Dark fiction novels rooted in horror, suspense, and mystery.
These books explore dangerous situations, hidden motives, and the moments when ordinary lives tilt toward the unknown. Rather than relying on shock alone, they build intensity through pacing, atmosphere, and character. For readers who enjoy being pulled steadily deeper into shadowed territory.
They cannot have the life they planned. She will not let him have another.
Three days after marrying Olympic sharpshooter Angel Meade, forensic expert Ridge Warner has annulled the marriage, attended her funeral, and discovered that the empty casket was only the beginning.
Angel is alive, armed, and determined to erase every person connected to the truth that destroyed their future. Her attacks leave Ridge’s home in ruins, his allies exposed, and the woman he loves marked for death. Each failed attempt only sharpens Angel’s resolve. She does not merely want Ridge dead. She wants control of the ending.
Ridge knows how to read a crime scene, anticipate an attack, and turn almost anything into a weapon. But Angel has built her campaign on false deaths, manufactured evidence, and carefully staged realities. To keep another victim alive, Ridge must give her a lie convincing enough to believe.
Now hunter and target are each acting on a version of events created by the other, and the next mistake may decide whose story survives.
Months after fifteen-year-old Rosa helped save his abducted daughter, Enrique learns that Rosa has been sold into sexual slavery by her brother. Driven by gratitude, guilt, and an attraction he won’t admit, the high school principal slips secretly away to search the brothels of Nogales, unsure whether he can bring Rosa home, or even find her at all.
Rosa refuses to remain a victim, but she has no intention of becoming Enrique’s grateful rescue. Fierce and calculating, she pulls him deeper into a violent struggle involving traffickers, gang loyalties, frightened children, and enemies who do not consider escape the end of an account.
As Enrique risks his marriage, career, and life to protect her, he must confront the possibility that his heroism and his hunger come from the same dangerous place. Because the more Rosa claims the right to decide who she will become, the harder it is for him to deny what others can already see.
She’s a Lot Like You is a relentless borderland crime novel about moral debt, desire, and the terrible difference between saving someone and believing you have the right to decide what their freedom should look like.
In Footsteps in the Shadows, Lou Manfredo crafts a masterful collection of crime stories that delves into the darker sides of human nature and the weight of moral choices. Beginning in contemporary Brooklyn, readers are introduced to Detective Joe Rizzo, whose sharp instincts and steady resolve are tested as he uncovers truths buried beneath the city’s chaos. Whether navigating the haunting silence of empty subway stations or pursuing leads down rain-soaked streets, Rizzo’s world is one of tension and grit.
The collection’s early stories set the stage with meticulously crafted cases that invite readers into the lives of investigators and the moral dilemmas they face. As the pages turn, the narrative broadens, spanning generations and offering perspectives from a small-town sleuth in mid-20th-century Long Island to the struggles of a modern detective grappling with his family's legacy.
Rich in atmosphere and charged with emotion, Footsteps in the Shadows captures the fragile humanity of those on both sides of the law. These tales resonate with fear, hope, and determination, drawing readers into a world where every choice carries weight and every shadow tells a story.
With compelling characters and vivid storytelling, Manfredo offers a haunting exploration of crime and its ripple effects, making this a must-read for fans of gripping, emotionally resonant fiction.
DEA Agent Faith Nelson is supposed to be going home for Christmas. Her father is facing heart surgery in Oakland. Her mother needs her. And Faith needs distance from Minnesota, from the shooting that made her a reluctant hero, and from the nightmares that followed.
Then a cartel accountant stops cooperating with a federal grand jury when his college-age stepdaughter disappears.
Faith is sent north to Duluth in the teeth of a winter storm, paired with a partner she does not trust and trapped in a case that keeps turning darker. The missing girl may not have been taken at all. Her roommate knows more than she is saying. A Mexican cartel executioner has entered Minnesota. And when the trail leads beyond Duluth toward the frozen north shore of Lake Superior, Faith finds herself alone, injured, and running out of time.
Up North is a crime thriller about violence, survival, and the terrible cost of doing the right thing when the cold is closing in and no one is coming fast enough.
Praise for Up North
“Northern Minnesota in winter is no place for the faint-hearted. Faith Nelson keeps relearning that lesson in Dave Case’s intense thriller, Up North. Case has brought decades of police experience to his writing, which gives his action scenes a welcome authenticity.”
— Sara Paretski, author of the bestselling V.I. Warshawski series and the soon to be released Bad Company
5.0from 3 readers
Chapter 1
A flash of brake lights ahead in the darkness warned Faith Nelson that the other car was slowing down. She took her foot off the gas and coasted to a stop on the gravel road. She lowered her window but all she heard was the soft murmur of her engine.
It was an inky dark night along the Minnesota River. The air heavy with humidity and the stink of fish. A well-lit pier up ahead produced a shock of intense yellow light. A stand of trees off to the side created a black blotch against the glowing radiance maybe a block away.
She was thinking in blocks instead of feet. Typical city girl. The misplaced frame of reference made her smile. It wasn’t the only thing that made her feel out of place here. She was a black city girl from Oakland in the Midwest.
She strained her ears and heard a car door shut. When she’d first been assigned the agency minivan, she’d disabled the dome light so there was no illumination when she opened her door. Leaning over, she popped the glove box and retrieved her Maglite, praying the batteries were still good, but didn’t want to risk checking it. She shut the van off and pocketed the keys.
As she got out, the tick of the engine was overpowered by the chirping of the crickets. She stuck the flashlight in her back pocket, then pulled her Glock, holding it in low-ready as she moved slowly forward. The gravel crunched under her soft steps. With her elbow, she felt the extra magazines on her belt. Hopefully she had enough bullets.
She could almost hear her range instructor back at Quantico barking in her ear: What’re you gonna do, Nelson?
His hot breath on her neck as he shouted. Have a plan, Agent! Always have a plan.
But she had none.
Why were they abducting Moose? Had he done something? Double-crossed them?
As she closed the distance, Faith heard a sound, but couldn’t tell whether it was a trunk or car door closing. She made it to a cut in the trees and could see through the leaves where a splintered path led down to the river. It was hard to believe she was in suburban Minneapolis, where the river valley divided Bloomington from Burnsville. She might as well be in the middle of nowhere, as isolated as she felt. At least it was warm. It was still September.
She crept forward. From the light of the pier she could make out the concrete seawall at the river’s lip, complete with docking cleats. No barge was moored at the landing.
The vegetation had been cleared away closer to the pier and the flat ground packed with stone led to the concrete. This was the easternmost portion of the dock. No doubt they’d dredged the river so that it was good and deep right off the wall. Any arriving vessels would be heavy with ore or grain or garbage or whatever else it was they were bringing in. The smell of fish filled her nose. The odor was anything but fresh.
From her position in the darkness, she could make out three figures in the glaring light, their splintered shadows stretching across the gray concrete in several directions. Their boldness only reminded her that she was completely on her own. No cavalry was coming to her aid.
Two men stood facing each other. The third crouched, working on something at the foot of the tallest man. She edged closer, counting on the deep shadows to keep her hidden.
The target of her surveillance, Darrell Lundgren, was easily recognizable as the tall man at the edge of the cement. His arms were secured behind his back. He was six-five and had long hair. Earlier, Faith had thought she’d be watching a dope deal. Lundgren, known as Moose to his biker gang, had an unscheduled meet with a guy who was supplying him with crank. But Moose had been taken at gunpoint by his contact and another man. And now they were all here next to the dark undulating water of the river.
Her problem being that she’d been conducting an unauthorized surveillance. Her calls to the other agents on her team had gone unanswered. Under her breath, she cursed her training agent and his Monday Night Football soiree.
Evan Thompson was Moose’s contact. Thompson was bald, short, and stocky, and stood in front of Moose. He held his revolver at waist level, pointed at Lundgren’s stomach. His accomplice, a guy in a wife-beater and Levi’s, was wiring something to Moose’s ankles.
Thompson ran his empty hand across his bald head. His voice floated up through the darkness as she closed the distance, worried she’d be spotted at any second. “It doesn’t really matter whether you’re a snitch or a pig. You ain’t walking away from this.”
Was Moose a cop? She couldn’t make out his response, though she could see him shaking his shaggy head. For once he wore no ponytail, and his greasy hair covered his face.
“But I’ll do this,” Thompson said. “Tell me what you’ve shared—” he paused and circled his gun’s barrel. “—and I can make it quick.” He cleared his throat and spat. When Moose didn’t respond, Thompson hooked his thumb at the river behind him. “Otherwise, you’re going in alive.”
Faith heard Wife-Beater Guy mutter something unintelligible.
Thompson looked down. “What’s wrong?”
The guy’s answer was inaudible. She finally got close enough to see that he’d wrapped Lundgren’s legs, from the knees down, with thick nylon rope and was using pliers to wire cinderblocks to the crimped loops at the end of the line.
They were going to drown him, if they didn’t shoot him first. Her mind raced.
What’re you gonna do now, Nelson! Gotta do something! Clock’s ticking! She forced herself to think.
There was at least one firearm in play, making Thompson the most immediate threat. Before she’d entered the Criminal Investigations Training Program with the D.E.A., Faith had never fired a gun, and then it had taken her three times to qualify. Shooting wasn’t a skill that had come naturally.
Know what’s down range! What’s behind your target! Don’t want to kill Grandma if you miss!
At least the backstop was the river and the uninhabited bank on the other side. How much time did she have? Regardless, she had to get closer. Rising from her crouch, she started for the men, hoping the deep shadows and their attention on one another would obscure her approach.
Heel. Toe. Heel. Toe. Get it right! Someone’s life might be at stake! The range instructor’s voice rang in her ears. Don’t let your front sight bounce! Keep it level and steady!
Wife-Beater Guy said something else to Thompson as he scooched back from Moose. He must be done. Faith’s stomach dropped and she couldn’t breathe. Game time.
Smooth is fast! her instructor had shouted. Squeeze!
“Police!” Faith yelled. “Thompson, drop the gun!”
Thompson turned and looked at her.
She was surprised at how close she’d gotten as she exhaled slowly out of pursed lips.
A smile spread across Thompson’s face before his hand moved, bringing the gun around toward her. The hole of the barrel huge and black.
She squeezed the trigger.
Double tap! She could feel the spittle on her cheek as the instructor had screamed, Two to the chest!
The first explosion scared her. The second sounded hollow and wasn’t quite the surprise the first had been.
Thompson stood there. Had she missed him? Was he wearing a ballistic vest? The gun didn’t move for a second. He slouched, took a half step, the gun rose, tilted downward to rise again.
One to the head! The words from the range reverberated in her skull.
Faith squeezed again.
Thompson staggered. A hole had appeared above his right eye. His gun dropped to the ground.
Something was happening to the left, but Faith didn’t take her eyes from her target as Thompson fell backwards into the river.
Faith looked at the other two men and found the movement she’d registered a second ago had been Lundgren falling. Legs splayed wide, he was struggling to keep his bulk on top of the man in the wife-beater, who was working his right hand toward his waistband.
“Roll off, Moose!” Faith yelled. Her voice sounded foggy and distant in her ears.
Lundgren fell off to the side, just as the man under him freed a black semi-auto. As Wife-Beater brought it up, Faith squeezed off her fifth and sixth and seventh rounds. The echoing bangs were reduced to pops in her abused ears. She knew without seeing it that she’d hit him center mass. His shirt was torn in three places on his chest. The gun dropped to the cement and he whimpered and hacked as red seeped out through the holes in the cloth.
“I. Give.” The man coughed and spit a glob of blood. Faith kicked his gun into the grass. Only then did she shift her Glock to one hand and pick up both firearms, shoving them in her waistband. The flat, metallic planes cold against her flesh. She pulled the flashlight from her back pocket and had to slap it hard on her thigh to turn it on. She swept the dark water of the river with her light. Thompson was nowhere to be seen.
As she took deep breaths, reality came back into focus. She checked the wounded man. He was slumped over unconscious, the front of his wife-beater soaked in red leaking over his belt onto his jeans. The stain spread toward the ground.
Going to Moose, she tried to roll him over, but she couldn’t. He was too big, and not cooperating. His face was a rictus of agony and spittle drooled from the corner of his mouth as he tried to speak. His hands were swollen and purple and blood streamed from his wrist restraints. His words came out as a hoarse croak.
“Ahhhh! Don’t, please,” he said. “My wrists.” He craned his neck to look at her. “ATF”
He hadn’t been handcuffed. His wrists had been wired together. The steel cut deep into his skin. She searched the ground before finding the pliers partially under Wife-Beater.
She felt sick as she tried to work the jaws under the bloody wire. But they were so tight, embedded in Moose’s flesh. Moose groaned with each movement as she forced the jaws through to the cutter almost at the hinge. Soon, the plier’s grips and her hands were slick with blood. She had to use both hands to cut through the first wire, then the second.
Clearly, he needed medical attention. She ran to her minivan and called nine-one-one, reporting the shooting to a police dispatcher who eventually understood where Faith was trying to direct the help. Then she drove the van down the road to the pier. Lundgren was trying to use the pliers to free himself, but he could barely hold the implement. His face twisted in a grimace. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He looked up at her.
She took the blood-slick instrument and started on the wire around his ankles. He jerked involuntarily from the pain as she worked the metal that was entrenched beneath his flesh along with material from his sock. Then he chuckled, his teeth streaked with blood. “Oh God, I thought I was dead. The way you took out those two guys—I owe you big time.” He shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut, more tears rolling down his cheeks. “Man, you’re an angel.”
He groaned.
“I’m ATF,” he said again, with more clarity this time as she worked the remaining wire from one leg. “You saved my ass.”
Faith wrestled with the remaining cable.
“You local?” Lundgren asked, his voice gravelly.
She shook her head, biting her tongue. “DEA”
“You said police before?”
“I’m from Oakland.” She grinned. “Cops are more intimidating than feds.”
When seventeen-year-old Usaré García slips away from her high school dance, no one expects the night to end in murder.
Her body is found across campus, and the investigation quickly reaches far beyond one student, one suspect, or one bad decision. Street gangs, racial tensions, hidden relationships, and old loyalties all begin to surface inside the school’s tightly wound world.
Enrique Tavish is not a detective. He is a school administrator who knows the south side, understands the advantages of passing easily through white spaces, and has spent years trying to keep his own hungers and anger under control. But when Usaré’s death exposes a web of deception around students, staff, gangs, and police, Tavish cannot stay safely on the sidelines.
His focus turns to Los Levantes, a street gang with cartel connections, but the deeper he pushes, the more dangerous the case becomes. Soon Tavish’s family is threatened, the police are questioning his methods, and justice begins to look less like a clean answer than a personal reckoning.
Ways to Be Wicked is a dark crime thriller about murder, identity, temptation, and the dangerous line between conscience and revenge.
“In his stunning new book Specters in the Gallery, J. Michael Major delivers an intriguing, finely crafted, twist-laden short story collection chock full of clever tales and unexpected outcomes. Major’s stories explore the exhilaration of danger, the sliding scales of justice, and the sardonic laughter of wry wit. In story after story, Major creates compulsively interesting scenarios. He then bends, twists, turns and corkscrews his plots in directions you’ll never see coming. Fast-paced, fiendishly clever, dark, playful, and unsettling, Major’s stories don't just pull the rug out from under you. They redefine the very nature of the floor. I invite you to step into Major’s amazing gallery of wordly delights. Experience the brilliance of his storytelling for yourself. If you dare!” —Gary K. Wolf, Creator of Roger Rabbit
Step inside a gallery where every portrait has a pulse, every joke has teeth, and every ordinary life is one bad choice away from the grotesque.
In Specters in the Gallery, J. Michael Major gathers dark, twist-laden stories of ambition, revenge, justice, faith, desire, and punishment. A private investigator follows the murder of a ruined writer and uncovers a creation dangerous enough to kill for. A desperate artist discovers the terrible price of being seen. A town buries its secrets beneath progress. A chain letter becomes a death sentence. Across horror, crime, satire, and speculative fiction, Major turns familiar fears into sharp little nightmares with a grin at the edge of the blade.
Fast-paced, clever, viciously playful, and unsettling, these stories do not simply pull the rug out from under you. They make you question whether the floor was ever there at all.
Enter carefully. Not everything on display is finished being alive.
“A marvelous collection of enchanting short stories, rich in imagination, intrigue and twisty turns of terror. J. Michael Major journeys across genres with skill and verve, producing an immensely engaging and clever concoction of tales that will keep you turning the pages.” —Brian Pinkerton, author of The Perfect Stranger
John Hyland lives a small, tightly controlled life in suburban Chicago. He works a dull office job, keeps the same routines every day, and tries to stay ahead of painful memories from his past. Then an old man at a diner starts calling him by another name—Blaney—and seems certain John is tied to a long-ago crime involving stolen gold. That strange meeting cracks open the careful life John has built.
As John tries to understand why this man has singled him out, the story begins to connect his lonely present to buried trauma, old violence, and a mystery that reaches back dec-ades. Fear follows him from the diner to his job, to his apartment, and finally out toward the rail lines linked to the famous robbery known as “The Big Touch.” John is no longer simply hiding from old wounds. He is pulled into something larger, darker, and far more dangerous than he expected.
What remains is a mood of unease and quiet sorrow, mixed with deep empathy for a man cornered by memory, guilt, and the pull of the past.
In the vast reaches of the Indian Territory, danger rarely stays buried for long. After weeks on the trail, Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves finds himself drawn into a new and growing threat that spreads across the frontier like wildfire. A violent prison break unleashes three desperate men—killers with nothing left to lose. Led by a former Confederate colonel with fierce ambitions and old grudges, the fugitives head west with a reckless plan that could ignite trouble across the Territory.
As rumors travel faster than riders, Reeves and the Lighthorse lawmen begin to piece together the trail of violence left behind. Each clue reveals a larger scheme—one involving stolen gold, rising unrest, and talk of stirring old loyalties back to life. With every mile, the stakes grow heavier, and the line between justice and vengeance becomes harder to see.
Across trading posts, settlements, and lonely stretches of open land, alliances shift and tempers flare. Settlers whisper of uprisings. Merchants close their doors early. And the name of the escaped colonel begins to echo like a storm rolling in from the horizon.
Set against a land where memory is long and justice rides hard, this new chapter in the Legends of the West series follows Bass Reeves as he tracks a danger that threatens far more than one town or one badge. It marks a turning point in a struggle shaping the future of the frontier—one forged in grit, shadows, and the relentless pursuit of what is right.
