Sins of the Past meet Present Company It's an old fashioned Christmas at the Nelson's. Duncan has invited several of his friends in Crocker to stay in the newly refurbished Nelson Hall. He's feeling more himself now that he has Scarlett and Lissie around to keep him company, and he plans to make Christmas as much like the ones the family celebrated in its heyday as possible. But when things go awry and the guests inside the Hall become trapped, there might be more than plum pudding on the menu. Old misdeeds are coming back to haunt them. And murder just might become the main course.

The ghosts of the past rarely remain there. Not when the future holds so much possibility for them. When a local man turns up dead at the Apple Blossom Festival ball, Anna and Pratt discover the man had been writing a tell all book that outed the sins of a good portion of Crocker’s residents. So when the local cops set out to find the killer, it makes sense to enlist the help of ex big city detective Pratt Davies. Pratt’s new in town and therefore one of the few who should be unaffected by the book and able to deal subjectively with the myriad suspects surrounding the murder. But Pratt and Anna quickly learn nobody’s beyond this particular gossip’s range. In fact, it’s possible Pratt’s on the suspect list himself. Along with just about everybody else in Crocker!

It might be a murder from decades ago, but it still has its claws in the present…and someone seems determined to drag Anna into it. It’s never a good idea to spend time in a haunted mansion, and Anna’s favorite cowboy ghost does his best to talk her out of it. But the opportunity to pick from the beautiful antiques left to her in a Crocker resident’s will is just too tempting for Anna and Pratt to pass up. So they’re going in… They’re prepared to deal with a few cold spots. Maybe the occasional flickering light. But what Anna and the boys weren’t counting on was bumping up against the ghost of Josiah Baumgartner, a contemporary of Joss’ from the 1800s. And when Josiah claims the old woman who lived in the house hid his bones around the place, Anna agrees to help him find them. But something much darker is at work there. And, unfortunately for our happy little gang of antique hunters…Anna seems to have unwittingly stepped right into the middle of it.

Sarah and her brother have grown up next to the world’s largest garbage dump on Staten Island in New York City. Little do they know, thousands of rodents at the dump have mutated into gruesome, killer rats and one of the workers there has just been badly mauled. Without mercy, the rats wreak havoc and devistation upon the once-peaceful neighborhood, entering homes through kitchen sinks and toilets. Now the entire city stands on the brink of total infestation. Can the kids save millions of innocent people from the approaching and unrelenting rat horde?

This holiday, spend quality time with family and loved ones—living and dead . . . There's no place like home for the horrordays—unless you'd prefer a romantic midnight walk through a ghost-infested graveyard . . . or a haunted house candlelight dinner with the sexy vampire of your dreams. The (black) magical season is here—and whether it's a solstice séance gone demonically wrong with the incomparable Kim Harrison, a grossly misshapen Christmas with the remarkable Lynsay Sands, a blood-chilling-and-spilling New Year's with the wonderful Marjorie M. Liu, or a super-powered Thanksgiving with the phenomenal Vicki Pettersson, one thing is for certain: in the able hands of these exceptional dark side explorers, the holidays are going to be deliciously hellish!

Original publication and copyright date: 2009.

Not Exactly Ghosts by Andrew Caldecott is a collection of downright terrifying tales of blood, anger, and jealousy. Excerpt: "Narrow in bounds, but wide in variety, the garden of Tilchington Rectory was one of the most beautiful in the South Country. It lay in a hollow, some four to five chains broad, down the middle of which ran a small and clear brook marked on the ordnance map as R. Tilch, but beloved of its riparians as, simply, our stream."