Fiend

Historical horror maven Alma Katsu turns her talents to the modern world for the first time, in this terrifying tale about an all-powerful family with an ancient evil under its thumb.

Imagine if the Sackler family had a demon at their beck and call.

The Berisha family runs one of the largest import-export companies in the world, and they’ve always been lucky. Their rivals suffer strokes. Inconvenient buildings catch on fire. Earthquakes swallow up manufacturing plants, destroying harmful evidence. Things always seem to work out for the Berishas. They’re blessed.

At least that is what Zef, the patriarch, has always told his three children. And each of them knows their place in the family--Dardan, as the only male heir, must prepare to take over as keeper of the Berisha secrets, Maris’s most powerful contribution, much to her dismay, will be to marry strategically, and Nora’s job, as the youngest, is to just stay out of the way. But when things stop going as planned, and the family blessing starts looking more like a curse, the Berishas begin to splinter, each hatching their own secret scheme. They didn’t get to be one of the richest families in the world without spilling a little blood, but this time, it might be their own.

Alma Katsu is the author of eight novels, most recently Red London, The Fervor, Red Widow, and The Deep. Prior to the publication of her first novel, she had a thirty-five-year long career as a senior intelligence analyst for several U.S. agencies, including the CIA and NSA, as well as RAND. Katsu is a graduate of the master’s writing program at the Johns Hopkins University and received her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University. She lives in West Virginia with her husband and is a contributing reviewer for the Washington Post.