A snarky detective. A heinous crime. A blood thirsty vampire who might drive her to commit murder. Detective Tara Tremble is no stranger to the dark side. As a seasoned investigator with the Emerald Bay Police Department, she has seen her fair share of crimes. But nothing could have prepared her for the encounter that would forever change her perception of reality. Assigned to a puzzling case, Tara finds herself chasing a cunning criminal who seems to always be one step ahead. Determined to bring justice to the streets she swore to protect, she embarks on a relentless pursuit, unaware that her adversary possesses an otherworldly secret. As the line between hunter and hunted blurs, Tara finds herself torn between her duty as a protector of the innocent and the alluring allure of the vampire's world. In this thrilling urban fantasy, Detective Tara Tremble will challenge everything she knows about the supernatural as she fights to bring light to the darkness that lurks beneath Emerald Bay's surface. Can she outsmart the immortal foe and uncover the truth, or will she succumb to the seductive power of the night?

A Jehovah's Witness is stabbed in her home by a stranger she once allowed in. A homeless woman masturbates on a park bench. A statue of the Virgin Mary, "plaster receptacle of petitions and foolish pleas," is found in a dump, a missing hand suggesting the sound of a one-handed rosary. Through images brutally honest and disarmingly off-center, Dixie Salazar explores the hidden lives of everyday people, objects, and experiencesÑand their transformation in the hidden realms of the heart. Charting furious descents into the darkest crevices of our souls, Salazar paints for us a lost city that exists below our mundane consciousness. Blood Mysteries is a tribute to lost souls, from a suicidal mental patient who doesn't believe she existsÑ"melting out of a landscape spotted with shadows, washing her hands in an empty basin of light"Ñto Marilyn Monroe, victim even in the morgue. In finely tuned lyricism showing an uncanny grasp of frayed lives, she gives flesh and vitality to women normally encountered only as statistics. The incarcerated, the homeless, the hopeless. Missing young girls who turn up violated and murdered. Salazar presents us with blood mysteries not only of women, but of family as well. In poems invoking her dual heritage, she explores the identity crises brought on by having a Spanish father and a mother from the deep South, leaving her a product of American meltdown with a predisposition to check "other" for race on applications. "Other can be a place," she reminds us, "a residence for those of us without / papers, where halos of lightning bugs / swarm the rickety family tree." Salazar writes with toughness and grit "for all the shipwrecked saints / and wretches among us." But beneath the surface of words sometimes gritty, sometimes playful, lies a testament to the power of empathy, giving voice to those whose voices have been stifled and offering hope for those who have found none. Blood Mysteries is a forceful prayer for the disenfranchised that offers not merely hope, but transcendence.

Poppy Z. Brite re-imagines the haunted house novel, creating a fresh, sensual, and totally original reading experience. IT'S A PASSION. IT'S AN ART. IT'S THE ONLY WAY OUT. . . In the house on Violin Road he found the bodies of his brother, his mother, and the man who killed them both—his father. From the house on Violin Road, in Missing Mile, North Carolina, Trevor McGee ran for his sanity and his soul, after his famous cartoonist father had exploded inexplicably into murder and suicide. Now Trevor is back. In the company of a New Orleans computer hacker on the run from the law, Trevor has returned to face the ghosts that still live on Violin Road, to find the demons that drove his father to murder his family—and worse, to spare one of his sons. . . . But as Trevor begins to draw his own cartoon strip, he loses himself in a haze of lines and art and thoughts of the past, the haunting begins. Trevor and his lover plunge into a cyber-maze of cartoons, ghosts, and terror that will lead either to understanding—true understanding—or to a blood-raining repetition of the past. . . . Praise for Drawing Blood “Electrifying . . . explosive lyricism . . . [a] soul-sucking antagonist . . . rich background descriptions. That there is a Brite future never doubt.”—Kirkus Reviews “Exotica . . . disaffected youth . . . a spicy gumbo of sub-cultural hipness simmered in a cauldron of modern horror fiction.”—Fangoria “Darker and more exotic than Anne Rice, more cerebral than Stephen King . . . Horror is rarely this good.”—Echo

"WHEN THE MOON TURNS TO BLOOD is a harrowing and fascinating tale of apocalyptic obsession and murder. Leah Sottile leads us down every head-shaking twist and turn of the case, an expert guide to the dark tributaries of religious extremism that run closer to the American mainstream than we'd ever like to believe."―Jess Walter, American author of Ruby Ridge On the heels of the sensational murder trial and shocking verdict, WHEN THE MOON TURNS TO BLOOD examines the culture of end times paranoia and a trail of mysterious deaths surrounding former beauty queen Lori Vallow and her husband, grave digger turned doomsday novelist, Chad Daybell. When police in Rexburg, Idaho perform a wellness check on seven J.J. Vallow and his sister, sixteen-year-old Tylee Ryan, both children are nowhere to be found. Their mother, Lori Vallow, gives a phony explanation, and when officers return the following day with a search warrant, she, too, is gone. As the police begin to close in, a larger web of mystery, murder, fanaticism and deceit begins to unravel. Vallow's case is sinuously complex. As investigators prod further, they find the accused Black Widow has an unusual number of bodies piling up around her. WHEN THE MOON TURNS TO BLOOD tells a gripping story of extreme beliefs, snake oil prophets, and explores the question: if it feels like the world is ending, how are people supposed to act?