In this horror story set in colonial New England, a law-abiding Puritan woman goes missing. Or perhaps she has fled or abandoned her family. Or perhaps she has been kidnapped, and set loose to wander in the dense woods of the north. Alone and possibly lost, she meets another woman in the forest. Then everything changes. On a journey that will take her through dark woods full of almost-human wolves, through a deep well wet with the screams of men, and on a living ship made of human bones, our heroine may find that the evil she flees has been inside her all along.

TOWNIES collects, for the first time, Eryk Pruitt's short fiction in a single volume. The title story, "Townies," details what really happened one night, after hours, in a once-popular East Texas sports bar, and the sinister revenge that would soon follow. "Let's Be Awful" tells the story of a cocktail waitress who decides that, after a horrid round of revenge porn, her days of playing the victim have past. In "A Lot Prettier (When You Smile)," we are introduced to a woman who can wrap any man around her finger and decides to put that powerful skill to use one last time.

An anonymous tip about a crime in Upper Manhattan proves to be a setup. An officer is taken down --- and, despite the attackers' efforts, it's not Michael Bennett. New York's top cop is not the only one at risk. One of Bennett's children sustains a mysterious injury. And a series of murders follows, each with a distinct signature, alerting Bennett to the presence of a professional killer with a flair for disguise. Bennett taps his best investigators and sources, and they fan out across the five boroughs. But the leads they're chasing turn out to be phantoms. The assassin takes advantage of the chaos, enticing an officer into compromising Bennett, then luring another member of Bennett's family into even graver danger.

A loyal street lieutenant to New Orleans’ mob boss, Carlos Marcello, Frank Guidry knows too much about the crime of the century: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Within hours of JFK’s murder, everyone with ties to Marcello is turning up dead, and Guidry suspects he’s next. With few good options, Guidry hits the road to Las Vegas, to see an old associate --- a dangerous man who hates Marcello enough to help Guidry vanish. When Guidry sees a beautiful housewife on the side of the road with a broken-down car, two little daughters and a dog in the back seat, he sees the perfect disguise to cover his tracks from the hit men on his tail.

Toby is a happy-go-lucky charmer who has dodged a scrape at work and is celebrating with friends when the night takes a turn that will change his life --- he surprises two burglars who beat him and leave him for dead. Struggling to recover from his injuries, beginning to understand that he might never be the same man again, he takes refuge at his family's ancestral home to care for his dying uncle Hugo. Then a skull is found in the trunk of an elm tree in the garden --- and as detectives close in, Toby is forced to face the possibility that his past may not be what he has always believed.

When a mutilated body is found hanging in a seedy motel, forensics specialist Liam Dwyer assumes the crime scene will be business as usual. Instead, the victim turns out to be a woman he’d had an affair with before breaking it off to save his marriage. But there’s a bigger problem: Liam has no memory of where he was or what he did on the night of the murder. Panicked, Liam turns to his brother, Sean, a homicide detective. From fingerprints to DNA, everything points to Liam, who must race against time and his department to uncover the truth --- even if that truth is his own guilt. Yet as he digs deeper, dark secrets come to light, and Liam begins to suspect the killer might actually be Sean.

Rebecca’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Ezra, has gone missing. The police suspect he has been playing the “stranger game,” a viral hit in which players start following others in real life, as they might otherwise do on social media. As the game spreads, however, the rules begin to change, and disappearances are reported across the country. Curious about this popular new obsession, and hoping that she might be able to track down Ezra, Rebecca tries the game for herself. She also meets Carey, who is willing to take the game further than she imagined possible. As her relationship with Carey and involvement in the game deepen, she begins to uncover an unsettling subculture that has infiltrated the world around her.

When Paula picks up her last passenger of the night, all she sees is a few more dollars to put toward her husband's medical bills. That's before she recognizes the quiet stranger in her back seat as a world-famous musician and realizes the woman waiting at his destination is not his equally famous wife. So, Paula does what any down-on-her-luck woman would do. She asks for money in exchange for silence. But when a woman is murdered in the same building days later, Paula discovers she is the only witness to the secret affair --- an affair that incriminates the musician. Now, Paula's silence comes at a much more dangerous price.

A group of criminals in 1946 pull off the heist of the century, stealing a dozen priceless works of art from a Boston museum. But while the thieves get caught, the art is never found. Forty years later, the last surviving thief gets out of jail and goes hunting for the loot, involving some innocent college students in his dangerous plan --- and 30 years after that, in the present day, the former college kids, now all grown up, are drawn back into danger as the still-missing art tempts a deadly new generation of treasure hunters.

Late one night, a man walks into the luxurious home of disgraced banker Harry McNamara and his wife, Julie. And when the man launches an unspeakably brutal attack on Harry, a horror-struck Julie watches her husband die. Just one hour later, J. P. Carney hands himself into the police and confesses to beating Harry to death. Except he also claims that the assault was not premeditated and that he didn’t know the identity of his victim. With a man as notorious as Harry McNamara, who was just found innocent in a highly sensationalized fraud trial, the detectives cannot help but wonder: Was this really a random act of violence? Was Julie really powerless to stop JP? When Harry’s many sins are unveiled to include corruption, greed and betrayal, nothing is for sure.