THE COUNTING GAME – Sinéad Nolan

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Southwest Ireland, 1995: Two children go into the woods. Only one comes out.

When thirteen-year-old Saoirse Kellough goes missing, panic grips a rural Irish community. Saoirse is not the first girl to disappear in the forest, rumored by locals to be haunted, and the only witness—her troubled younger brother, Jack—refuses to speak. Saoirse went missing when they were playing the Counting Game, a ritual believed to ward off evil, and Jack has sworn to protect the forest’s secrets.

Freya Hemmings, a psychotherapist still healing from a loss of her own, is brought in to help investigators break Jack’s silence. As the race to find Saoirse alive accelerates, the search threatens to unravel a family facing the unthinkable. Everyone is a suspect, and the closer Freya and Jack become, the more danger they find themselves in.
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BLOOD IN THE WATER – Tiffany D. Jackson

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Brooklyn girl Kaylani McKinnon feels like a fish out of water. She’s spending the summer with family friends in their huge house on Martha’s Vineyard, and the vibe is definitely snooty. Still, there are beautiful beaches, lots of ice cream, and a town full of fascinating Black history. Plus a few kids her age who seem friendly.

Until the shocking death of a popular teenage boy rocks the community to its core. Was it a drowning? A shark attack? Or the unthinkable–murder?

Kaylani is determined to solve the mystery. But her investigation leads her to uncover shocking secrets that could change her own life as she knows it…if she survives.
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JAPANESE GOTHIC – Kylie Lee Baker

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October, 2026: Lee Turner doesn’t remember how or why he killed his college roommate. The details are blurred and bloody. All he knows is he has to flee New York and go to the one place that might offer refuge—his father’s new home in Japan, a house hidden by sword ferns and wild ginger. But something is terribly wrong with the house: no animals will come near it, the bedroom window isn’t always a window, and a woman with a sword appears in the yard when night falls.

October, 1877: Sen is a young samurai in exile, hiding from the imperial soldiers in a house behind the sword ferns. A monster came home from war wearing her father’s face, but Sen would do anything to please him, even turn her sword on her own mother. She knows the soldiers will soon slaughter her whole family when she sees a terrible omen: a young foreign man who appears outside her window.

One of these people is a ghost, and one of these stories is a lie.

Something is hiding beneath the house of sword ferns, and Lee and Sen will soon wish they never unburied it.
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ABYSS – Nicholas Binge

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Joe always had potential, but he doesn’t expect much, and he hopes that his new job as an admin assistant won’t expect much of him. But when he enters the offices of Ponos―a company he’s never heard of and knows nothing about―he discovers that potential is exactly what they want from him.
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THE DORIANS – Nick Cutter

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On a remote island in the Canadian wilderness, five elderly volunteers from different walks of life are given a tantalizing offer: to stall their biological clocks or even reverse them, restoring their lost youth. The chance to put death on pause—forever, perhaps. The remarkable secret lies in the high-tech harnessing of an ancient and extraordinary biological agent…one with no conscience, yet possessed with a single-minded purpose that has helped it persist for eons: the will to survive. The dark heart of unbridled human ambition finds its apex in an unholy experiment that now tests the limits of both creator and subject, eclipsing all bounds of morality and sanity….
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THE DOLL HOUSE – D. W. Gillespie

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Garrett never met his grandfather, Burke, but he’s heard the stories from his mother. Burke was an enormously successful writer, but he was also notoriously cruel, especially to his family. After he passes away suddenly, Garrett and his mother are told that his enormous fortune is hers…if they agree to spend a week at his estate.

The house is a monument to Burke’s obsession with puppet-like dolls, and the attic is packed with cryptic notes and ancient books. It’s clear that his grandfather was up to something, but Garrett can only guess what, and his fear only deepens when he finds a creepily detailed doll with ‘Marion’ written on the foot. 

As the week progresses, Garrett realizes that the house isn’t what it seems. An old typewriter clicks away on its own. There are sounds in the night that come from the basement. And strangest of all is Marion, who always seems to be watching…
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THE NIGHT THAT FINDS US ALL – John Hornor Jacobs

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Sam Vines is struggling. Her boat is up on the hard and she doesn’t have enough money to get her back in the water. Turns out the snorkelers and the scubadivers are looking for the ultra-luxury boating experience, not the single-handed, rarely sober, snarky stylings of sailboat captain Samantha Vines. So it’s a good thing when her former crewmate Loick asks her to help deliver a massive, hundred-year-old sailboat from Seattle to England. Sam is the only one who can handle the ship’s engine, and did Loick mention that the money is good? It’s very good.

The Blackwatch is a huge boat. An ancient boat. It’s also probably (definitely) haunted.

Sam’s alcohol withdrawal (sobriety is important at sea) has her doubting her senses, but when one crewmate disappears and another has a gruesome accident, she knows that this simple delivery job has spiraled into something sinister.
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THE RETURN OF ELLIE BLACK – Emiko Jean

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It’s been twenty years since Detective Chelsey Calhoun’s sister vanished when they were teenagers, and ever since she’s been searching: for signs, for closure, for other missing girls. But happy endings are rare in Chelsey’s line of work.

Then a glimmer: local teenager Ellie Black, who disappeared without a trace two years earlier, has been found alive in the woods of Washington state.

But something is not right with Ellie. She won’t say where she’s been, or who she’s protecting, and it’s up to Chelsey to find the answers. She needs to get to the bottom of what happened to Ellie: for herself, and for the memory of her sister, but mostly for the next girl who could be taken—and who, unlike Ellie, might never return.
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THE EYES ARE THE BEST PART – Monika Kim

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Ji-won’s life tumbles into disarray in the wake of her Appa’s extramarital affair and subsequent departure. Her mother, distraught. Her younger sister, hurt and confused. Her college freshman grades, failing. Her dreams, horrifying . . . yet enticing. 

In them, Ji-won walks through bloody rooms full of eyes. Succulent blue eyes. Salivatingly blue eyes. Eyes the same shape and shade as George’s, who is Umma’s obnoxious new boyfriend. George has already overstayed his welcome in her family’s claustrophobic apartment. He brags about his puffed-up consulting job, ogles Asian waitresses while dining out, and acts condescending toward Ji-won and her sister as if he deserves all of Umma’s fawning adoration. No, George doesn’t deserve anything from her family. Ji-won will make sure of that. 

For no matter how many victims accumulate around her campus or how many people she must deceive and manipulate, Ji-won’s hunger and her rage deserve to be sated.
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A BAD, BAD PLACE – Frances Crawford

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Glasgow, 1979: If it hadn’t been for her wee stupid dog, Sid Vicious, twelve-year-old Janey Devine might never have stumbled upon the corpse of Samantha Watson. And then maybe she’d still be able to sleep at night. And maybe her nana wouldn’t be so worried all the time. And maybe Billy “The Ghost” Watson, a
notorious gangster, wouldn’t be on her tail—for it’s Billy’s daughter who was left for dead on those train tracks, and now Billy wants answers.

Fear and gossip have spread through the tight-knit community of Possilpark, and while Janey swears she can’t remember the details of that morning, the cops think she’s hiding something—and indeed, there’s something she knows that she’s not quite ready to tell anyone, not even her nana, who won’t rest until this whole thing is behind them.
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