Mysteries & Thrillers We’re Reading This September

The Mexican board game of Lotería is a game of chance—similar to bingo. However, in Lotería instead of matching up numbers on a game board, players match up images. There are 54 cards in the Lotería game, and for this short story collection you will find one unique story per card based on a Latin American myth, folklore, superstition, or belief—with a slant towards the paranormal and horrific. In this deck of cards you will find murderers, ghosts, goblins and ghouls.

In the middle of the night, Claire is informed that her beloved daughter, Julia, who was away at college, is dead – and life, as she knows it, is over. Searching for answers, Claire stumbles upon a pile of letters hidden under Julia’s bed in an old, battered shoebox, and feels closer to her daughter than ever before. They tell her that Julia was happy, that she was thriving at university, that she was in love. But as the letters go on, Claire starts to feel uneasy about something hidden between the lines. Even as she grieves, she must prepare to face a shocking discovery. Because Julia was hiding a terrible secret—and when it’s uncovered, it might make Claire question everything she thought she knew about her daughter…

Seven strangers meet for an anonymously hosted dinner party. As the evening winds down, seven cards appear, one in front of each of the guests. On the card is a number-the age at which they will die. Thinking it an elaborate prank, the guests disperse into the night, hoping to forget the morbid evening forever.Weeks later, one of them is dead at exactly the age the card predicted. It must be a coincidence. But as more guests die, each one dead at the same age as their card, it soon becomes clear that something much more sinister is afoot. Now, it’s up to the quickly dwindling group to figure out who (or what) was behind that fateful dinner party, before their numbers catch up with them.

It’s been six years since Glen Masters lost his wife in a tragic accident. In hopes of reconnecting with his grieving teenage daughter, Lauren, he decides to take her on a road trip through the Appalachian mountains, where he has fond memories of their past as a family. But what was supposed to be a quick diner pit stop suddenly transforms into a nightmare when armed men stumble in, ranting about a mysterious and deadly “living water” that attacked several people up the road. The story the men spin seems to be the rantings of drunken lunatics, but soon Glen, his daughter, and the other diners find themselves hostages to both the gunmen and the inexplicably terrifying entity.

It’s been close to twenty years since forensic pathologist Dolores Hawthorne left her hometown of Little Horton, Wisconsin. The town is famous for its Halloween celebrations, but also its history of violent deaths linked to the holiday. To Dolores, it’s the place she fled, family, bad memories, and all. Until the FBI calls to tell her that her father, the former mayor turned US Senator, is missing under mysterious circumstances. With Halloween fast approaching, Dolores must face the past she left behind before it’s too late.

Alice Ingold has been kidnapped. Call the police. Alert the media. You can’t play this game without all the pieces.Beautiful, blond, and immensely privileged, Alice Ingold is the perfect victim for a true-crime obsessed culture–and for a masked duo with a singular purpose. Instead of a demand for ransom, her captors have a riddle, and they’re inviting the entire country to solve it.

It’s been several years since Detective Jimmy Perez left Shetland. He has settled into his new home in Orkney, the group of islands, off the northern coast of Scotland, with his partner Willow Reeve and their growing family. One stormy winter night, his oldest and closest friend, Archie Stout, goes missing. Ever the detective, Perez catches a boat to the island of Westray. But when he arrives he finds a shocking scene: Archie’s body, on an archaeological dig site and an ancient Westray story stone with precise spirals carved into it beside him, the clear murder weapon. But Perez is so close to the case that he struggles to maintain an objective distance from the potential suspects. With each new lead, the case becomes more twisted and Perez wonders if he will ever find out what happened in his friend’s final days.