"A chilling and blisteringly relevant literary novel of social horror centered around a brutal killing that takes place in a full-contact haunted escape room-a provocative exploration of capitalism, hate politics, racial fetishism, and our obsession with fear as entertainment. On April 27, 1997, four contestants make it to the final cell of the Quigley House, a full-contact haunted escape room in Lincoln, Nebraska, made famous for its monstrosities,...

"'Your situation is always ambiguous, isn't it, Guido?', his father-in-law, Count Orazio Falier, observes of Donna Leon's soulful detective, Guido Brunetti, at the beginning of her superb 28th Brunetti novel, Unto Us A Son Is Given . 'The world we live in makes that necessary,' Brunetti presciently replies. Count Falier was urging his Venetian son-in-law to investigate, and preferably intervene in, the seemingly innocent plan of the Count's best friend,...

"In Chicago, a young man jumps from his thirtieth-story hotel room; along the Missouri river, a hunter and his son stumble upon a lake whose surface is littered with snow geese, all of them dead; and in southern Alabama, Ryder Creed and his search-and-rescue dog Grace find the body of a young woman who went missing in the Conecuh National Forest and it appears she filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the river. Before long Ryder Creed and...

With his wild heart, Sawyer McKettrick is NOT ready to settle down on the Triple M family ranch in Arizona. So he heads to Blue River, Texas, to seek a job as marshal. But in a blinding snowstorm he is injured, and collapses into the arms of a prim and proper lady in calico. The shirtless, bandaged stranger recuperating in teacher Piper St. James room behind the schoolhouse says he is a McKettrick, but he looks like an outlaw. As they wait out...