Not every ghost is dead. For Gregor Lepov, quarantine was never more agonizing than the day his ex-wife walked into his office. With a new husband at her side and a plea for help on her lips, the former Gloria Lepov hires Gregor to hunt down a stolen artifact on a trail littered with the dead. Haunted by her betrayals of the past, he determines to solve her case then throw her off his world before she ruins him a second time. Lilly Stewart has mysteriously chosen to give up her lucrative antiquities business to stay with Lepov in the Lazaretto. Bedeviled by the arrival of his ex-wife, she will perform her own exorcism of the dead husband she betrayed. Homicide Detective Ed MacNally, heading home after a typical day on the job, steps into a bar for a drink and watches two gangsters rough up a bartender. In the time it takes to stand to his feet, he is forced into a gunfight that leaves both gangsters dead. But his fight has just begun. Bent on avenging the death of his brother, one of the most prominent criminals in the Euxine system sets out to make MacNally pay with his life. Abandoned by his fellow detectives, the aging detective's only option is to run. But in quarantine, souls can never hide from their ghosts, their regrets, or the consequences of their worst and best intentions. And when they stop running and turn to face them, Gregor and his friends will pay the cost of betrayal with sorrow, violence and vengeance in a war waged by the gangsters, heroes, angels and traitors who inhabit a unique and dreadful little hell called the Lazaretto.

As he carves a new life on the quarantine moon first revealed in "The Lazaretto," Gregor Lepov is hired to solve the perplexing disappearances of its citizens into a mysterious basement apartment. Detective Ed MacNally of Lazaretto Homicide is busy training his new partner, Menya Russell, with whom he is investigating the murder of a man whose body was recently uncovered after thirty years. Thieves, corpses, ladies and liars lure Lepov and MacNally into the Lazaretto's disturbing past. Has the killer that was active thirty years ago begun killing again? And after Lepov is nearly killed by a woman who looks too much like Lilly Stewart, he must decide who he can really trust in a city that shuns faith and embraces fear.

The Lazaretto: A central quarantine system built in response to the rampant interplanetary epidemics that once ravaged the colony worlds of the Euxine System. Its simple design is centered on one premise: survive the forty-day quarantine without contracting an infectious disease. If you are lucky, you will be free to leave the quarantine moon, otherwise, you will not be allowed to leave the Lazaretto. Ever. Gregor Lepov arrives to discover just how paranoid and dangerous such a world can be. Hired to find a woman's missing son, he must carefully pick his way through a depressing healthcare system populated with dubious gov-ernment bureaucrats and overzealous cops even as it becomes evident that there is a violent killer loose in the city.

Eight passengers embark on The Jenny, a luxury yacht designed to revive the golden age of travel. Unfortunately, they can't sail twenty-four hours before being overtaken by a U-boat loaded with pirates. As if piracy weren't bad enough, the passengers and crew must face a threat even more terrifying than murder and mayhem: jury duty Dare a man trust his life to a jury of fools? Action, mystery, courtroom drama, and comedy collide on this ridiculous trip as the pirate Captain, Robert Montane, seeks his redemption on a madcap adventure that will bring him face to face with a society that has no clue how to recognize its own mistakes or what to do with them, even if it could.

If Jason and Jennifer Reeser were going to indulge their life-long fantasy of visiting Paris, they weren't going to play by the rules; no hotels, no guided tours, and none of those four-day-and-three-night packages. They would live in the City of Light as if they belonged. Setting aside two weeks in April, they ignored the experts and set out to find a Room With Paris View. "When you first encounter a city or a woman or a good book, you learn more about them, and fall in love with them the more you discover, but you will never quite match that moment when you first encountered them, knowing you had found something extraordinary and realizing how exciting it would be to explore the city or hold the woman in your arms or read the book to its very last page." -excerpt from Room With Paris View

Ghosts, devils, grave-robbers, killers, lovers, pirates, and dead Rock-and-Rollers. These are only some of the inhabitants of Jason Phillip Reeser's short story collection Cities of the Dead. Each of these thirteen stories is set in one of the many above-ground cemeteries in New Orleans where the dead refuse to be buried. Not every story has a ghost, but every story is haunted by the inevitable ghosts that lurk in the shadows terrorizing our darkest corners: regret, guilt, fear, obsession, despair, failure, and loneliness.