Spooktacular Reads.....OH the HORROR!!!

Ghost Story by Jim Butcher

Publishers Weekly

Butcher's 13th supernatural crime novel featuring Chicago-based wizard Harry Dresden (after 2010's Changes) is less accessible to newcomers than many of its predecessors, though longtime fans will be gratified. The current volume opens with Dresden in a limbo-like state, after "a long, long day, battling the forces of evil, destroying the Red Court
utterly, rescuing my daughter and murdering her mother—oh, and getting shot to death." Police captain Collin J. Murphy, the late father of Dresden's longtime ally Karrin, explains that an "irregularity" with Dresden's death requires him to go back to Chicago to solve his own murder. Dresden obligingly returns to the world he'd just left, experiencing a steep learning curve as he adjusts to his incorporeal state. The usual plot twists and high-stakes combat with an assortment of supernatural beings ought to hold Butcher's fans for another year. 

Heart of Evil by Heather Graham

From the Publisher -

Emerging from the bayou like an apparition, Donegal Plantation is known for its unsurpassed dining, captivating atmosphere, haunting legends…and now a corpse swinging from the marble angel that marks its cemetery’s most majestic vault. A corpse discovered in nearly the same situation as that of Marshall Donegal, the patriarch killed in a skirmish just before the Civil War.

Desperate for help traditional criminologists could never provide, plantation heiress Ashley Donegal turns to an elite team of paranormal investigators who blend hard forensics with rare – often inexplicable – intuition. Among them is Jake Mallory, a gifted New Orleans musician with talent that stretches beyond the realm of the physical, and a few dark ghosts of his own.

The evil the team unveils has the power to shake the plantation to its very core. Jake and Ashley are forced to risk everything to unravel secrets that will not stay buried – even in death….

The Magician King by Lev Grossman

Kirkus Reviews-

Now a king in the magical land of Fillory, Quentin embarks on a quest to save the universe in Grossman's searing sequel to The Magicians (2009, etc.).

It's been two years since Quentin assumed one of Fillory's four crowns along with Eliot and Janet, fellow graduates of the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, and Quentin's high-school friend Julia, a Brakebills reject who managed to acquire magical powers on her own. Truth to tell, he's a little bored with his cushy life at the Castle Whitespire, so he seizes on the excuse of a tax-collecting mission to sail for Outer Island, rumored to be the home of "the key that winds up the world." It's an ugly surprise when he and Julia find the key and it dumps them back in their hometown on Earth. Searching for a way back to Fillory, they learn that something is very wrong in the Neitherlands, the mysterious embarkation point that leads to all other worlds, and that the key they found is one of seven required to fend off an apocalypse. Interspersed chapters flash back to Julia's dark adventures before she reunited with Quentin. She discovered a network of people sharing magical knowledge outside the approved Brakebills framework, and her prodigious skills eventually earned her entrance into an elite circle of brilliant, self-taught magicians seeking "an advance so radical it will take us into another league...we think there's more to magic than what we've seen so far." Indeed there is: The ancient forces recklessly summoned by Julia and her friends provoke a spectacular magical battle, a terrifying transformation for Julia and the loss of everything Quentin has ever wanted. Echoes from The Chronicles of Narnia, in particular The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, continue to reverberate, but Grossman's psychologically complex characters and grim reckoning with tragic sacrifice far surpass anything in C.S. Lewis' pat Christian allegory.

Fabulous fantasy spiked with bitter adult wisdom—not to be missed.