Blood Evidence: 25 True Crime Chillers
Franklin Maw

Blood Evidence gathers twenty-five true crime cases that span more than a century — poisoners who hid in plain sight, killers whose crimes were overshadowed by more infamous contemporaries, cases that crossed borders and jurisdictions, and disappearances from the 1970s that were never fully explained. Alongside them are cases finally cracked open decades later by advances in forensic science, and wrongful convictions that expose how easily the justice system can get it wrong.

Franklin Maw skips the cases you’ve already read a dozen times. There’s no Ripper, no Borden here. Instead, you’ll find the lesser-known stories that deserve wider attention, and a handful of famous cases revisited from angles the headlines never covered. Each chapter is written as narrative nonfiction — grounded in research, but told with the pacing and detail of a true crime documentary, pulling you into the interrogation rooms, the courtrooms, and the quiet moments before everything went wrong.

Some of these cases were solved in weeks. Others took forty years, a cold case unit, and a DNA match no one expected. A few remain open today.

Twenty-five cases. Poison, disappearance, obsession, and the long, uneven road to justice — Blood Evidence is for readers who want their true crime without the same six stories retold for the hundredth time.

About ‘A Marriage Below Zero’
Alan Dale

A Vivid Press Edition

A Marriage Below Zero (1889), written by Alan Dale, is a pioneering work of early gay fiction and one of the first English-language novels to center a homosexual male character in a serious, tragic narrative. The story is told from the perspective of Elsie Bouverie, a young woman who enters into what appears to be a promising marriage with the charming and refined Arthur Ravener. At first, their life together seems socially enviable—secure, respectable, and filled with the expectations of Victorian domestic happiness.

But beneath the surface, something is wrong.

Arthur grows emotionally distant, evasive, and restless. Elsie senses that she is not the true object of her husband’s affection. Gradually, she discovers the devastating truth: Arthur is romantically and physically involved with another man. In an era when homosexuality was not only taboo but criminalized, this revelation shatters her understanding of marriage, loyalty, and identity.

Rather than portraying Arthur as a villain, the novel presents him as a man trapped between societal expectations and his authentic self. The “marriage below zero” becomes a metaphor for a union devoid of warmth, passion, and truth—frozen by repression and secrecy. As scandal looms and emotional tensions escalate, the story moves toward a tragic conclusion that reflects the harsh realities faced by gay men in late 19th-century society.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room
Gaston Leroux

A Vivid Press Edition

Now in a Vivid Press Edition. A woman is attacked in a locked room. The door is bolted from the inside. The windows are too small to pass through. There are no hidden exits. When the door is broken down, her attacker has vanished without a trace.

It is one of the most perfect crimes ever committed — and one of the most perfectly constructed mysteries ever written.

First published in 1907, Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room stands as the gold standard of the locked-room mystery, a novel so precisely engineered that even the greatest detective writers of the twentieth century — from Agatha Christie to John Dickson Carr — acknowledged they were trying to match it. Into the impossible puzzle steps Joseph Rouletabille, an eighteen-year-old reporter with a genius for logic and a gift for seeing what others overlook. What he uncovers will upend everything you think you know about the crime, the suspects, and the truth.

Set against the vivid backdrop of Belle Époque France, this is a novel of misdirection, revelation, and razor-sharp reasoning — a masterwork that invented conventions the genre still follows today.

This Vivid Press Annotated Edition presents the complete text with an original introduction placing the novel in its literary and historical context, exploring the life of Gaston Leroux and the enduring legacy of the mystery he created. Prepared for the modern reader, it is the ideal way to encounter — or rediscover — a genuine classic of crime fiction.

The Willows
Algernon Blackwood

Vivid Press Edition

When Algernon Blackwood published The Willows in 1907, the modern world was congratulating itself. Industry was expanding, science was mapping the unknown, and reason seemed to be winning. And then along came a quiet river story that suggested something far more unsettling: the universe is vast, indifferent, and not especially impressed with us.

On its surface, The Willows is simple. Two friends canoe down the Danube, camp on a shifting island thick with willow trees, and begin to sense that they are not alone. But what follows is not a conventional ghost story. There is no tidy monster, no clear explanation. Instead, Blackwood creates a growing pressure — a feeling that the natural world itself is thinning, opening, revealing something just beyond human understanding.

This story helped shape what later became known as “weird fiction.” Writers who came after Blackwood recognized the power of what he accomplished here: dread built not from spectacle, but from atmosphere; fear born from the realization that reality may not be stable.

More than a century later, The Willows feels remarkably modern. Its quiet eco-unease, its sense of human smallness against landscape, and its refusal to offer easy answers resonate even more strongly today.

Vivid Press is pleased to present this enduring classic to a new generation of readers — not simply because it is old, but because it remains alive. Some stories fade. This one lingers.

Carmilla
J. Sheridan Le Fanu

A Vivid Press Edition

Before Dracula, there was Carmilla.

Published in 1872 — more than two decades before Bram Stoker put his vampire to paper — Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla is the story that invented modern vampire fiction. A young woman named Laura lives in an isolated castle in the Styrian countryside. When a carriage accident strands the mysterious Carmilla on her doorstep, Laura finds herself drawn to the beautiful stranger in ways she cannot explain and cannot resist. As Laura grows weaker and Carmilla grows more possessive, the line between devotion and danger dissolves entirely.

Le Fanu gave the world something that has never been replicated: a vampire who seduces rather than terrorizes, who mirrors the desires of her victims back at them, who is as much a force of longing as of death. Carmilla is gothic horror at its most psychologically acute — a story about the terror of wanting, and the danger of being wanted in return.
Influential, erotic, and deeply strange, Carmilla shaped the imaginations of writers from Stoker to Anne Rice, and its imprint can be felt across more than a century of horror fiction, film, and television. Yet it remains less widely read than the tradition it created. This Vivid Press Edition returns it to the attention it has always deserved — presented in full, with a new introduction placing this seminal work in its literary and cultural context.