On a snowy December night, single mother Rebecca Carter drives her van into a snowbank to avoid hitting an elk on a desolate mountain highway. She is at the end of her rope, out of money and food. Still, she refuses help from a man in a pickup truck. Rebecca’s adolescent daughter, Moonflower, is on the run from a grisly secret, and the last thing they can afford is to be remembered by anyone they meet. Meanwhile, Special Agent Marc Donner of the FBI has spent the better part of two years hunting down a gruesome serial killer who drains victims of blood before severing their spinal cords. As Agent Donner’s investigation brings him closer and closer to where Rebecca and Moonflower are hiding out, the life that Rebecca has fought so hard to hold together for her daughter becomes increasingly imperiled.

Sara Keane’s husband, Damien, has uprooted them from England and moved them to his native Northern Ireland for a “fresh start” in the wake of her nervous breakdown. Sara, who knows no one in Northern Ireland, is jobless, carless and friendless. When a blood-soaked old woman beats on the door, insisting the house is hers before being bundled back to her care facility, Sara begins to understand the house has a terrible history her husband never intended for her to discover. As the two women form a bond over their shared traumas, Sara finds the strength to stand up to her abuser, and Mary --- silent for six decades --- is finally ready to tell her story.

Since his debut novel, the modern classic THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, was published a decade ago, Stuart Neville has published eight other critically acclaimed novels and achieved international recognition as one of crime fiction’s great living writers. Now, for the first time, Neville offers readers a collection of his short fiction --- 12 chilling stories that traverse and blend the genres of noir, horror and speculative fiction, and bring the history and lore of Neville’s native Northern Ireland to glittering life. The collection concludes with the long-awaited novella “The Traveller,” the companion piece to THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST and COLLUSION.

Henry Garrick, a local car dealer who was maimed in an accident five months before, has apparently taken his own life. A simple case, it should be wrapped up in a few days. But something doesn’t feel right to Belfast detective Serena Flanagan, despite the fact that there is no evidence of foul play. As she investigates, Flanagan interviews Roberta Garrick, Henry’s widow, who is comforted in her grief by Reverend Peter McKay, rector of the local church and a close family friend. But with the secrets McKay is keeping, he is in no position to help anyone. As Flanagan picks at the threads of the dead man’s life, a disturbing picture emerges, and she realizes that Roberta is not what she seems.

Ciaran Devine, who made Belfast headlines seven years ago as the “schoolboy killer,” is about to walk free. At the age of 12, he confessed to the brutal murder of his foster father; his testimony mitigated the sentence of his older brother, Thomas, who was also found at the crime scene, covered in blood. But DCI Serena Flanagan, the only officer who could convince a frightened Ciaran to speak, has silently harbored doubts about his confession all this time. She will soon discover that even closed cases can unleash terror on the streets of Belfast.

Rea Carlisle has inherited a house from an uncle she never knew. It doesn’t take her long to clear out the remaining possessions, but to her horror she discovers a leather-bound book, its pages filled with locks of hair and fingernails: a catalog of victims. Rea turns to the only person she can think of: an old boyfriend, police inspector Jack Lennon. He has more than enough problems already, but a gruesome murder brings the dead man’s terrifying journal to the top of the Belfast police’s priority list.

As the Irish people prepare to welcome President John F. Kennedy to the land of his ancestors, a German national is murdered. This is the third foreigner to die within a few days, and Minister for Justice Charles Haughey wants the killing to end lest a shameful secret be exposed: the dead men were all Nazis granted asylum by the Irish government in the years following World War II.