In these three chapters of Night Flight to Murder Town, Marshall James finds himself waking up on the couch of Colin Griffin — a sharp-witted escort who becomes his unlikely confidant — and paying the price of admission: the truth. Marshall lays out his history, from his Hollywood past to the body he found that morning, and Colin listens without calling the police. Meanwhile, in a counterpoint chapter set in the present, Marshall and his partner Boo enjoy a deceptively quiet afternoon in Lambertville and New Hope — a brief, tender interlude that feels worlds away from what's unfolding in New York City.

Back in the past, the stakes suddenly escalate. A breaking news report out of Manhattan reveals that Senator Daniel Roth — the powerful man Trent Stoffer had been secretly involved with — has fallen twelve stories to his death from his apartment near the United Nations. With his old flame dead and a senator now gone, Marshall grows convinced that his presence in New York is no accident. He's been here before — marked as a patsy, caught in someone else's design. And so he does what Marshall James always does: he heads straight for the scene of the crime.

Today in this special feature of the Fearsome Fiction Podcast we're offering another short story from Mark McNease's collection, 'Five of a Kind.'

Jawbone tells the story of young Richard who was eighteen years old when a head-on collision on a snowy Indiana road took the lower half of his face. He survived — and that, in many ways, was the cruelest part.

We Richard Krump across the decades after his accident: the surgeries that promised normalcy and delivered nothing, the friends who never showed up to his homecoming party, the little girl in a drugstore who gave him his name, and the slow, steady retreat of everyone he ever loved — until only his books, his silence, and finally his paintings remained.

A haunting, deeply human story about disfigurement, isolation, and the particular cruelty of surviving intact on the inside while the world refuses to see past the outside. Jawbone begins where a young man's life as he knew it ends.

True Crime Tuesdays — A Fearsome Fiction Feature: Shot by a Killer Clown

It was Memorial Day weekend, 1990, in Wellington, Florida. Marlene Warren answered her front door to find a clown holding flowers and balloons — and was shot in the face at point-blank range. The clown got back in the car and drove away. Marlene died two days later.

The case had a suspect almost immediately. It had circumstantial evidence. It had motive. What it didn't have — for twenty-seven years — was enough to make an arrest. This week on True Crime Tuesdays, we follow one of the most bizarre cold cases in American history from a quiet Florida neighborhood in 1990 all the way to a courthouse in 2023, and a prison release that left a victim's family without the justice they deserved.

Fearsome Fiction is produced by MadeMark Media. New episodes every Tuesday.

Welcome to Fearsome Fiction, the podcast that brings you mysteries, thrillers, rare gems, and a weekly True Crime Tuesday.

Today we conclude our journey through one of the greatest locked-room mysteries ever written, with chapters 14 through 29. Published in 1907, Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room set the standard for a genre that would captivate readers for generations. A young woman is found brutally attacked inside a room locked from the inside. No one could have entered. No one could have escaped. And yet someone did both. Following the investigation is the brilliant young journalist and amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille — one of fiction's most ingenious and overlooked heroes — as he unravels a mystery that seems to defy every law of logic and nature. Now for your listening pleasure, the remaining chapters of Gaston Leroux's 'The Mystery of the Yellow Room.'

Marshall James: Chapters Twenty-Five Through Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Five finds Marshall waking up in Leland's apartment the morning after a drug-fueled night he remembers all too clearly. Filled with regret, he dresses, slips out, and returns to Trent Stoffer's Upper East Side apartment — where he finds the place ransacked and Trent dead, bound and tortured in his bedroom. Knowing the police will eventually trace him to the scene, Marshall grabs a hidden computer disk from his suitcase and disappears into the New York morning — just as Carlton the doorman picks up the phone.

Chapter Twenty-Six steps out of the thriller's timeline for a quieter moment, as Marshall and Boo walk the streets of Lambertville, taking in Bridge Street, the Brightside Diner, and the unhurried pace of small-town life. For the first time in a long time, Marshall feels something loosen. He begins to think Lambertville might be exactly the change he needs.

Chapter Twenty-Seven brings us back to the immediate crisis. With nowhere to go and the clock ticking, Marshall makes his way to the Big Cup coffee shop in Chelsea, where he encounters Colin — a young, sharp-eyed escort with a gift for reading people. Out of options and running on fumes, Marshall accepts Colin's offer of a couch and a few hours of sleep, knowing he's going to have to tell someone the truth very soon.

True Crime Tuesdays - A Fearsome Fiction Podcast Feature: The Black Dahlia

Welcome to True Crime Tuesdays. I'll be sharing a true crime story every Tuesday on Mark McNease's Fearsome Fiction Podcast. Narration is provided by my own Wondervox. Fasten your headphones for one of the most famous unsolved murders in the annals of American crime - or is it American madness?

They found her on the morning of January 15th, 1947.

A woman walking with her daughter through a vacant lot in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. She thought at first that what she was seeing was a discarded department store mannequin. A broken one, in two pieces.

It wasn't a mannequin.

The body had been completely severed at the waist. Drained of blood. Cleaned. Posed with a precision that suggested not rage — but ritual. Her face had been slashed at the corners of the mouth, cutting what investigators would describe as a grotesque grin from ear to ear.

She was twenty-two years old. Her name was Elizabeth Short.

The press would call her the Black Dahlia — a name she never knew in life, but one that would outlast everything else about her.

Welcome to Fearsome Fiction, the podcast that brings you mysteries, thrillers, rare gems, and a weekly True Crime Tuesday.

Today we continue our journey through one of the greatest locked-room mysteries ever written. Published in 1907, Gaston Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room set the standard for a genre that would captivate readers for generations. A young woman is found brutally attacked inside a room locked from the inside. No one could have entered. No one could have escaped. And yet someone did both. Following the investigation is the brilliant young journalist and amateur detective Joseph Rouletabille — one of fiction's most ingenious and overlooked heroes — as he unravels a mystery that seems to defy every law of logic and nature. Now for your listening pleasure, another three chapters of Gaston Leroux's 'The Mystery of the Yellow Room.'

I'll be sharing one story at a time in audio version from my collection '5 of a Kind: Short Fiction.'

"The Gospel According to God", narrated by my own Wondervox, is the first story the collection. Spanning human history from primordial silence to a chance encounter on a Central Park bench, the story traces what happens when people mistake the infinite for a brick and the boundless for a rulebook — including Eric, a pre-literate mystic who discovers the divine lives inside every person and is killed for saying so.

Threading through the ancient scenes is Melissa, a young theater major from Michigan who arrives in New York City chasing a dream and finds herself ambushed by wonder. Riding subways and navigating the beautiful chaos of the city, she begins to sense something watching back — curious and unhurried.