Hooked On Urban Legends - And Murder!

Every part of the country keeps its own after-dark stories: the thing in the lake, the house where the lights burn all night, the shape at the edge of the woods. They are only stories, of course. That is what everyone says, right up until the first body turns up.

Seventeen crime writers take American urban legend as a starting point and follow it somewhere much darker. Three bored teenagers hunt a Florida ghost and find something worse. A grimoire surfaces in a library where it has no business being. A journalist digs through an archive and pulls loose a thread better left alone. Enterprising ghosts run a tidy operation in an Indianapolis neighborhood, and in one haunted manor the taps run red for a houseguest who takes it remarkably well.

Some of these legends are false and some are true, and both kinds can kill. In nearly every case, though, the most dangerous thing in the dark turns out to be a person.