Fiction Without Frontiers

When family man Joe Crawford confronts a young mother abusing her toddler in a gas station parking lot, he has no idea of the chain reaction he's setting in motion. How could he suspect the young mother is part of an ancient fire cult, a sinister group of killers that will destroy anyone who threatens one of its members? When the little boy is placed in a foster home, the young mother burns herself alive in grief and rage...and the cult's fanatics begin their mission of terror as Joe and his family are plagued by otherwise inexplicable events. One night Joe smells ashes in his daughter's nursery. A kindly old couple whose house Joe renovated is found butchered ritualistically. Pushed to his limit, Joe becomes friends with the local police chief Daryl Copeland, who decides to accompany Joe to the cult's isolated compound, where the chief is murdered and Joe is taken hostage. Joe awakens in the huge three-story house he has been renovating for a beautiful client and her husband. His lovely client turns out to be the leader of the fire cult. Joe and the little boy he saved are the planned sacrifices of the cult's midsummer ceremony. Joe's wife and some local policemen save Joe, but in a wild shootout the house is set ablaze and the little boy is taken hostage upstairs. Joe is left to do battle against the cult...alone.

Ghosts have always walked there. Now they're not alone. In 1891, Edinburgh's Henderson Close is a seething mass of humanity, poverty, crime, and degradation. Even murder. Miss Carmichael is a middle-aged spinster, living in the prosperous New Town. She regularly takes food, money, and clothing to families living in the Closes, deep within the slums of the Old Town. In the present day, Henderson Close, having been buried under the foundations of newer buildings a century earlier, is a major tourist attraction. In the depths of Edinburgh, an evil presence is released. Hannah and her colleagues are tour guides who lead their visitors along the spooky, derelict Henderson Close, thrilling them with tales of specters and murder. For Hannah, it is her dream job, but not for long. When renovations begin to extend the location, the Auld De'il is released from its devil's trap and even the spirits are afraid. Who is the mysterious figure that disappears around a corner? What is happening in the old print shop? And who is the little girl with no face? The legends of Henderson Close have become all too real, and the ghost stories told by the tour guides begin to take on a sinister reality.

Amber Hawthorne and Jolene Morris, roommates and business partners at the Hawthorne Funeral Home, are drowning in debt. Because both young women have trouble keeping their partying habits in line, they start selling body parts on the black market to keep their business alive and their new buyers seem friendly and trustworthy enough at first. That is until the dead gangster they've recently parted up turns out to have been full of disease. Now Amber and Jolene's buyers want something else to make up for lost profits, leaving the two undertakers to learn sometimes running your own business can cost you an arm and a leg. Literally.