On Venice’s popular Lido beach, a man is found lying on the shore, his throat slit and his tongue viciously torn out, and his face covered by an unusual antique mask. Superiors inside the Venice Carabinieri have finally given Captain Kat Tapo permission to run her first murder case. But when she learns that the mask is a Masonic “hoodwink” --- and that the circumstances of the man’s death are eerily similar to the Masonic punishment for betrayal --- she suspects that her appointment has darker implications.

Lonely Charles Latterly arrives at his small hotel hoping that the island’s blue skies and gentle breezes will brighten his spirits. Unfortunately, there’s no holiday cheer to be found among his fellow guests, who include a pompous novelist, a stuffy colonel, a dangerously ill-matched married couple, and an ailing old man. The one charming exception is orphaned teenager Candace Finbar, who takes Charles under her wing and introduces him to the island’s beauty. But when a body is found, Charles quickly realizes that the killer must be among the group of guests.

Edward Savill, working in London as an agent for a wealthy American, receives word that his estranged wife, Augusta, has been killed in France. She leaves behind 10-year-old Charles, who is brought to England to Charnwood Court, a house in the country leased by a group of émigré refugees. Savill is sent to retrieve the boy, though it proves easier to reach Charnwood than to leave. And only when Savill arrives there does he discover that Charles is mute. The boy has witnessed horrors beyond his years, but what terrible secret haunts him so deeply that he is unable to utter a word?

In Jeff Lindsay's long-awaited sequel to his debut novel, TROPICAL DEPRESSION, Billy Knight wants to ride out Key West’s slow season with the occasional charter and the frequent beer. But when he discovers a dead body floating in the gulf, Billy gets drawn into a deadly plot of dark magic and profound evil. Along with his plucky, gun-happy friend, Nicky, and Anna, a resilient and mysterious survivor of her own horrors, Billy sets out to right the wrongs the police won’t, putting himself in mortal peril on the high seas.

Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast, together with his ward Constance Greene, travels to the quaint seaside village of Exmouth, Massachusetts, to investigate the theft of a priceless wine collection. But inside the wine cellar, they find something considerably more disturbing: a bricked-up niche that once held a crumbling skeleton. Pendergast and Constance soon learn that Exmouth is a town with a very dark and troubled history, and this skeleton may be only the first hint of an ancient transgression, kept secret all these years. But they will discover that the sins of the past are still very much alive.

As Allied forces close in on Berlin in spring 1945, a solitary figure emerges from the wreckage that is Germany. It is Marian Sutro, whose existence was last known to her British controllers in autumn 1943 in Paris. Returned to an England she barely knows and a postwar world she doesn’t understand, Marian searches for something on which to ground the rest of her life. When the mysterious Major Fawley, the man who hijacked her wartime mission to Paris, draws her into the ambiguities and uncertainties of the Cold War, she sees a way to make amends for the past and to find the identity that has never been hers.

When Amory Clay was born, her disappointed father gave her an androgynous name and announced the birth of a son. But this daughter was not one to let others define her; Amory became a woman who accepted no limits to what that could mean, and, from the time she picked up her first camera, one who would record her own version of events. Moving freely between London and New York, between photojournalism and fashion photography, and between the men who love her on complicated terms, Amory establishes her reputation as a risk taker and a passionate life traveler.

In a nation still recovering from the nuclear tragedies of 40 years earlier, Clyde is working a dead-end guaranteed job at a diner, and Moonis is incarcerated in a Labor Camp for the Malcontented. But when Moonis’ sister, Cecily, goes missing, the old friends escape their prisons to search for her in post-fallout America. Moonis and Clyde follow Cecily’s trail until it leads them into the atomic-ravaged heart of the Midwest, an outlaw territory of dark legends and darker truths where Cecily is being held captive by a brutal gang lord.

Over the years, Caitlin Strong has taken on all manner of criminals and miscreants, thwarting the plans of villains to do vast damage to the country and state she loves. But none of that has prepared Caitlin for an investigation that pits her against ruthless billionaire oilman Calum Dane, whose genetically engineered pesticide may have poisoned a large swath of the state. How that poisoning is connected to the disappearance of 30 high school students presents Caitlin with the greatest and most desperate challenge of her career.

From Edgar Allan Poe to Kelly Link, M. R. James to Neil Gaiman, H.H. Munro to Audrey Niffenegger herself, GHOSTLY spans the whole history of the ghost story genre from gothic horror to the modern era. Each story is introduced by Niffenegger, with short original commentary and background on why she chose to include it. Also included is her own story, “A Secret Life with Cats.”