September's Horror and True Crime Book Deals Are Here to Haunt Your Dreams

A hate crime coverup and the longest-running fight for exoneration in America on record.

In 1968, a budding New York City entrepreneur who provided immigrants with jobs takes a Florida vacation with his family. Meanwhile, his relative, an employee, is murdered on Long Island.

Upon returning to New York, Sam Sommer learns the fate of his wife’s uncle, Irving Silver, when he doesn’t show up to carpool to work. Three days pass with no clues about his death. Then a recent contractor at Sam’s deli sets up a meeting to share news on the investigation.

Related: 12 Powerful True Crime Books to Read After You’ve Watched The Innocence Files 

Within moments after pulling into a donut shop parking lot to meet, Sam is kidnapped by detectives with the engine still running. While held in custody, he is beaten and allegedly confesses to the murder.

Court proceedings amount to do-overs, appellate victories and overturns, and mysterious documents. Sam is found guilty of murder in 1971. Soon, his case is highlighted in college law courses.

After surviving years of power-hungry guards and moving often from prison to prison for good behavior, Sam is released on parole in 1991. Justice continued to railroad him until 2015 when he finds an eerie document in the police archives that proves his innocence, triggering the re-opening of his case and free legal assistance. What will a momentous turn of events bring next?

“Recounts all the twists and turns of the case . . . two jury trials, a surprising appellate court ruling . . . and, decades later, a shocking development” (Visalia Times Delta).

One October morning in 1979, a stamp and coin dealer was gunned down in his Visalia shop. There were no witnesses. Persistent police efforts across jurisdictional lines connected it to another death. Two months earlier, the body of a Fresno coin dealer was found locked in the trunk of his car. The trail of evidence led to a most unlikely suspect. Author Ronn M. Couillard, retired judge and former Visalia district attorney, lays out the facts in this compelling case from the investigation to the court proceedings and the surprise that almost derailed the conviction.

A DESIRE BEYOND REASON
As a vampire, Elijah Pike (alias Roger Neimann) has been a slave to instinct—consuming human blood to satisfy an unquenchable thirst. As a doctor, he relies on his intellect in the pursuit of a cure that will end not only his craving but also the deadly urges of others like him.

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AN APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION
Master vampire Michael Morpheus’s last encounter with Elijah Pike, in the Louisiana bayou, left him disfigured and consumed by hatred for those he considers traitors to the race. He went underground to lick his wounds—and to gather an army of evil that will follow him in his quest for vengeance.

A CALL TO ARMS
Pike knows that the fate of innocent mortals depends upon his victory in a battle against his own kind—one in which no mercy can be shown. Now, in the frozen wilderness of the Canadian Rockies, he’ll face Morpheus once more—and the snow will be stained with blood . . .

The true crimes of one of nineteenth century England’s most notorious thieves and killers, whose exploits still capture the public’s imagination.

Once immortalized in Madame Tussauds’s Chamber of Horrors, and brought to life in two silent films, his gnarled and prematurely aged features would be the last image his victims ever saw, yet ironically, he was known by the name of Peace. A grotesque figure who took on many names and many faces, he could slip into the home of an unsuspecting family with the silent stealth of a cool night time breeze, and leave without a trace.

Spending his nocturnal hours limping through the dirty streets with villainy on his mind, and impishly disappearing into the industrial smoke that hung over Victorian Sheffield like a perpetual storm cloud, this devil wrote his own place in the folklore of his hometown. Committing one gruesome crime after the next, he was the most wanted man in England for a time.

True crime that “will appeal to readers interested in gaining an insight into the lives of women accused of murder in the mid 19th century” (Essex Family Historian).

For a few years in the 1840s, Essex was notorious in the minds of Victorians as a place where women stalked the winding country lanes looking for their next victim to poison with arsenic. Though that terrible image may not have much basis in truth, it was a symptom of an anxiety-filled time...

Related: 32 Most Horrifying Serial Killer Books 

The 1840s were also known as the “hungry ’40s,” when crop failures pushed up food prices and there was popular unrest across Europe. The decade culminated in a cholera epidemic in which tens of thousands of people in the British Isles died. It is perhaps no surprise that people living through that troubled decade were captivated by the stories of the “poisoners”: that death was down to “white powder” and the evil intentions of the human heart.

Sarah Chesham, Mary May, and Hannah Southgate are the protagonists of this tale of how rural Essex, in a country saturated with arsenic, was touched by the tumultuous 1840s.

The true crime story of a father’s murder and a daughter’s discovery of his Jekyll-and-Hyde double-life in pursuit of his killer.

Denise Wallace had spent years hiding deadly secrets about her enigmatic father, Wesley Wallace. Wes was a trusted security guard of the Ritz Carlton Palm Beach. He was supposed to protect those who found themselves in his care. But a closer look into his brutal murder revealed a split personality—one that his daughter may have seen but tried to ignore.

Related: 9 Haunting Cases from Unsolved Mysteries That Have Since Been Solved 

However, detectives assigned to the case persuaded her to assist them in the capture of her father's killer. The trail would lead from the glitz of Palm Beach to the murky streets of Dixie Highway and end in a courtroom where her father's secret life, and his dangerous penchant for sex slaves, would be revealed.

This tale of missing children and mythic monsters is “a fantastic novel in every sense of the word” (Karl Ove Knausgård).

Summer 1978. A young boy disappears without a trace from a summer cabin. His mother claims he was carried away by a giant. He is never found.

Related: Victor LaValle: Where to Begin with the Award-Winning Horror Author 

Twenty-five years later, another child goes missing. This time there’s a lead, a single photograph taken by Susso Myrén. She’s devoted her life to the search for trolls, legendary giants known as stallo who can control human thoughts and assume animal form. Convinced that the fabled beasts are real, she follows the trail of missing children to northern Sweden. But humans, some part stallo themselves, have been watching over the creatures for generations, and this hidden society of protectors won’t hesitate to close its deadly ranks.

Mixing folklore and history, suspense and the supernatural, The Shapeshifters is an extraordinary journey into a frozen land where myth bleeds into reality.

A Paris police detective is haunted by a murderous evil in this chillingly macabre mystery.

Murder and depravity are Police Commissioner Amédée Mallock’s daily bread. As far as he is concerned, mankind has been thoroughly abandoned by God, and the visions that haunt him do nothing to disabuse him of this notion. But nothing he has encountered has prepared him for the sudden appearance of a serial killer dubbed “the Makeup Artist.” The bodies of the killer’s first victims, found in four separate neighborhoods of Paris, are monstrous works of art, demented expressions of corrupted piety. These crimes are unprecedented in their ferocity and their intricacy—and the deeper Mallock investigates, the greater the mysteries and the enigmas. Foremost among them: Is a solution to a series of crimes behind which the devil himself seems to lurk even conceivable?

A blend of noir mystery, horror, and theological thriller, The Faces of God is ideal for fans of dark, atmospheric crime fiction.

In the village of Pitts Landing, true evil can linger for centuries

It all started with the desperate urging of an internal voice, born from a pulse-pounding nightmare: Run. With that, Iris Ammons felt impelled to leave behind her husband, her children, her job, and her idyllic life. Her motive was never clear to her, just a notion that her entire life had become unfamiliar and that she had to get to the West Coast and the mystical village of Pitts Landing.

Similarly focused on the town is its devilishly charismatic cult leader Michael Roman. Michael cuts a bloody swath through his followers in order to get to the secret at the heart of the village.

Related: 7 LGBTQ+ Horror Authors to Read During Pride Month and Beyond 

As the coincidences pile up and the omens stack on top of one another like the bodies of Michael’s disciples, he and Iris find themselves at the center of a mystery that stretches back for generations and has effects that could be felt for centuries to come.

Lightfall is an erotic horror epic from gifted National Book Award winner Paul Monette, a master of combining thrills with intense emotion, no matter what the genre.

Discover the darker side of New York City history with this collection of stories and photos.

Amid the bustle of the city’s ever-changing landscape, Manhattan’s past still whispers. At Fraunces Tavern, George Washington’s emotional farewell luncheon in 1783 echoes in the Long Room. Gertrude Tredwell’s ghost appears to visitors at the Merchant’s House Museum. Long since deceased, Olive Thomas shows herself to the men of the New Amsterdam Theatre, and Dorothy Parker still keeps her lunch appointment at the Algonquin Hotel.

In other places, it is not the paranormal but the abnormal—violent acts by gangsters, bombers, and murderers that linger in the city’s memory. Some even believe that Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler hunted here.  

Dismembered corpses are discovered scattered along the banks of the river Thames, a calculating clinical multiple murderer is on the loose, and the London police have no inkling of the killers identity and, more than a century later, they still don't. 

Related: The Untold True Story of the Five Women Killed by Jack the Ripper 

In this, M.J. Trow's latest reinvestigation of a bizarre and brutal serial killing, he delves deep into the appalling facts of the case, into the futile police investigations, and into the dark history of late Victorian London. The incredible criminal career of the Thames torso murderer has gripped readers and historians ever since he committed his crimes in the 1870s and 1880s. The case poses as many questions as the even more notorious killings of Jack the Ripper. How, over a period of fifteen years, did the Thames murderer get away with a succession of monstrous and sensational misdeeds? And what sort of perverted character was he, why did he take such risks, why did he kill again and again?

The author of The Book of the Bizarre returns with a new compendium of freaky facts, terrifying trivia, and true stories that are stranger than fiction.

In Beyond Bizarre, Varla Ventura presents an all-new batch of nightmarish tales that teem queasy diseases and paranormal encounters—not to mention the outrageous, outlandish, and the simply strange. Arranged into thirteen chilling chapters like Haunted Hollywood, Tales from the Cryptids, Bride of the Bizarre, and It’s Enough to Make You Hurl, Beyond Bizarre tackles everything from female pirates and creepy candy stripers to psychic predictions, virgin shark births and much, much more.

Related: 10 People Share Their Most Terrifying Ghost Photos 

A word of warning: this book is not for the faint of heart!

A surreal gothic fantasy of three nefarious cities: Paradise, Paradis, and Paradys

Welcome to Paradise, where the sun hasn’t shone for years and a callous, ritual-obsessed populace roams the decayed metropolis enshrouded in fog. The citizens are unhinged, murder and incest are praised, and madness reigns. Only a pair of twins, Felion and Smara, remains sane. But their sole hope of escaping the city is a mysterious ice labyrinth connecting parallel worlds.

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