Showing results by author "Kathryn Meyer Griffith" in All Categories

Ex-cop Henry Shore has been Chief Park Ranger at Crater Lake National Park for eight years and he likes his park and his life the way it's been. Safe. Tranquil. Predictable. But he's about to be tested in so many ways. First the earthquakes begin, people begin to go missing, then there's some mysterious water creature that's taken up residence in the caves below Crater Lake and it's not only growing in size, it's aggressive and cunning and very hungry.

Abigail Sutton's beloved husband walks out one night, doesn't return, and two years later is found dead, a victim of a long ago crime. It's made her sympathetic to the missing and their families. Starting her new life, Abigail moves to small town and buys a fixer-upper house left empty when old Edna Summers died. Once it was also home to Edna's younger sister, Emily, and her two children, Jenny and Christopher, who, people believe, drove away one night, thirty years ago, and just never came back.

Midnight. Some call it the witching hour. Others call it the devil’s hour. Here in the graveyard, midnight is a very special time. It is a time when ghostly spirits are at their strongest, when the veil between our world and theirs is at its thinnest. Legend has it, that while most of the world is asleep, the lack of prayers allow the spirits to communicate under the cover of darkness, among the headstones, their whispers rustling in the leaves of the old oak trees. But if you’re here in the graveyard, you can tell yourself it’s just the wind....

Ten years ago Frank Lester, a Chicago homicide detective, thought he had rid himself forever of the Mud People Killer who'd kidnapped and murdered six people. Frank had shot him as he'd fled through a snowy night; had killed him, he believed, though a body was never found. But the killer wasn't dead. He'd only been waiting to take his revenge on Frank and those he cares about now...10 years later. Frank retired early and is living back in his hometown of Spookie when the killer resurfaces to take up where he left off.

Discover 23 tales of terror, flavors of fear. Here for your twisted culinary delight, we present some of the best horror fiction of 2018. We sincerely hope you survive it.

For years, the vampire family lived in the shadows, hidden by the night and people's disbelief; feeding on animals or throw away people who would never be missed. But as the family moves into an old theater, and uses it to cover up their crimes, the youngest of them are restless and determined to live as they like. Recklessly. Killing and feeding when and where they want. Feeding on who they want. Only the parent vampires have managed to keep them in check. But no longer.

Emma Bloodworth once had a normal life - a loving husband and two children, a cat, a good job in the city - and she was happy. Then, for her, everything changed...as the world ended. The earthquakes, the global floods, and the devastating fires arrived first. The human race, displaced and panicked, fled, migrating to any place there was food and shelter. Then the worldwide plague arrived with its waves of death.

Someone is terrorizing the elderly and vandalizing their homes in a certain neighborhood in Spookie. As usual, Abigail Sutton, a freelance artist, and her boyfriend, Frank Lester, a retired homicide detective, are called in to help find out who's doing these awful acts. The two seem to have an uncanny knack for unraveling mysteries and getting to the bottom of such strange happenings. Some of the old people think it's ghosts in their basements, in their homes, doing these destructive deeds, but Frank doesn't believe in ghosts while Abigail isn't so sure.

To keep the bank from repossessing her eighteen-wheeler, Baby Blue, and putting her and her daughter, Tessa, on the street, Loretta Brennan takes a dangerous job driving it into Wyoming with a winter storm approaching. All alone she worries if she can make the deadline and navigate the roads since her driving partner husband died the year before in an accident.

The Fifth Spookie Town Murder Mystery is finally out. Who wouldn’t want to find a chest of buried treasure, ancient gold coins, and exquisitely priceless jewelry on their land? A treasure a sailor dead for over 70 years once found in the shallow waters of a distant island and later buried, hid, the remnants of at the end of his tragic life. The townspeople of Spookie have been searching, fighting, and killing each other over it for decades, and no one has ever unearthed it.

The usual eccentric characters are here for their fourth murder mystery and the case is one which really hits close to home this time for Myrtle, the town's Perry Como singing and wagon-pulling bag lady. Her sister Evelyn, the local animal hoarder, is missing. Strange miniature figures fashioned of twigs are found hanging from one of Evelyn's trees as warnings. Because of them, Myrtle fears a coven of wanted-to-be witches she once knew, and escaped from, could be behind the kidnapping because she stole their ancient black grimoire - and they want it back.

Henry Shore has spent the last decade hunting for, fighting, protecting people from, and exterminating rogue dinosaurs in his beloved Crater Lake National Park, and the towns around it. Once the chief park ranger there, now he’s retired and, since all the dinosaurs are supposedly gone, he’s trying to live his best retirement life. Except, for Henry, that doesn’t seem to be possible…because of a new sorrow he’s had to shoulder, and a new insidious breed of super-smart, highly intuitive dinosaurs that have suddenly emerged to again menace humanity.

Maggie Owen is a beautiful, spirited Egyptologist...but lonely. While staying in Egypt on a grant from the college, she searches for an undiscovered necropolis she’s certain lies below the sands beyond the pyramids of Giza. Even this discovery doesn’t give her the happiness she had hoped it would. There has always been and is something missing. Love.

Frank and Abigail, and the town of Spookie, have survived the last horrific year and a half and are moving on with their lives. They’re sending their two children, Laura and Nick, off into the world to seek their futures. Abigail is preparing for another art gallery show, her theme this time: ghosts.

Faye Summer has been haunted by a 3,000-year-old-murdered Egyptian princess, one of the five daughters of Nefertiti and the doomed pharaoh Akhenaten, since she was a young girl...and has glimpsed her desperate ghostly face in darkened mirrors and heard her whispers in her dreams.

Two mysteries, one from her far distant past of over 70 years ago and one for the future and a dire prediction from her grandniece Glinda, a psychic, that will affect not only Spookie and its inhabitants, but the whole world. Mysterious bones are unearthed in the ground behind Luke’s Hardware Store, and Frank and the sheriff are determined to find out whose bones they are, and how the victim died - even though whatever happened occurred over 70 years ago.

A beautiful Civil War era bed and breakfast called Willowwind is cherished and run by a loving couple, Adrian and Caroline Stone. But it’s also haunted by a long-dead Civil War era ghostly vampiress called Lilith who believes the man, Adrian, is her reincarnated soldier/lover and she will do anything to have him, body-heart-and soul, for her own again, no matter how many she must kill. Yet Adrian’s wife, Caroline, along with the spirit of her dead father, will do anything to make sure that doesn’t happen. For true love is far stronger than any evil obsession.

This sixth Spookie Town Murder Mystery belongs primarily to Abigail and Frank Lester, my two main characters in the six book series. It’s their turn. First off, it at long last solves the enigma of Abigail’s first husband Joel Sutton’s disappearance, and death, a decade before…the tragic event that sent Abigail to Spookie in the first place to begin a new life. The new life that would grow so big as to include a new love, a new family, quirky, but well-meaning friends, and the strange murder mysteries her new friends would drag her into over the years.

That’s what 27 writers want you to consider, here in this collection of the strange and terrible, the shocking and amazing, the frightening and awe-inspiring. Assembled here for easy perusal are some of the finest tales of ghosts, zombies, witches, cryptozoological freaks, monsters, and aliens of the past year.

The humans' dinosaur killing serum and extermination practices had worked far better than anyone had prayed. The Earth belonged to the humans once more, and all its lands were safe - or so the world, Henry Shore, former Chief Park Ranger at Crater Lake National Park, and his wife, Ann, had believed...until one day, years later, two new dinosaurs, craftier than any the Earth had ever seen, appeared. One of them was benevolent, a friend to mankind, and the other was not. It was blood-thirsty, eerily intelligent, and unbelievably vengeful. This dinosaur wouldn’t be so easy to kill.