A Mask of Flies by Matthew Lyons is a pulse-pounding crime horror epic about a criminal on the run, the deadly family secrets she unearths along the way, and the sinister monster from her past which has gotten a taste for her blood—and won’t sleep until she’s dead.
In the grisly aftermath of a botched bank heist, career criminal Anne Heller has no choice but to return to her family’s cabin – a secluded shack in Colorado’s San Luis Valley, and the site of her mother’s untimely death.
Along for the ride are Jessup, Anne’s badly wounded partner, and Dutch, the police officer she’s taken hostage. As they wait for help, Anne discovers strange relics from her mother’s past and begins to unfold the mystery of her childhood at the cabin.
Then Jessup goes missing, only to turn up dead. Anne and Dutch bury her friend, but that night, he comes back and knocks at the cabin door.
Not a dream, not a hallucination, but not exactly Jessup, either. Something else. Something wearing her friend’s face. Something hungry…
School's out for summer and that means one thing to Parker, Chloe, and their four friends: a well-deserved camping trip in the Pine Barrens, a million-acre forest deep in the heart of New Jersey. But when old grudges erupt, an argument escalates into the unthinkable, leaving one of them dead and the killer missing. As darkness descends and those left alive try to determine a course of action, the forest around them begins to change...In the morning, more of the group has vanished and the path that led them into the woods is gone?as if consumed by the forest itself. Lost and hungry, the remaining friends set out to find help, only to realize that the forest seems to have other plans?a darker, ancient horror lies dead and dreaming in a lake in the center of the woods. And it's calling to them.Meanwhile, deep in the trees, the killer is still at large, and one of the group's own has started to transform and warp into something other. Something inhuman. Something that wants to feast.Banding together to survive, the friends soon begin to understand the true nature of the horror waiting for them in the Pine Barrens?and that not all of them will make it out alive.
