Here are the new releases from Crossroad Press for June, July, and August 2025. Unless noted otherwise, you can purchase any of them at Amazon, B&N, Apple, Google Play, Smashwords, or Kobo.
(Release date – 6/12/2025)
Featuring cover art by Dan Brereton
There’s nothing quite like a circus. The Carnivale de Fantastique is an acrobatic and musical phenomenon, a show based on the legends of a circus that vanished mysteriously half a century ago. Every season the numbers grow, the merchandising expands and the ticket sales explode.
This year things are a little different. This year the star of the show was murdered and shipped to the next city in a cardboard box. This year the acts are running into all sorts of troubles, and even the police and the F.B.I. are trying to figure out what’s causing all the troubles.
Once upon a time there was a kid named Cecil. He ran away, joined the circus and then got murdered for his troubles. Fifty years later, he clawed his way out of Hell, found the people who killed him and his circus and had his bloody revenge. Since then he’s been trying to find something to do with his time and now he’s heard about the Carnivale de Fantastique, a show based on the disappearance of the circus he traveled with. Of course it’s not a traditional circus. This one has acrobats and dancers and actors and a story.
It’s only missing one thing and it’s just not funny.
When in doubt, send in the clowns.
(Release date – 6/8/2025)
Featuring cover art by Zach McCain
There is no peace in death. Some people know that better than others. In Carson’s Point, Colorado the dead do not rest, but rise every night and try to kill whatever crosses their path. Those dead are merely the symptom of something far worse, something ancient and evil that does not care for the Europeans taking the lands, or for those who lived there before. The living do not matter, the dead are tools, the possible spawn of the pale, white thing lurking in the woods are all that is important to that dreadful force. It will kill anything that gets in its path and make living and the deceased suffer for their transgressions.
Carson’s Point is on a course that leads straight to Hell, unless something comes along that can fight back against the unnatural servants of the thing that wants the boomtown destroyed.
The wizard, Albert Miles, is in town for reasons all his own, escaping the latest terrors he’s spread across the land. He might well be able to save the town, but if he does he’ll exact a terrible price.
The new sheriff has his work cut out for him. There are savages waiting outside the town, dead things crawling from the grave, bad men set on taking what they want and fools aplenty trying to survive the disasters coming their way until they can once again go hunting for the dreams they hope will change their lives.
Jonathan Crowley could very well be the salvation that the town needs, but he has no desire to help anyone living there and has settled himself on one mission and one mission only: revenge against the soldiers that left him for dead.
The Hunter has quit and no longer wants anything to do with justice for humans or stopping the evil things that feast on humanity’s sorrows. Evil grows throughout the town, mortal evil and things far worse. And when the sun sets, that evil takes root and spreads like wildfire.
(Release date – 6/8/2025)
Featuring cover art by Dan Brereton
Jonathan Crowley is having a bad time of it.
He’s too busy for anyone’s good, dealing with calls from beyond the grave, demons that refuse to stay dead, the very creature that murdered his wife and children, and a few spirits that have unfinished business with the Hunter.
The past comes back to haunt the man who gives monsters their nightmares in a series of encounters that deal with Crowley’s past losses and even his occasional victories, but any way you look at it, Jonathan Crowley is having One Bad Week.
Now the question is who will survive to talk about it later?
(Release date – 6/10/2025)
Featuring cover art by Zach McCain
They survived the nightmare at Carson’s Point, but Jonathan Crowley, the Hunter, and his new associate, Lucas Slate have only just begun their trek through the weird, wild west.
All Crowley wants is to retire and catalog the creatures he’s never before encountered in the Americas. All Lucas Slate wants is to understand what is happening to his body and mind, and why there is an endlessly changing song echoing through his head that will not leave him in peace. Dark Gods, Ghosts, Werewolves and Spectral Trains are a few of the obstacles between what they want and what they get.
Collected for the first time, the stories “Black Train Blues,” “The Devoted,” “Blank, White Page (Songs In The Key of White,” and “What Rough Beast” (co-authored by Charles R. Rutledge) continue the story started in BOOMTOWN. An additional never before published short story, “Where Did We Go Wrong,” finishes this collection of tales.
Jonathan Crowley is new to the Americas and heading Where the Sun Goes To Die while he examines a land full of mysteries and nightmares. Won’t you join him?
The Tourist’s Guide to Haunted Wellman
by James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge
(Release date – 6/24/2025)
Like most small towns, Wellman, Georgia has its share of ghost stories. A group of amateur paranormal investigators plan to write a book about these macabre legends, The Tourist’s Guide to Haunted Wellman. But after the ghost hunters perform a late-night ritual in a graveyard, the old stories seem to be coming true. Something has been awakened. Something angry. Something hungry.
Occult specialists Jonathan Crowley and Carter Decamp begin separate investigations of the occurrences in Wellman, but soon their paths will converge, bringing them into conflict with malignant and dangerous entities. And it may be more than even their combined knowledge and skills can overcome.
James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge return to shadow-haunted Wellman, the setting of their Griffin and Price novels, for one last tale of suspense and dark horror.
(Release date – 6/24/2025)
A Legacy of Violence
When Stiva and her twin brother, Chandris, inherit the troubled throne of Aris, the populace grows uneasy, and with good reason. The twins, estranged for years after a bitter feud, are dynamic opposites. Stiva takes after their mother, a Reonih bard from the primal mushroom forests of distant Shadri, while Chandris favors their father, a hardened warlord, commander of the mighty Selin army.
A King’s Thirst For Power
Faced with enemies on all sides and the rising threat of war, the twins vow to put their discord behind them and unite to protect Aris. But Chandris wants more than survival; he dreams of empire, and is determined to lift Aris out of its post-technological dark age. He will stop at nothing to achieve that goal, and has no qualms about reawakening an ancient, deadly technology to do it.
A Land Divided
By delving into forbidden science and forgotten dark arts, Chandris breaks a longstanding treaty with the Reonih and incites civil war. He also unleashes an ancient, unearthly threat; the bloodthirsty, elemental Zhur. As alliances fracture and warfare threatens to engulf the land, Stiva must fight not only to save the Reonih from her brother’s lust for power, but protect herself from the Zhurlord that is haunting her.
Desolation: A Horror Western Novella
by Lucy Taylor
(Release date – 6/18/2025)
When Ruth Ellen Abbot, a young woman running away from a failed love affair, finds employment on a wagon train heading west to Santa Fe, she could never imagine she’d soon be embroiled in a horrific web of disappeared children, witchcraft, and satanic rites—nothing a simple girl from Chicago could possibly have any connection to.
Or does she?
The old Mexican curandero she visits in an effort to rid herself of terrible nightmares advises her to flee and hints that, like others on the wagon train, Ruth harbors dark secrets that attract evil.
“But what would a witch want with me?” she asks.
“Now that,” the curandero says, “is the question.”
(Release date – 6/25/2025)
Private Investigator Amanda Lane thought she’d gotten her life together after losing her leg in Afghanistan, but a crumbling marriage and PTSD showed her that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Because of this, she decides to go back to the odd little Florida town where she lived as a girl—not to reconnect with family, but because the cold case of two missing college students seems to point there. If she can solve this case, she reasons, her estranged husband will see her as a hero, and will have to take her back.
However, in the heart of the Ocala National Forest, almost 700 square miles of pine scrub and swamp, waits a horrifying truth about her childhood that will push her the edge of her sanity. She will confront both human and inhuman monstrosities, and endure earth-shattering revelations which she—and the world as we know it—may not survive.
(Release date – 6/30/2025)
1994 Lambda Literary Award-Winning Novel for Lesbian and Gay Science Fiction and Fantasy
India Carless, alias Trouble, managed to stay one step ahead of the feds until she retired from life as a hacker and settled down to run a small network for an artist’s co-op. Now someone has stolen her pseudonym and begun to use it for criminal hacking.
So Trouble returns. Once the fastest gun on the electronic frontier, she has been called out of retirement for one last fight. And it’s a killer.
Less than a hundred years from now, the forces of law and order crack down on the world of the Internet. It is the closing of the frontier. The hip, noir adventurers who got by on wit, bravado, and drugs, who haunt the virtual worlds of the shadows of cyberspace are up against the edges of civilization. It’s time to adapt or die.
(Release date – 7/5/2025)
Vienna, 1908: Gabriele Ziegler is a young art student who becomes infatuated with charismatic archaeologist Dr. Emeryk Quintillus. Only too late does she realize his true designs on her. He is obsessed with resurrecting Cleopatra and has retained the famed artist Gustav Klimt to render Gabriele as the Queen of the Nile, using ashes from Cleopatra’s mummy mixed with the paint. The result is a lifelike portrait emitting an aura of unholy evil…
Vienna, 2018: The Mortimer family has moved into Quintillus’s former home, Villa Dürnstein. In its basement they find an original Klimt masterpiece—a portrait of Cleopatra art scholars never knew existed. But that’s not all that resides within the villa’s vault. Nine-year-old Heidi Mortimer tells her parents that a strange man lives there.
Quintillus’s desire to be with Cleopatra transcends death. His spirit will not rest until he has brought her back from the netherworld. Even if he has to sacrifice the soul of a child…
by Lisa von Biela
(Release date – 7/8/2025)
In the not-too-distant future, climate change wreaks havoc on agriculture, the economy, public health, and the very fabric of society. Everything is in short supply: food, water, money—and hope.
Convicted of a murder she did not commit, Ravenna opts for a work-based diversion program in place of prison time. She becomes a first responder in Chicago’s toughest and most desperate section. She faces violence, suicides, and danger on every shift.
One day, Ravenna learns the immense personal sacrifice that led to her conviction was in vain. The discovery drives her to take a risky leap. Determined to make a new life for herself one way or the other, she meticulously plans her escape to Mexico, then sets out on the road.
But she encounters far worse obstacles and dangers than she imagined—and there’s no turning back. Her plan in tatters, she has to find a way to reach a safe place to start over.
Will the road be Ravenna’s salvation—or her undoing?
(Release date – 7/25/2025)
OLD EVIL
Four years have passed since the slaughter that took place at the old Whitcome house. Four years since the tiny picture-perfect town of Antrim, Vermont, was devastated by the ugliest event in its history. Now the bloodstained Whitcome walls have been painted over, the broken-down doors repaired. And a new family has moved in…
YOUNG BLOOD
Fifteen-year-old Will Crockett could have told his mother and stepfather that the bargain price on the Vermont house was too good to be true. But they never listened to him anyway. Now weird things were beginning to happen: open doors that he knew he had locked; strange scampering sounds on the porch roof. A sense of being watched. His parents didn’t believe him, but Will knew something was wrong — something so twisted and evil that only a kid’s imagination could conceive of its horror…
The Southern-Fried Horror Trilogy
by Ronald Kelly
(Release date – 8/4/2025)
Now in one volume, all three books in The Southern-Fried Horror Trilogy.
HAUNT OF SOUTHERN-FRIED FEAR
Down below the Mason-Dixon Line, deep in the shadowy hills and hollows of Tennessee, lives a teller of terrifying tales and a spinner of dark yarns unlike any you have ever heard before. Stories to chill your bones and pepper your flesh with goose bumps. What his true name may be, no one knows for sure. But, if you listen closely, you can hear his voice ringing through the dead of night!
Pull up a tombstone and join your host, The Old Storyteller, as he shares nine tales of ghostly horror that will run a shiver down your spine! Tour a backwoods graveyard, neglected and forgotten…a cemetery haunted by restless spirits and wayward souls. Some are earthbound by sorrow and remorse…others by an unearthly hunger for vengeance!
Now enter…the Haunt of Southern-Fried Fear!
______
TALES FROM THE SOUTHERN-FRIED CRYPT
Below the pale orb of a full moon, a lone boat navigates the dark channels of the Louisiana bayou, moving between ancient cypress and the heave mats of Spanish moss that dangle from their gnarled limbs.
Who are the two who brave the swamp at night? One is a lanky Cajun man by the name of Pierre, while the other is his visiting cousin from Tennessee. The man folks call… THE OLD STORYTELLER.
Take a seat and join him as he shares ten terrifying tales on a midnight boat ride across black waters where no man should dare to go! It is dark and dangerous down on the bayou; a place full of horrifying critters and plenty of haints and spirits, too! See those mausoleums on the bank yonder? Listen closely, for that is where the dead tell their frightening stories!
______
VAULT OF SOUTHERN-FRIED HORROR
The Old Storyteller knows the darkness that dwells in folks’ hearts. He’s aware that evil and depravity comes in all shapes and sizes. Men, women, even young’uns. Some lurk in the dead of night or walk, undetected, in broad daylight. They could be watching you from the shadows of an alleyway or a dense growth of forest… or they could be standing right behind you in line at the hamburger joint or grocery store, trading small talk, sizing you up, spinning their web. They could even be hiding in the back seat of your car in a dark parking lot… or sitting in the pew right next to you at church.
Murderers, maniacs, serial killers… human monsters who walk the streets among us. Some have a motive for what they do, while some don’t. Most do it for the sheer thrill of the kill. And, more than likely, their victims never know it’s coming. They soon find themselves at the mercy of brutal hands or sharply honed steel. And when the dastardly deed is over and done, the unfortunate prey ends up in a drainage ditch or trash dumpster… or part of them go home with their killer as grisly souvenirs and mementos.
There’s no time to waste! The Storyteller can hear them now; skulking through the woods, growing nearer and nearer, with malice and ill intentions on their twisted minds. Join him in the sanctuary of his backwoods hideaway, locked away from those who would do him – and you – harm. While he sharpens an axe on the ol’ grinding wheel, along with a handy knife or two, he’ll spin some disturbing yarns to pass the time. So, sit back and listen to some spine-tingling tales of corruption and chaos, deep in the… Vault of Southern-Fried Horror!
(Release date – 8/13/2025)
The murderer, dubbed “The Harlot” by the media, was on a brutal killing spree that had moved from St. Louis to southern Illinois. By all indications, The Harlot appeared to be a woman, but there was something odd that Detective Frank Powell couldn’t quite understand about the killer’s motivations. The Harlot didn’t seem to target any discernible “type” of victim. Women and men alike seemed to be in the murderer’s crosshairs.
But, as Powell would soon find out, there was a reason The Harlot was the most unpredictable serial killer he had ever come across. For The Harlot was both killer and victim in a compassionless society, and Frank Powell would come to understand that some monsters are not born, but created.
And he had to stop her before it was too late.
by Bill Crider
(Release date – 8/14/2025)
Dan Rhodes, the sheriff of Blacklin County, Texas, has seen more than his share of strange events during his time in office-most recently he exorcised a ghost from the county jail and he has always tolerated the banter between his elderly jailer and dispatcher. However, not even Hack and Lawton’s friendly word play could have prepared him for the group of writers that have descended upon Blacklin County.
When Vernell Lindsey, Clearview’s newly published romance novelist, decides to hold a romance writer’s convention, residents think this will finally get their town on the map. They are even more excited when they learn that former Clearview resident Terry Don Coslin will headline the event-Terry Don is now the most sought after male cover model for these very novels.
Rhodes doesn’t understand why so many people are interested in writing, but this becomes the least of his concerns when a local aspiring novelist is found dead in her room at the college. Was her death the work of a jealous rival? Or did her new book get a bit too close to certain people’s real lives? As he investigates, Rhodes begins to learn more about the publishing industry and some sordid facts Terry Don. Is he at all connected to the murder? When another murder occurs, Rhodes receives the unwelcome aid of two aspiring novelists, eager to switch from romance to mysteries. Their theories are a little too far from the truth, but Rhodes does make some headway on his own.
Relying on his trademark common sense and cunning and the help of his deputy sheriff Ruth Grady, Rhodes is able to solve the murders although he still can’t figure out why so many people want to write a novel.