Deanna Knippling – författare

Secrets:  Everybody's got one or two...Even before the stock market crash of 1929, Eliza lives in a world of secrets as a legal secretary to a wizened old lawyer in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota.  If she admits that she's practically engaged to be married, she'll lose her job.  Then one day she notices that Foshay Tower's shadow has turned into impenetrable ink. She's pulled off the street by a grifter who claims that the tower is cursed and that if she can see such a thing that she must have magical talent...a little bit, at least.The grifter lies about a lot of things, but Eliza really does have magic...and Foshay Tower really is about to fall. Unfortunately taking Eliza's boss's money--and therefore Eliza's job--with it.  How can Eliza use a smidge of magic and a handful of secrets to get her boss's money back?By drafting a grifter to do her dirty work!

It took her husband's death in order to get the money to buy their first, brand-new house......and now it's haunted by someone Julie's never met.Julie moves into her brand-new house in her brand-new housing development with mixed feelings.  It's a new start after her husband's death, with a new job and good schools for her two kids.  Then the lights flicker and go out, and a ghostly image appears in the basement.It's a new house.  And it's not on some ancient burial ground.  How is it even possible that the new house is haunted?

The house was creepy. No getting around that. Windows covered on the inside with tinfoil so nobody could look in. And barred on the outside so nobody could get out. KEEP OUT and BEWARE OF DOGS signs everywhere. Pictures on the walls that seem like eyes are watching her from between the trees. Everything's brown and yellow, hasn't been updated since the Seventies…and a bad smell, too…You never know what you're going to get, cleaning houses for a living. Carrie goes where her company sends her. But in this case, her curiosity might just put her in the wrong place at the wrong time…in front of the wrong ghost.A short tale of haunted houses and tortured souls...

A desperate mother summons the spirits as her infant son's last hope...but what if she's wrong?A group of women hold a seance on a dark and snowy winter's night to summon forth wisdom from beyond the grave in order to save a sickly child.  But what is the real nature of the spirit that answers the summons?And will they have to call forth something even worse to save them from what their seance brings?

SPOOKY SHORT FICTION - PERFECT FOR A HALLOWEEN NIGHT!Thirty-one short horror tales of ghosts, haunted houses, vampires black cats, mad science, weird plants, demons, zombies, and Halloween. From the surreal to the gory, surprise twists, black humor, bad puns, dark dreamlands, old myths, thrillers, chillers, and illers. Twilight Zone stories, dark fantasy stories, Black Mirror stories, and far-future dystopias. Short & sweet…monsters & meat.(For teens and up.)

A novelette of swindlers, dames, and a millionaire with a pig.Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1925.  Right before New Year's Day.Genevra Valentine is a roper, someone who brings in marks for a team of con artists working in the basement of a soda fountain-come-speakeasy.  The mark she just brought in has a story she can't believe:  he's a millionaire cattleman from Chicago who wants to race his famous racing pig, Zeus, against the fastest runner anyone can produce.It sounds like a con.  And she should know.But the chance to fleece a millionaire isn't something that Genevra or her boss can pass up.

At sunrise and sunset, the sky burns like it's on fire and the old broken bridge over the railroad tracks on the far side of town stretches across the universes.  At the end of the bridge are the fairies…Della Rae is only in this podunk Midwestern university town for the full-ride biology scholarship she's getting.  In a year or two, she's going to Oxford as an exchange student, she knows it.  Her eventual goal:  to cure cancer. Only life doesn't go like that.  The way you planned.Something's going on in the basement of the science building, something that's tied up every single professor and sends the summer work-study students running.  Rumors are going around that the professors are performing a vivisection.  And nobody wants to see that.But it's probably not going to be performed on the lab rats.  Because this town has always had something weird going on. Something that involves Della Rae's best friend, Merc, and a few other kids in town, all with the same face…

Vlad keeps so many secrets that they surround him like a cloak of mist:  one secret hides another, protects another.  He’s a gay man in Volgograd, Russia…and a drug dealer…and a vedmak, a witch, who can release the souls of the dying, if they wish it.His secrets keep him safe…until he meets a rusalka, an undead water spirit who drowns the men who get too close to her, and has to face the terrible truth she brings...

What does normal even mean...and why does it seem so fake?Let me tell you...31 tales of normal things gone wrong. Everything from coffee to gift cards to having friends over. 31 innocuous, even delightful things that are supposed to be able to replace happiness, job satisfaction, and a sense of purpose. 31 atmospheric tales about good things gone wrong--horribly, weirdly wrong.When the world has gone completely nuts, even the normal looks strange.(Teens and up.)

EVERYONE FEARS DEATH—THE GREAT UNWINDINGA dark fairy tale retelling.What happened to Alice after the Alice books finished? She got married, had children, became a society hostess—and dreamed of Wonderland.Not that Wonderland has any business knocking at her door. She is happy. And yet, on certain late nights, especially under a full moon, she finds herself standing in front of the painting that the Reverend Charles Dodgson had given her for a wedding-gift, wondering.Magic lives within the painting—she has no doubt of that—the canvas warm under her palm and yielding like flesh. If she presses on its surface, it tries to pull her through.So far, she has resisted.But Wonderland needs her.The mad world had gone entirely wrong, and then wronger still. It runs strictly by rule now, its mad denizens reduced to clockwork servants of an enormous spring-driven machine—one beginning to fail.Wonderland itself is unwinding.Dying.Follow Alice back into the fairy tale that had been created just for her, and which she must now face as an adult. What must she do—and who must she become—to repair its lost madness?

Three women.  One serial killer who has access to the supernatural. He can scare them...but he can't stop them from taking revenge.A small Midwestern college town.  A series of murders that ape the Jack the Ripper killings.  Then Laney Miller is butchered just after dawn in front of a second-hand bookstore.  The one witness didn't see anything...except Laney getting dragged out of her car and murdered by an invisible force.One that carries a straight razor.It's a town that has attracted the weird and strange as far back as the eighteen hundreds.  Since then disappearances, murders, suicides, and kidnappings have only grown worse.  Especially targeted are a group of local girls that carry the same face...Laney's face.Laney's girlfriend Joy and her friends decide to find the seemingly-supernatural killer and take him down before he strikes again.  In as violent and bloody a manner as possible.By dawn's bloody light...they will have revenge.A novella-length horror/paranormal suspense story to kick off the Fairy's Tale Series, coming soon!  Book 1:  ONE DARK SUMMER NIGHT, August 2017.

Bernice had a good life with Bobby. She mighta been the second wife but to him she was number one. Then he died of cancer--something that not even the modern docs who could treat a ninety-year-old man to look like he was twenty-five again could cure.Most of the money went to his kids. She'd get a house and enough to live really good on if she hosted an illegal copy of his A.I. for three years--his "e;ghost."e; It was almost like having him back. They could go to underground clubs and hang out with the other A.I.s who were slumming it with the living. She could see him, talk to him, feel his touch--And hide him from the people who were lookin' for him. And who mighta just found out where he was hidden...

Sometimes a book comes out of your soulYou're taking a train ride from Alabama to the Chinatown in San Francisco to be with your mother, who is dying of cancer.  The year is sometime in the 1920s.  A white man walks by, carrying a book that slips away from him.  He can't find it...it's after midnight and the train is dark.The book calls to you.It says its name is Jimmy O'Toole and the man who dropped it is a sorcerer.  You're holding a grimoire...although it used to be more than that.It used to be a person.You know your mom should be able to work this out.  She's always been into magic.You just have to live long enough to get the book home to her...

Something's going on in the new apartment building.  Something small…something blue…something that likes to steal things out of your kitchen trash can. Not a rat, not a mole, not a vole, not a gopher…what?The only way to find out might be to catch it!

A new zombie outbreak overtakes Victorian England…and Alice's only sanctuary is the man who once tried to eat her.At eighteen, Alice Liddell is forced to return to the rooms of the Reverend Charles Dodgson—the undead photographer, the mathematician, the man who wrote her into a story she cannot escape. She has been glad not to see him for eight years. She resents him for turning her into a fairytale heroine of a world that never existed. But her mother insists on the visit: all her daughters are to be photographed, as marriage-market calling cards.Then Dodgson leans close and whispers a warning that changes everything.Before Alice can make sense of his words, her secret love—youngest son of Queen Victoria, Prince Leopold—shatters her heart. The marriage she hoped for will never happen. The future she imagined crumbles to ash.And then the screaming begins.The dead flood Oxford's cobbled streets. Alice, Leopold, and two desperate students flee through priest-holes and servants' passages with only croquet mallets for weapons. Their one chance at survival: reach Dodgson's rooms before the swarm breaks through.Alice must trust the monster who nearly destroyed her—or become one of the shambling dead herself.Step back into Underland, where the greatest danger isn't always the one wearing shackles. …Book 2 in Alice's Adventures in Underland. For fans of Victorian horror, dark fairy tale retellings, and gothic fiction where survival demands impossible choices. Adult themes; not for younger readers.—The Queen of Stilled Hearts (covering the events behind Alice's Adventures in Wonderland)—The Knight of Shattered Dreams (covering the events behind Through the Looking-Glass)

What is the true story of Castle Frankenstein, the inspiration for Mary Shelley's famous novel? Was there ever a mad scientist? A monster? A pursuit across the Arctic ice? Because there is a Castle Frankenstein, and you can go there and walk around the ruined stones, poke around in the forest, and eat lunch.The legends that get told by the people who work at Castle Frankenstein are strange, but the layers leading downward into the truth are stranger.And stranger...An alchemist with no soul. A mysterious object falling from the sky. Terrified peasants with pitchforks and torches. An eerie whistling that echoes through the forest. A fallen tower. The elixir of life.How much is real? How much is just legend?And just how much of it are the locals covering up?

Pink-haired goth Tiff Cordero isn't a witch.  She's a clairaliant, someone who smells spirits. And she's been hired to sniff out a ghost who has recently started to give migraines to the patrons of a local coffee shop.Only problem:  nobody's died anywhere near the building recently, no one has cursed the place, and the only odor Tiff can pick up is the smell of burnt plastic.If she can't solve the case, all the cool patrons will ditch the coffee shop—and it's already in a neighborhood getting updated and plasticized out of existence.

Eighty books in, veteran author DeAnna Knippling still writes crime the way criminals think: fast, personal, and with a code all her own.Thirty-one crimes. Thirty-one criminals who would argue law and justice serve different masters.A teenage fixer takes payment in Nintendo cartridges. A doctor balancing a fentanyl patch against a brochure for Hawaii. A secretary who pulls a murder charge out of a pile of old tax returns and puts it back.Every last one of them lives by a code of justice that goes outside the law.One law. Thirty-one flavors of justice.Ruthless, bittersweet crime fiction for readers who want to put a finger on the scales.

Nobody surprises—or unsettles—readers quite like DeAnna Knippling, veteran author of over 80 books.Unflinching private investigator Frank Mallory stalks a near-future Minneapolis of muggy August nights and neon fog. Skyscraper windows blaze and scrolling ads flicker over a city hooked on Mindsight, a new street drug that rewires human empathy.Fueled by burnt coffee and cheap bourbon, Frank trusts his own blunt instincts over any drug. His latest case: a dead serial killer whose victims couldn't find the desire to resist him.A gritty, twisted near-future mystery about free will and what it takes to keep it.

Once upon a time...Napoléon Buonoparte did not ally himself with the armies of France during the French Revolution, but sought power instead in Britain, where his subtlety and planning was met with reticience and phlegmatism.  The British feared Napoléon's infamous Corsican temper, and worried that it would lead him to vendetta--and not capable leadership.  Would he betray them to France unintentionally? Although he had proved himself capable in various matters, Napoléon knew that he would be once again tested before the British would commit.  His plans hung upon the outcome of a single ball:  a man who could not organize a pleasant country ball surely could not be relied upon to lead an army.His plans were in place, his resources martialed......and then he met a bookish young woman named Jane Austen.This short, sweet romance is an alternate history of what might have happened, if Napoléon had not met his Josephine and gone to France, but allied himself elsewhere.

Nobody surprises — or unsettles — readers quite like DeAnna Knippling, veteran author of over 80 books.New Year's Eve. Cheers, champagne, a countdown. The ball drops at midnight—and the Templeton Building in downtown Minneapolis goes dark and silent.The building disappears from all outside contact: no Internet, no phone calls, no wifi, no radio. No way in through the newly sealed windows and doors. All while a blizzard pounds the city at ten below.Two hundred wealthy partygoers walked into the ritzy high-tech skyscraper.None walked out.Hard-nosed private investigator Frank Mallory, veteran of the sticky gray areas where technology crosses with crime, gets called in for an emergency job:Enter the Templeton Building. Use a pair of AI-powered lenses called Darkscan to navigate the unstable darkness. Extract the client's ex-wife.Then walk back out.A claustrophobic near-future noir about the savage cost of mistaking obedience for intelligence.

It's thirty years to the day that Jim lost the love of his life, Laina Jarvy, back in 1929. Now a colleague's wife has a gift for him: a watch that will take him back in time to save Laina, and instructions on how to use it.Jim's willing to pay whatever price is necessary to save her--but the offer that he's given in the past, at the mysterious Crossroads Hotel, smells more than a little like yesterday's fish.Is he about to save Laina?Or get stiffed?

Can't drink the water, can't drive around the potholes, can't sleep for gunshots at night, can't trust the locks on your doors. But you can trust the creepy white van that's been parking around your neighborhood at night.On the side, someone spray painted:"e;Something borrowed, something blue, something terrible will happen to you."e;The neighborhood is under siege. The defense is holding but the war is taking its toll. Not just on the streets but on the sanity of the people who are fighting it.Dark shapes stalk the shadows between the abandoned houses, growing closer...Just another day, in a nameless suburb of Detroit.

In 1816, summer vanished—and something else took its place. Northamptonshire, 1816. The sun is veiled in a spiderwebbed red haze. Frost settles where wheat should ripen. Famine creeps through manor and village alike. And beneath it all—something stranger still: a red fungus that seals windows, invades cellars, and feeds on silence.Marcus, the second son of the Earl of Penderbrook, returns from the Napoleonic front expecting a hero's welcome or at least a stiff drink. Instead, he finds his brother missing, his ancestral home overtaken by decay, and his father unraveling into something brutal.Marcus is no one's idea of a savior. He'd rather gamble away his title and chase other men's wives than shoulder any legacy. But Penderbrook isn't letting him go. Not yet.As disappearances mount and the estate reveals grotesque secrets—cellars that whisper, a folly that shifts in the corner of your eye, and something pale that watches from the pond—Marcus uncovers a truth soaked in blood, spores, and betrayal.Whatever is happening at Penderbrook didn't begin with him. But it might end with him.And if the corruption is in the land……it may already be in his blood.For fans of Frankenstein, crumbling empires, and stories that don't flinch from the monstrous within the civilized.