known only as "The Briars". These interviews, intended to extract data for a book on the sexual habits of married women, lead the listener on a trail through the lives and loves of several very different women, and the men in their lives.