October 18th, 2026
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On Top Shelf
📚 New Books This Week 📰 Latest News 🎪 Reader Games 👻 🎃 Halloween Contest Giveaways 🎃

October Reads Worth Falling For

Danger, desire, second chances, and unexpected romanceβ€”discover this month’s Fresh Fiction Featured Books.

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A poisoned cousin, a five-year-old's life, and a family with too many secrets.


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Supernatural sparks fly
between a bookseller
& her hard-boiled ghost.


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If Her Highness thinks I’ll let another man claim her and my child, she’s lost her royal mind. Sophaya’s mine.


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She found a body. Then she started asking the wrong questions.


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He ghosted her ten years ago. Now she’s stuck with him for Christmas.


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She’s the lady everyone overlooks. He’s the prince who can’t look away.

Bad Things by Michael Marshall Smith

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Also by Michael Marshall Smith:

Killer Move, March 2012
Paperback / e-Book
Killer Move, July 2011
Hardcover
Bad Things, December 2010
Mass Market Paperback
Bad Things, May 2009
Hardcover
The Intruders, January 2009
Mass Market Paperback
The Intruders, August 2007
Hardcover

BAD THINGS
By: Michael Marshall Smith

William Morrow
May 2009
On Sale: May 1, 2009
Featuring: John Henderson
384 pages
ISBN: 006143440X
EAN: 9780061434402
Hardcover
Add to Wish List

Mystery

From the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Intruders and The Straw Men comes a nerve-shattering story of guilt, rage, deadly secrets, and very, very . . . bad things

Three years ago, lawyer John Henderson watched his four-year-old son tumble from a jetty into the lake outside their Washington home. In a terrible instant, a life all too brief and innocent ended. But it wasn't drowning, the fall, or even some previously undetected internal defect that killed the little boy. Scott Henderson had simply, inexplicably . . . died.

Today, John is a different manβ€”divorced, living a solitary existence in a beach house in Oregon, working as a waiter in a restaurant that caters to the summer crowd. Withdrawn from a life and past too painful to revisit, he touches no one and no one touches him. Then one night he receives a short and profoundly disturbing e-mail message from a stranger. It reads: I know what happened.

It's enough to pull John back to Black Ridgeβ€”the one place on earth he'd hoped never to return toβ€”in search of answers to the mystery that shattered his world. In this small, isolated Pacific Northwest community, populated in large part by descendants of the original settlers, the shadows now seem even darker and more sinister than when tragedy first drove him awayβ€”and the wind whipping down out of the primal forest can chill a man to his soul. It seems that bad things have always happened in this town of generations-old secretsβ€”and are happening still.

The deeper John digs into his own past, and into local history, the more danger he draws toward himself . . . and toward his estranged and helpless family. And though he doesn't know it, he's not the only one who's been called back to Black Ridge.

And that's a very bad thing . . .

A twisting, relentlessly thrilling, and consistently surprising novel of psychological suspense, Michael Marshall's Bad Things is a masterwork of chilling brilliance that will keep the reader guessing right to the final page. Bad things don't just happen to other people. They're waiting to happen to you, too.