It’s the perfect time of year to curl up with a book that sends a delicious shiver down your spine! From haunting historical mysteries to modern supernatural suspense, these stories capture the haunting spirit of the season. Check out our list of 2025’s best spooky season books — they’re guaranteed to keep you reading well past midnight!
Descendants of the Big House
C. Vonzale Lewis
(A Horde of Dead Poets)
Publication date: October 14th 2025
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, Fantasy, Mystery
Beatrice Monroe is still getting used to the knowledge that she was born a champion for Good and Evil. She spends her days combing through her great grandmother’s journals trying to find answers to what this newfound ability means for her as a member of law enforcement.
When a woman walks into her precinct claiming her aunt was murdered, Beatrice discovers a link between their families that may just have the answers she needs. But those answers are not easy to find. Because this mystery’s roots are buried in the past with five young girls and what they gave birth to…in The Big House.
Descendants of the Big House is a standalone installment in A Horde of Dead Poets collection featuring seven authors and their stories inspired by famous literary poems. If you often find yourself steering toward a dark, mysterious, isolated location; if family curses haunt you and unreliable narrators keep you in suspense, you won’t want to miss a single volume in this gripping collection.
Perfect for fans of T. Kingfisher, Simone St. James, Stephen King, and Shirley Jackson.
Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / iBooks / Kobo
—
EXCERPT:
“I think somebody did something,” Mr. Taylor announced suddenly, voice raised. “My wife, my children. Not right. Not right at all.” He started crying. “I can’t convince anybody to listen to me.”
I got up and kneeled by his chair. “I’m listening, Mr. Elijah.” It didn’t dawn on me that I might have overstepped. The pain in his plea just pulled at me. I understood the feeling of being lost so well, growing up in a home filled with abuse and no one listening to my own cries for help.
He looked down at me. “I appreciate that. You find ’em. You find the one that took my Mary. She was the only woman I ever loved. And our children. Godsend. No matter what that man told her at the crossroads.”
“What man?” I asked, my blood running cold. Of course, I knew what man he was referring to, but I didn’t dare say it out loud.
He flapped his hand in the air again.
I looked at Gautier and dipped my head toward my bag. I didn’t want to upset him further, but I needed to confirm what I already suspected. Mary had met Papa Sin at the crossroads.
Gautier pulled out the book Odette gave us, still in an evidence bag, and came over and gave it to me. I pulled it out and Mr. Taylor gasped.
“Get that evil book out of my house!” He tried to get to his feet and ended up falling back in the chair. I straightened and, after thrusting the book at Gautier, helped Mr. Elijah right himself.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” Cherie asked, rushing over. “What evil?” She looked at the book. “I don’t understand what’s going on, but it’s upsetting my daddy.”
“I’m sorry about that, ma’am. But your sister Natalie sent this book to Odette along with a letter claiming she was going to…” I looked down at Mr. Taylor. His eyes were wild.
“She swore she’d gotten rid of that book. She swore.” He let out a sob. “That man told her she’d birth evil. That twins were broken.” He caved in on himself, chest heaving as he cried.
“I better take him to his room,” Cherie said, her face filled with concern.
Gautier got up and helped her take him in the back. I stood there berating myself for upsetting him. I shouldn’t have asked about the book. But I had to get answers, right?
Author Bio:
Carla Vonzale Lewis likes her martini’s shaken…never stirred. Though she was born in Georgia, please don’t mistake her for a Georgia peach. She’s more like a prickly pear. Speaking of being born, someone asked her recently if she remembered her birth, and all she had to say was, “Yes, I do remember that handsy doctor pulling me out into the cold. Right Bastard!!!”
Despite being born in the South, she grew up in the North. California to be exact. And every once in a great while, she gets to experience all four seasons. But mostly, it’s just heat.
Her debut novel, LINEAGE, was released July 16, 2019 and she fully intends to ride that joy for the rest of her life.
When she’s not concocting her next contemporary fantasy story, she enjoys reading, binge watching shows on Netflix, and trying to convince her husband that getting a dog is a wonderful idea.
GIVEAWAY!
Descendants of the Big House Blitz
https://widget.gleamjs.io/e.js
—
</
The Murder at the Vicarage is Agatha Christie’s first mystery to feature the beloved investigator Miss Marple—as a dead body in a clergyman’s study proves to the indomitable sleuth that no place, holy or otherwise, is a sanctuary from homicide.
Miss Marple encounters a compelling murder mystery in the sleepy little village of St. Mary Mead, where under the seemingly peaceful exterior of an English country village lurks intrigue, guilt, deception and death.
Colonel Protheroe, local magistrate and overbearing land-owner is the most detested man in the village. Everyone–even in the vicar–wishes he were dead. And very soon he is–shot in the head in the vicar’s own study. Faced with a surfeit of suspects, only the inscrutable Miss Marple can unravel the tangled web of clues that will lead to the unmasking of the killer.
tie’s genius for detective fiction is unparalleled. Her worldwide popularity is phenomenal, her characters engaging, her plots spellbinding. No one knows the human heart–or the dark passions that can stop it–better than Agatha Christie. She is truly the one and only Queen of Crime.
Miss Marple–Agatha Christie’s immortal spinster sleuth with the razor-sharp mind and an intuitive understanding of criminal behavior–encounters a compelling murder mystery in the sleepy little village of St. Mary Mead, where under the seemingly peaceful exterior of an English country village lurks intrigue, guilt, deception and death.
Colonel Protheroe, local magistrate and overbearing land-owner is the most detested man in the village. Everyone–even in the vicar–wishes he were dead. And very soon he is–shot in the head in the vicar’s own study. Faced with a surfeit of suspects, only the inscrutable Miss Marple can unravel the tangled web of clues that will lead t
The first Miss Marple mystery, one which tests all her powers of observation and deduction.
“Anyone who murdered Colonel Protheroe,”declared the parson, brandishing a carving knife above a joint of roast beef, “would be doing the world at large a favor!”
It was a careless remark for a man of the cloth. And one which was to come back and haunt the clergyman just a few hours later—when the Colonel is found shot dead in the clergyman’s study. But as Miss Marple soon discovers, the whole village seems to have had a motive to kill Colonel Protheroe.
Colonel Protheroe, a strong candidate for most disliked citizen of St. Mary Mead, is found shot in the vicarage. It takes the intuitive sleuthing of elderly Miss Marple to identify the killer from the lengthy list of suspects (including the vicar himself). This dramatization of Agatha Christie’s classic mystery lives up to the high standards of BBC Radio productions. The full cast, featuring June Whitfield as Miss Jane Marple and Francis Matthews as the Rev. Leonard Clement, is superb. All the eccentricities and gossipy nature of Miss Marple and the villagers are voiced in a natural manner. Sound effects, including the pouring of tea and the gentle clinking of cups on saucers, add to the charm of the production. C.R.A. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
My name is Eufrasia Canelli but everybody calls me Effie. I come from a big Italian family with big hearts, big appetites, and an even bigger bankroll that’s cleverly hidden from the IRS.
I’m not married to the mob, I was born into it. Just last year, I was laid off from my career at a tech company and in an effort to keep from moving back home—I went crawling to the biggest crime lord I know—my Uncle Jimmy.
He gave me two options: Dance at his strip club—or hunt down his enemies.
Seeing that I’m no fan of public nudity, I opted for murder.
Let’s just say my mortality rate so far is nil.
Okay, so I’m not a straight shot but my Uncle Jimmy doesn’t seem to mind and I’m still raking in enough money to keep a roof over my head.
I also took a part-time job at a local bakery. Not only do I get to satisfy my sweet tooth for free but I get a decent cover when I’m asked about my employment.
But the darndest thing just happened at one of my gigs, someone dropped dead!
And guess who landed at the top of the suspect list?
Me.
Now I’ve got to find the killer before I end up behind bars for committing a homicide that wasn’t even on my radar.
I guess it’s true what they say—living in Honey Hollow can be murder.
From a crime writer and “an acknowledged literary landmark,” a PI heads west and battles corruption and a rising death toll in this 1920s classic mystery (The New York Times Book Review).
Summoned to Personville, the detective known as Continental Op discovers the real reason locals call the western mining town “Poisonville.” The whole community has been divvied up into warring factions of gangsters and petty criminals. As the body count continues to rise, starting with the newspaperman who called in the detective for help, the Op decides to stick around. He is determined to clean up the criminal element, even if it means interrogating the whole town. But corruption knows no bounds and soon enough, the trusty detective finds himself a prime suspect of murder.
“Dashiell Hammett is an original. He is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer.” —The Boston Globe
“Hammett’s prose [is] clean and entirely unique. His characters [are] as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction.” —The New York Times
“[Hammett] was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” —Raymond Chandler
Dashiell Samuel Hammett was born in St. Mary’s County, Maryland. He grew up in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Hammett left school at the age of fourteen and held several kinds of jobs thereafter—messenger boy, newsboy, clerk, operator, and stevedore, finally becoming an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency. Sleuthing suited young Hammett, but World War I intervened, interrupting his work and injuring his health. When Sergeant Hammett was discharged from the last of several hospitals, he resumed detective work. He soon turned to writing, and in the late 1920s Hammett became the unquestioned master of detective-story fiction in America. In The Maltese Falcon (1930) he first introduced his famous private eye, Sam Spade. The Thin Man (1932) offered another immortal sleuth, Nick Charles. Red Harvest (1929), The Dain Curse (1929), and The Glass Key (1931) are among his most successful novels. During World War II, Hammett again served as sergeant in the Army, this time for more than two years, most of which he spent in the Aleutians. Hammett’s later life was marked in part by ill health, alcoholism, a period of imprisonment related to his alleged membership in the Communist Party, and by his long-time companion, the author Lillian Hellman, with whom he had a very volatile relationship. His attempt at autobiographical fiction survives in the story “Tulip,” which is contained in the posthumous collection The Big Knockover (1966, edited by Lillian Hellman). Another volume of his stories, The Continental Op (1974, edited by Stephen Marcus), introduced the final Hammett character: the “Op,” a nameless detective (or “operative”) who displays little of his personality, making him a classic tough guy in the hard-boiled mold—a bit like Hammett himself. –This text refers to the paperback edition.
Book Reviews by the Reluctant Retiree 