Share
House of Mystery Radio on NBC
Bruce Borgos - The Riddle Maker: A Porter Beck Mystery
•
In the latest in this USA Today bestselling series, Nevada sheriff Porter Beck receives an anonymous riddle leading him to a body hidden for decades, leading Beck and his team in a chase to unravel riddles that will help them uncover and stop a long-time serial killer.
Porter Beck is the sheriff of Lincoln County, Nevada, a vast expanse of desert and mountains best known to the outside world for the top-secret installation called Area 51. Just down the highway sits a weathered mailbox where UFO believers leave messages for aliens. But this time, the message is for Beck.
It’s a riddle. And when Beck and his team decipher it, the answer leads them to the shrinking waters of Lake Mead and an oil drum chained to the bottom. Inside are the remains of someone missing for more than fifty years, someone tied to Beck by a thread of DNA stretching deep into his own past.
Enter Jett Lowell, a pint-sized but fearless FBI profiler who believes Beck’s riddle is connected to one she received seventeen years earlier, shortly before the disappearance of someone close to her.
Convinced they are hunting a serial killer, Beck and Jett follow a trail of riddles from the deserts of Nevada to the mountains of Arizona, and finally to the red rock wilderness of Utah, racing to uncover a chain of murders spanning generations before the killer unleashes a final, horrendous act decades in the making.
More episodes
View all episodes
Walter Mosley - Hanging and Burning: A King Oliver Novel
32:22|A dying gangster's plea sends Joe King Oliver on a quest for a missing woman across America's coasts—unraveling a dark and violent family history along the way—in this engrossing new novel from one of the most celebrated and acclaimed crime writers at work today.Joe King Oliver is the big man you call to solve the most delicate and dangerous of problems. Fresh off unraveling the mystery of his own parents’ fates, King finds himself accepting (again at his grandmother’s request) a case from Arman Babylon, a powerful Los Angeles gangster now dying from cancer.Babylon’s granddaughter, Twyla Mann, has been missing for years, and he’s desperate to find her before he passes. The search pulls King into the Babylons’ stained past and the cold case of Dalia Shorts, a torch singer who vanished without a trace and whom Arman was once suspected of killing.As King follows her trail from L.A. to New York and back, he’ll realize nothing is what it seems as he uncovers a pattern of violence that has targeted the women around Babylon for decades. How much will King be willing to risk to finally set things right?
Gregg Olsen - Ordinary Wife: The True Story of America’s Forgotten Serial Killer
32:46|From #1 New York Times bestselling author Gregg Olsen and his daughter Morgan Olsen, the gripping true-crime story of America’s Lady Bluebeard—a seemingly ordinary wife accused of poisoning husband after husband, who very nearly got away with all of it.On a hot August afternoon in 1920 at Blue Lakes Ranch in Idaho, a new bride set out three saucers of flypaper on the boarding house porch. By nightfall, her husband was on the floor of their canvas tent, clutching his stomach in agony. Within days he was dead.Lyda Trueblood was everything a wife should be: beautiful, charming, an excellent cook. Men fell for her easily. They also died easily around her too—poisoned by arsenic. One husband, then another, then two more. Her brother-in-law. And, then there was her two-year-old daughter—whose death no one could ever fully explain.Six deaths in five years, and a 1921 trial that made Lyda Trueblood a national sensation. But what turned a Missouri farmer’s daughter into a methodical killer—and how did she elude justice for so long?Drawing on court transcripts, prison records, and Lyda’s own unflinching statements, the Olsens go beyond the lurid headlines to reveal the woman herself—calculating, charismatic, and chilling to the last.
James Renner (Cruise to Nowhere) & William J. Mann (Black Dahlia)
56:29|James Renner - A Cruise to Nowhere: My Search for Amy Lynn Bradley&William J. Mann - Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood
Matt Cost - 1955: A Jazz Jones & January Queen Raleigh Mystery
30:37|“Welcome to Antebellum,” the ghoul said. “You are the guest of honor.” Things are not right in 1955, Raleigh, North Carolina, and it will be up to Jazz Jones to get to the bottom of the murk and clear things up.“You heard about the dead boy?” She had said that her name was January Queen and that she was with the NAACP. Her eyes were a pair of sins, or maybe they just mirrored my own.“Maybe we came to you,” she said, “because not only are you fair, but you have a firm grasp on what the word justice really means.”And there it was, I thought. I was being asked to bring the killers to justice and expose the underbelly of seething hatred in my city, even if it meant offending my neighbors and inflaming the ire of otherwise good white folks who just didn’t know any better. And, possibly, break the law along the way. Whatever it took. Even if I had to dig some six-foot-deep holes along the way.
Christopher Michael - The Danforth Tales
33:10|World War II wasn't only fought with tanks and rifles. In the shadows behind every front line, another war was raging—one for knowledge no human mind was meant to hold. OSS operative Robert Danforth has already seen things that broke other men beyond the Mountains of Madness. Now the Nazis are hunting the same forbidden truths, from the tombs of Egypt to the fortresses of the Carpathians, and Danforth is the only one standing between them and powers that predate civilization itself. Each investigation pulls him deeper into a war the Allies don't know they're fighting—against Nazi occultists who believe they can bend ancient evil to their cause, and against something far older and hungrier than any army, waiting for the moment it can finally cross through. Some wars are fought for territory. This one is fought for the future of humanity itself, and every answer Danforth finds comes at a price he's not sure he can keep paying. A gripping blend of WWII historical fiction, cosmic horror, and occult thriller, The Danforth series is perfect for readers who love Nazi occult horror, Lovecraftian dread steeped in real history, and stories where evil doesn't need a uniform to find a war.
Nzondi - Dark Reservoir
38:51|Dark Reservoir is an exploration of what remains after unimaginable loss. Through award-winning horror fiction, haunting poetry, and deeply personal nonfiction, Bram Stoker Award-winning authors Nzondi and Cindy O’Quinn guide readers through three emotional descents—Ghosts of Heartbreak, Blind Fury, and Mind Rot—where trauma, grief, survival, and the supernatural converge.These are stories of ordinary people forced to endure extraordinary pain. Some are haunted by ghosts. Others by memory. All are confronted by the lingering question of what survives after tragedy.Inspired by both imagination and lived experience, Dark Reservoir is not simply a horror collection. It is a meditation on resilience, the cost of survival, and the ghosts—literal and metaphorical—that refuse to let us go.