This weekend the UK’s SFX Weekender arrives in Wales. To help mark the event, author guest Stephen Hunt is offering his novella In the Company of Ghosts (Book 1 in The Agatha Witchley Mysteries) as a free, worldwide download on Amazon Kindle from Thursday February 2nd to Sunday February 5th — the actual days of the event.

Here’s the novella description:

Because sometimes, insanity and genius are indistinguishable…

Agatha Witchley used to be a spy in the Cold War, but now she’s locked up in the UK’s premier maximum-security mental institution. She believes that the ghosts of the celebrity dead visit her padded cell and whisper the world’s secrets in her ears. Which is a big problem for the British government, because she’s the only one who can help them when an American billionaire is murdered in London in one of the strangest killings yet.

The Home Secretary needs the case locked down and solved before the entrepreneur’s death becomes public knowledge and economic chaos ensures.

The woman he has in mind for the job might be paranoid, she might be lethal, she might half-insane and drawing a pension, but it’s amazing how you can forgive that in a genius when it’s a genius’s help you need.

Yes, the security forces need Agatha Witchley again. It’s just the ghosts of Churchill, Elvis and Groucho Marx they could do without.

Downloads are available for at

• Amazon US
• Amazon UK
• Amazon Germany
• Amazon France
• Amazon Italy
• Amazon Spain

There’s an overwhelming selection of appealing titles to choose from when it comes to reading science fiction, fantasy and horror books. Yet some titles float to the top of the pile, making them more immediate candidates for the next books you’ll read.

Read on to see the tasty selections of this week’s panelists…

Art the top of my stack is Islington Crocodiles, the highly praised short fiction collection by the UK’s Paul Meloy. Intro by is by Graham Joyce. Really looking forward to that.

Next up: Strange Forces – The Stories of Leopoldo Lugones, a collection of fantastical stories from an Argentine writer released in 1906. Lugones is very well known in Latin America, almost unheard of here. He’s supposed to have been an eccentric a la Lovecraft and killed himself over a woman 30 years his junior by drinking a mixture of whiskey and cyanide.

Horacio Quiroga is a classic Latin American writer of extremely dark stories, some of which are included in The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories. A disciple of Poe, he lived a tormented life that included the suicide of one wife and desertion by his wife and child while enduring his final illness. Many of his stories are set in the jungle where much of his life was spent. Sounds like my kind of guy.

Lucy Snyder’s Spellbent — I’m not sure what this one is, a YA I guess, but it sounds like a blast. About hell coming to Ohio. Having played in a lot of Ohio’s armpit bars, I can relate.

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