Joe R. Lansdale’s Rumble, Tumble was the latest Hap and Leonard crime novel in which Hap Collins’ girlfriend learned that her teenage daughter was part of a hellish prostitution ring and the two friends were forced to confront a biker army turned vice barons and stone-mad killers. Norman Partridge’s The Ten-Ounce Siesta was the second volume in the enjoyable Jack Baddalach mysteries, in which the standard-issue good guy became involved with bikini girls with machine guns, cops with donuts, the heavyweight champion of the world, and a demon from Hell.

Voodoo Child by Michael Reaves was predictably set in New Orleans, while John Pritchard’s Dark Ages took place in present-day Oxford but harkened back to earlier horrors. A massacre in the 12th century resulted in a modern-day haunting in Jenny Jones’ Where the Children Cry. Mary Murrey’s The Inquisitor concerned a depressed woman who became involved with pagan mythology, while a young widow joined a village coven of white witches in The Witching Time by Jean Stubbs.

John Evans’ Gordius was a sequel to the author’s God’s Gift, Nick DiMartino’s A Seattle Ghost Story was illustrated by Charles Nitti, and Black as Blood by Rob Chilson was a humorous novel about a body that would not stay dead.

Reporter-turned-sleuth Hollis Ball was helped by her husband’s ghost in Ghost of a Chance by Helen Chappell, and David Beaty’s The Ghosts of the Eighth Attack involved a RAF squadron in World War II haunted by phantom flyers from the First World War. A supernatural western set in Mexico, Loren D. Estleman’s Journey of the Dead involved an ancient alchemist and the man who killed Billy the Kid.