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.
Collected within these pages you will find twelve masterful tales of ill-conceived notions and faulty assumptions from prolific Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine contributor David Dean.
A retired man with a mole-infested lawn decides a ferret is the obvious and nature-provided answer; an American prisoner in Mexico is offered a work-release program in which survival, not freedom, is the prize; and a travel agent discovers the consequences of blind love in Belize. These and other stories comprise the suspenseful tales that you will find within this collection. But remember—the wisdom of serpents is poison.
The Wisdom of Serpents and Other Stories of Tragic Misunderstandings is the second volume in the collected short fiction of David Dean, following Tomorrow’s Dead and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense.
Review of "The Mole" by Anne Van Doorn of the Netherlands:
BEST SHORT STORY OF THE WEEK Since 2016, I read a short story a day. My favorite read this week is “The Mole” by David Dean, published in his short-story collection The Wisdom of Serpents and Other Stories of Tragic Misunderstandings.
Moles are making a mess of Stivac's garden and that annoys the elderly man enormously. A few days ago, his foot sank into a mole run, causing him to fall. To end this predicament, Stivac buys a ferret. He hopes the little carnivore will hunt down the moles. But the ferret is not interested in moles. The next day, Stivac finds the ferret dead, and the neighbor's cat is resting contentedly near him. Three days later, the neighbor's cat is found dead—poisoned.
Over the years, David Dean has written stories about tragic misunderstandings and what they can lead to. "The Mole" is a fine example of what a writer can do with this appealing premise. In fact, all the characters have their own misconceptions, leading to a dramatic, tragic finale. A well thought out plot, masterfully executed.
Rumors rising out of the Yucatan jungle report healings and miracles attributed to a holy relic. Father Pablo Diego Corellas discovers that even his own parishioners are making secret pilgrimages to the decrepit plantation where it is held. There, Doña Josefa, a mysterious woman who is either mystic or mad, possesses an artifact that she claims is a fragment of the robe worn by Christ at his trial. Guarded by armed Mayan farmers, she holds sway over an ever-growing number of pilgrims desperate for the healing power of the Purple Robe.
Much against his own wishes, young Father Pablo is dispatched to the interior to investigate, while a police captain and a vacationing American couple make plans of their own for the robe. But when the relic is stolen, they soon discover that miracles have unforeseen consequences and that no one is beyond their reach.
In this new collection, David Dean—Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s longtime favorite author—brings you the Edgar Award nominated “Tomorrow’s Dead,” along with ten other short stories of crime and suspense. This master of short fiction has entertained readers for decades with his suspenseful stories, and for the first time ever you can read them back-to-back.
Tomorrow’s Dead and Other Stories of Crime and Suspense takes the reader through mysterious misdeeds that will bring you to the edge of your seat… or have you hiding under your covers. In these arresting short stories, David Dean’s characters find themselves in sticky, often illegal, situations that shift at every turn. From the chief of police being blamed for a series of murders to long lost siblings on quests for revenge, these stories will leave you wanting more. Luckily, the next Collection is on its way soon!
Research wizard John Shaney launches his career as a grad student at University of Texas, Austin planning to investigate how chemistry can transform human lives for the better. One moonlit night downtown, however, Shaney discovers unexpected and more pleasurable mysteries surrounding one Lila May Wulfhardt and her well-heeled, eccentric family while crossing paths with something more ancient than love and money, something that also wants to change the lives of hapless locals. John Shaney’s world is about to become seriously weird and deadly dangerous, yet ultimately transformative.
Werewolf, Texas is a gripping and vividly dark story of a blood-thirsty dynasty set on preserving their power. With Palladino’s unique voice, this grim love tale explores the not-so-secret dark world of the Wulfhardt family.
It’s 1975, and rookie cop Edward One patrols the streets of Long Beach, California. As he gains experience as a police officer, he finds himself dealing with dangerous criminals as well as outrageously funny scenarios, learning from some of the best—and worst—officers the Long Beach Police Department has to offer. Edward One is dedicated to truth, justice, and the law, which are not always in harmony.
During this time, a twisted and violent predator who calls himself The Skulker grows deadlier with each attack. When The Skulker arrives in Long Beach, he crosses paths with Edward One, and the results are as surprising as they are deadly.
Dilemma tells the captivating tale of the dangers and joys of police work in the ‘70s and provides an insight into the corrupted thinking of a killer.
As editor of the Empire City Dispatch—a struggling twice-weekly newspaper in coastal Oregon—former investigative journalist Jack Teller thinks he’s found refuge from his traumatic past, until he discovers the body of the outcast scion of the region’s most powerful family, Jesse McLennon. Tragic events closer to home force Teller to delve more deeply into Jesse’s life and death. Teller quickly finds himself in conflict with the McLennons, who will stop at nothing to maintain their positions of power and respect. Dark and brooding, Deadlines evokes the mist-shrouded Oregon Coast as Jack Teller is drawn into a plot of deception and revenge, and reckons with his own troubled past.
Dr. Duncan Bright treats patients who invent lovers, struggle with addiction, and constantly challenge and berate him. His dedication to guiding his clients through the turmoil of life is tested when he meets teenagers Dawn and Zander—their escalating violence and erratic behavior become his greatest challenge.
When a body is found in Central Park, Dawn and Zander are the prime suspects, and the police come to the psychologist for his insight. As he is drawn deeper into the investigation, his professional and personal lives become jeopardized.
Dawn’s Web, a gritty, page-turning psychological thriller, explores the twisted minds of Dr. Bright’s patients, the motives of murderers, and his own flawed intentions.
Scarlett Fergusson’s life is anything but perfect. Working as a waitress in a small town, she lives with her addicted father, his girlfriend, and her toddler. Scarlett dreams of a better life. When wealthy Hugh Cruz sweeps her off her feet, she’s ready to believe that her life has turned around. And when Hugh proposes, her fairytale ending suddenly seems possible.
But Hugh isn’t the man she thinks he is. Cruel, controlling, and violent, he turns her fairytale into a nightmare. Scarlett can’t believe the woman she’s become. Just when things can’t get any worse for Scarlett, the unthinkable happens. Is it the end, or a new beginning?
Unbroken is the tale of a woman’s fight for survival, and her quest to discover her own strength.
Charlotte Wilson is an investigative journalist reporting on a global pandemic that seems to have no identifiable cause. When she is contacted by the COO of a multinational biotech company claiming he has the answer to what’s making people sick, Charlotte and her producer Nick start dreaming of Pulitzers and national syndication.
But as she begins to uncover the truth, Charlotte discovers she is at the center of a conspiracy that is 12 years in the making, one that touches every part of her professional and personal life. Millions of lives depend on her breaking the news, but the story is so big, will anyone believe it? Charlotte may not live long enough to find out.
Steven Booth’s The Orchard is many things – an intriguing mystery, an intense suspense tale, a terrifyingly plausible bio-thriller – but overall it’s just plain great. Pick it up at your own risk. You’ll be in its grip from the first page to the last…and thinking about it long after you put it down.
—Steve Hockensmith, author the Holmes on the Range mysteries and The White Magic Five and Dime
5.0from 1 reader
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<h1 id='c6'><i>Chapter Five</i></h1>
<div>I sat down in the booth in the small café. I wondered how Nick had found this place. It was a fifties-style setup, with pictures of Elvis, Marilyn, and Ike everywhere. There were jukeboxes at the tables, and the booths looked like they were stripped directly from the interior of an old Corvette or Bel Air. I signaled the waitress, who wore a silly pink gingham outfit, a little pink hat, and an intense air of boredom. She also had the requisite facemask and gloves on, to try to stave off WBS. That this restaurant was even open was a bit of a miracle.</div>
<div class='indent'>After slopping coffee into our cups, the waitress wandered off to chat with a coworker, without even stopping to wipe up the splatter.</div>
<div class='indent'>“What’s so damned important that I had to fly thirteen hundred miles to Wisconsin to meet you in this dump? You said it was juicy. Come on, spill it.”</div>
<div class='indent'>He smiled, the big silly grin brightening his stubbly face.</div>
<div class='indent'>“Well?” I prompted.</div>
<div class='indent'>“It’s Verigro,” he said, as if that explained everything.</div>
<div class='indent'>I waited. He continued to smile. I opened a creamer and poured it slowly.</div>
<div class='indent'>“Aren’t you going to ask me about it?” he asked, the smile falling ever so slightly.</div>
<div class='indent'>“You’re getting to it, I’m sure.” I sipped my coffee. It tasted liked it had been burning for hours.</div>
<div class='indent'>Nick huffed. “You take all the fun out of things, you know that, Lotte?”</div>
<div class='indent'>I decided to take pity on him. “Okay, fine. Gee, Nick,” I said with mock enthusiasm, “what about Verigro?”</div>
<div class='indent'>The smile returned. “There’s something going on. Something big. Peter Youngs wants to talk to you.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“Who’s that?” I had never heard of him.</div>
<div class='indent'>“Oh, just the Chief Operating Officer.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“Hold on!” I said. Nick shushed me and looked around as if CNN was sitting on his shoulder. “Hold on,” I repeated, more softly this time. “The COO? Why the hell would he want to talk to us?”</div>
<div class='indent'>“No, not us. He wants to talk to you. Asked for you specifically. Wouldn’t say what it was. I doubt he wants to show you pictures from his last vacation.”</div>
<div class='indent'>I sat back in my seat, which made flatulent noises as I shifted. Verigro was the largest biotech firm in the country, maybe the world. It made Monsanto look like a high school chemistry class, and Du Pont look like a baking-soda volcano. If I remembered correctly, Peter Youngs was Verigro’s rising star. He was billed as young, brilliant, and powerful. If he had something to say, and he had to tell it to an investigative reporter from Seattle, it must be one hell of a scandal.</div>
<div class='indent'>“Do we have a meeting?” I asked, keeping my voice almost to a whisper.</div>
<div class='indent'>“About two hours from now. Some restaurant on Third Street. He originally suggested he meet you at Lake Park, but I told him it was too cloak and dagger.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“Did you do a background?”</div>
<div class='indent'>“Right here,” he said, handing over his portable. I paged through some basic stuff: Verigro’s history, its current stock price, its board of directors—and I stopped. Errol Foster—the owner of Foster Media Network, in other words, our boss—held a position on their board.</div>
<div class='indent'>“Did you see this?” I said, turning the portable so that he could look.</div>
<div class='indent'>“Yeah,” he said, nodding. The smile was plastered to his face again.</div>
<div class='indent'>“You know he’s going to go apeshit if he gets a hold of the fact that we are following this story.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“If it pans out, it’ll be the biggest scoop in years. He’s got to see that the story is better for the network than whatever he’s got invested in Verigro shares. He’s always been a health food kinda guy. Not exactly a biotech fanatic.” He took a sip of his coffee and lowered his eyes. “Besides,” he said into the cup, “you can always sweet-talk him into running it.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“Nick,” I said, raising my voice again, “I’ve told you before to drop it. Foster and I haven’t had anything to do with each other in years. I doubt I could sweet-talk him into checking his watch.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“All right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”</div>
<div class='indent'>I glowered at him, then went back to paging through Nick’s research. Verigro began as a participant in the Human Genome Project back in the 1990s. Fifteen years ago, they pioneered the technology for selective codon sequencing of DNA, which allowed them to write codons to order. They could now insert foreign genes precisely into the DNA sequence of nearly any organism and do it cheaply. If it came down to it, they could rewrite the entire genome of an organism from the files they had in their database. I kept waiting for them to start programming Tyrannosaurs, but that wasn’t the business they were in. They made transgenic foods—mostly crops, but some transgenic animals as well—economical and safe, with little chance of replicative fading. Verigro’s flagship product was BioStar, a gene from some unpronounceable thermophilic deep-sea bacteria which programs crops to stay fresh without refrigeration and maintain the nutritional value of foods after cooking. BioStar was hailed as a miracle, especially in third world counties. No more famine. Verigro was the hero of the biotech world.</div>
<div class='indent'>“You think it’s about BioStar?” I asked. The waitress approached to refill our coffee cups, and Nick leaned back in the booth as nonchalantly as he could muster.</div>
<div class='indent'>Once the waitress had retreated behind the counter, Nick moved forward again, conspiratorially. “Yeah, I do,” he said simply.</div>
<div class='indent'>I looked at him for a moment, trying to remember. “Isn’t their CEO running for Senate?”</div>
<div class='indent'>“Yeah, Jackie Hughes is the front-runner, and is supposed to win in a landslide.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“If we run this story, it will destroy Hughes’s political career.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“Yep,” Nick said.</div>
<div class='indent'>“Fuck,” I said quietly. If there was something wrong with BioStar, then this really was a Pulitzer waiting to happen.</div>
<div class='indent'>“I know the feeling,” Nick said.</div>
<div class='indent'>“The meeting’s in two hours you said?”</div>
<div class='indent'>“Yeah. Macchione’s Italian Garden. Just you two.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“But you got us a truck, right? In case he wants to talk on the record?”</div>
<div class='indent'>“No. No truck. We’re flying under the radar on this one.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“What do you mean, no truck? Didn’t you get this cleared with Jared?” Jared was our news director in Seattle.</div>
<div class='indent'>“Nope. I wanted to see what we had before I stuck our necks out. There is a small but real chance that Youngs just wants to air some corporate dirty laundry.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“You unmitigated ass,” I said, and I meant it. “Your plan was to get the story, then have me use my feminine wiles to persuade Foster to run a piece that could possibly cost him several million dollars in stock? Is that about right?”</div>
<div class='indent'>“Well, when you put it that way…” he trailed off.</div>
<div class='indent'>“You have to tell Jared. Call him right now!” I commanded.</div>
<div class='indent'>“Look, Lotte. I’m the producer. This is my call. If we screw up, it will be my ass, not yours. You have to trust me, okay?”</div>
<div class='indent'>I sighed. I seemed to be doing that a lot lately. “I do trust you, Nick. But this is crazy, even for you.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said, the smile returning.</div>
<div class='indent'>“Did you at least get me a hotel room? I’ll need to freshen up before I meet with Youngs.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“Next door.” I looked out the window to see a large, modern-looking hotel. “Parking’s underground. The key is waiting at the front desk. I brought you a suit. It’s in your room.”</div>
<div class='indent'>“At least you did something right,” I grumbled.</div>
<div class='indent'>“I heard that,” Nick said sweetly.</div>
<div class='indent'>I headed for my car with visions of a shower and a quick nap in my future.</div>
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Carrie Young’s life is one hot mess. The posh political aide is having an affair with her boss, a Congressman who is taking bribes from a major corporation. When a hit man kills the Congressman and sets Carrie up to die in an apparent murder/suicide, she is rescued by Spider Walsh, a soft-spoken janitor. The two strangers go on the run, pursued by an elite network of professional assassins, skilled men and women who do dirty work for the rich and powerful.
With both the police and the ruthless group of mercenaries on their trail, Carrie and Spider venture deep into LA’s gang territory, where she must trust her mysterious protector and his friends to keep her alive. Their enemies will stop at nothing to keep Carrie from revealing vital secrets to the authorities. As they begin to fight back, Carrie learns that Spider is not just a janitor after all. In fact, he is a very dangerous man, with a few dark secrets of his own.
“All the Devils is a wild and fast-paced thriller pitting brave and quick-witted heroes against a frightening array of vivid adversaries.” —Thomas Perry, author of Big Fish and The Informant
Police Chief Nick Catesby has been haunted for seven years by the unsolved disappearance of a young boy from his peaceful New Jersey town. When Megan Guthrie goes missing from her school playground, followed quickly by two teenage boys, Nick’s nightmare begins anew. He has only one suspect, disgraced professor and town drunk Preston Howard, whose arrogance has left him with nothing more than his pride, a sea of whiskey, and his exasperated daughter, Fanny, with whom Nick is falling in love. Preston is not the culprit, he insists. Instead, Chief Catesby should seek out Gabriel, the strange and terrifying boy who appears only between dusk and dawn. Nick wants to ignore the old alcoholic’s rantings, but Preston’s story rings true when sightings of the boy lead to a trail of missing and murdered children going back three centuries. Now Nick and Preston must race to stop Gabriel before more children are sacrificed to his ravenous appetite.
Cottage Grove Oregon is a sleepy little town, but in the surrounding forests, an ancient nightmare is growing stronger. Dr. Joseph Hoffman, head psychiatrist at Cottage Grove Hospital, wants to believe he has all the answers to his patients’ problems, but there is a darkness within him that always lurks beneath the thin veneer of his competence. That veneer is about to crack.
In his Victorian home at the edge of the forest, his troubled memories hide in untouched rooms under a thick blanket of dust. He thinks he has them under his control, but as he delves into his patients’ twisted stories, the shadows of their insanity begin to follow him home. In order to see what is happening to him, Joseph must turn everything he knows about his past, and his reality, upside down.
As he gets closer to discovering the source of the malevolence that surrounds him, he feels his sanity slipping away. Joseph must uncover the truth before it consumes him. Something terrible is taking over, and he may be the only one who can figure out why.
“The author’s rich and dark psychological landscape shows a suspenseful tale of evil iconography, while providing room to create a mysterious world. The decisive intensity of the characters comes from the narrative’s beyond world experiences - A book well worth picking up!”
—Brian Perera, CEO of Cleopatra Records / Cleopatra Entertainment
