Recommendations based on "Reader's Digest Select Editions"

'Stroud is a genius' Rick Riordan, author of the Percy Jackson series.Ghosts and ghouls beware! London’s smallest, shabbiest and most talented psychic detection agency is back.Life is never exactly peaceful for Lockwood & Co. Lucy and George are trying to solve the mystery of the talking skull trapped in their ghost jar, while Lockwood is desperate for an exciting new case.Things seem to be looking up when the team is called to Kensal Green Cemetery to investigate the grave of a sinister Victorian doctor. Strange apparitions have been seen there, and the site must be made safe. As usual, Lockwood is confident; as usual, everything goes wrong – a terrible phantom is unleashed, and a dangerous object is stolen from the coffin.Lockwood & Co must recover the relic before its power is unleashed, but it’s a race against time. Their obnoxious rivals from the Fittes agency are also on the hunt. And if that’s not bad enough, the skull in the ghost-jar is stirring again…The author of the blockbuster BARTIMAEUS sequence delivers another humorous and chilling instalment in the critically acclaimed LOCKWOOD & CO. series.

In an ancient tunnel underneath New York City a charnel house is discovered.Inside are thirty-six bodies--all murdered and mutilated more than a century ago.While FBI agent Pendergast investigates the old crimes, identical killings start to terrorize the city.The nightmare has begun.Again.

When young Harry Collins finds the mutilated body of a black woman bound to a tree with barbed wire, he and his younger sister suspect the legendary Goat Man, who is said to lurk under the swinging bridge crossing Texas's Sabine River. The creature holds the key to a string of brutal murders--and a chilling truth. A "New York Times" Notable Book of the Year".

Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come. 'You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug - especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eyes' Roaring down the desert highway, Raoul Duke and his attorney Dr. Gonzo are seeking out the dark side of the American Dream. Armed with a drug arsenal of stupendous proportions, they confront casino operators, police officers and assorted Middle Americans, in surreal, chemically enhanced encounters. Hilarious, hallucinogenic and subversive, Hunter S. Thompson's semi-autobiographical novel is a cult classic and a masterpiece of gonzo journalism. 'A scorching epochal sensation' Tom Wolfe

Scotland Yard's Murder Squad--and Jack the Ripper--return, in the extraordinary new historical thriller from the author of the acclaimed national bestseller The Yard. In The Devil's Workshop, London discovered that Jack the Ripper was back, sending the city--and Scotland Yard's Murder Squad--into chaos. But now it is even worse. Not only is the Ripper still at large, but so is another killer just as bad. For Inspector Walter Day, it has been a difficult time. His wife has given birth to twins, his hostile in-laws have come to stay, and a leg injury has kept him at his desk. But when the Harvest Man begins killing, carving people's faces off their skulls, the Yard knows they need Day in the field. Not so Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith. Rash actions have cost him his job, but that doesn't stop his obsessive hunt for the Ripper. When the mutilated bodies of prostitutes start turning up again, Hammersmith enlists the help of a criminal network to stop Saucy Jack, his methods carrying him further and further from the ideals of the Yard, so far in fact that he may never be able to find his way back. Of course, the Ripper's been playing a game with him--with Walter Day, as well. He is pushing both of them to their limits, and what happens when they get there . . . no one can say.

What if the monsters from your favorite horror books were real?Eddie Fennicks has always been a loner, content to lose himself in a mystery novel by his favorite author, Nathaniel Olmstead. That's why moving to the small town of Gatesweed becomes a dream come true when Eddie discovers that Olmstead lived there before mysteriously disappearing thirteen years ago. Even better, Eddie finds a handwritten, never-before-seen Nathaniel Olmstead book printed in code and befriends Harris, who's as much an Olmsteady as he is. But then the frightening creatures of Olmstead's books begin to show up in real life, and Eddie's dream turns into a nightmare. Eddie, Harris, and their new friend, Maggie, must break Olmstead's code, banish all gremlins and monster lake-dogs from the town of Gatesweed, and solve the mystery of the missing author, all before Eddie's mom finishes writing her own tale of terror and brings to life the scariest creature of all.

In 'The Haunted Monastery', Judge Dee and his wives seek refuge from a violent mountain storm and are plunged into a bizarre series of interrelated crimes. Three women have been murdered in the monastery; Dee has seen something impossible, perhaps supernatural, and inexplicable events flash forth in the dark tangle of corridors and the Taoist Hell - a hall filled with statuary showing realistically the torments of Hell.

The author and heroine of "The Red Scream" return in a novel so terrifying, so filled with squirming suspense, it's bound for the bestseller lists. When "Kirkus Reviews" greeted Mary Willis Walker's last book, "The Red Scream," with "welcome to the big time," they weren't kidding. That novel established Walker as an author with "the kind of clout that sets publishers' mouths watering" ("The Philadelphia Inquirer"). And now she has done it again, with an unforgettable tale ripped from the headlines and more terrifying than our worst nightmares. Kidnapped by a cult of religious fanatics, an Austin school bus driver and eleven of his young charges have been held underground at the group's highly fortified compound for forty-six days. While a team of federal negotiators begins to lose all hope of rescuing the hostages, crime reporter Molly Cates sets outto discover everything she can about the cult's iron-willed leader, Samuel Mordecai. And as the clock ticks inexorably, she takes the role of Clarisse Starling opposite Mordecai's Hannibal Lecter, engaging in a psychological confrontation as harrowing as any in "The Silence Of The Lambs," Tough, terrifying, and relentlessly heart-wrenching, this is a novel whose images no reader will ever forget.

John Saul, author of nineteen bestselling novels of chilling suspense, now gives us a serial thriller set in the small New England town of Blackstone, where the inhabitants are caught in the grip of unrelenting evil. Strange gifts are appearing in the most unlikely places: on doorsteps, in cars, glittering on a flea market table. Each object bears an unspeakable history. Each brings an ominous power to harm. Each reveals another thread in the tightly woven web of . . . THE BLACKSTONE CHRONICLES, PART 5 When attorney Ed Becker spots the carved antique dresser in a dusty attic, he takes it to restore. Then his young daughter, Amy, makes a curious discovery: Inside one of the drawers she finds a set of old pictures and a stereoscope, an old-fashioned device that allows you to see images in three dimensions. Oddly, one of the photos resembles their house, where Eds grandmother lived long ago. But the scenes inside the stereoscope also bring to vivid life some terrifying memories, eerie images that seem all too real. . . .

Getting to the bottom of some strange "supernatural" events is the goal; at various stages in the story, readers can choose one of two different options, each resolving the mystery in its own way.