New York, September 1945. The sign on my office door reads, Pierce Chandler & Assoc. Private & Paranormal Investigations. It wasn't my real name, but the fella I'd borrowed it from wouldn't mind. He was finished with it.

Pierce Chandler has never bungled a case. Not once. But this one's got teeth. Four stiffs turned up drained dry, and the only thing they had in common was the chew marks on their necks. An archaeologist in Budapest. A rare-book conservator in Paris. An Oxford don with a penchant for dead languages. And a two-bit bum who bought the farm in a Brooklyn alley.

Helping him chase the truth are the only four people crazy enough to walk into the dark with him: his protégé, Zachary "Zee" Bernstein, a skinny Jewish psychic who can fade from sight or plant ideas in a crooked copper's head with nothing but a stare; Father Brandon O'Neil, Pierce's big brother and New York's top exorcist, who opens most arguments with a 12-gauge trench gun and finishes them with holy wrath; Evelyn Harrow, the medium who's been talking to the dead since the day she was stillborn—at the exact same minute Avalon vanished for the second time; and Isyphenia "Icy" Teapenney, a flame-haired knockout who reads the blood of the recently departed like the rest of us mooks read the morning rags.

But time is running short. The final intended victim dropped off the face of the Earth seven years ago, and the killer seems determined to punch Mr. Chandler's ticket before he can put paid to this caper.

Some cases you solve. This one, you survive.

—So begins Strange Haunts, a new ongoing urban fantasy series with authentic 1940s flavor, magic that began crawling back into the world in 1850 when the legendary island of Avalon reappeared, and populated with a chorus line of supernatural bugaboos that go bump in the night.