The Nightmare Man

Ben Bookman, a bestselling horror novelist and heir to the Blackwood estate, wrote his new book, The Scarecrow, over a single weekend at the ancestral house. On the eve of its release, the murders in it begin happening for real.

Detective Mills is called to a barn where a family has been butchered and hung in cocoons of corn husks, staged exactly as the novel's opening scene. When a second family dies the same way, Mills and his daughter, rookie detective Samantha Blue, start looking for the link between the book and the killer. Ben, who cannot account for the night he wrote it, is the obvious suspect and the least useful witness. His memory keeps returning to the Atrium, his grandfather's forbidden room of numbered, wordless books.

J.H. Markert braids a police procedural with supernatural horror, and the answer lies in Blackwood's buried history rather than in the case file.