At the start of Week Four of Halloween Bingo, I’ve read books for 8 of the 25 squares, including 3 of the 5 Called squares on my card.

From this point onwards, the books I pick to read next depend on the patterns on the card.

This week, that means that I’ve picked the three squares to read for so that I can have a bottom-left to top-right diagonal of read books and so that I can read a book for the only Called square that I haven’t read for yet.

This gives me an interesting mix: a Californian police procedural, a psychological thriller set in Virginia about a woman looking for revenge, and an account of a massacre carried out by Bigfoot in Washington State.

‘Bone Canyon’ by Lee Goldberg (2021)

I picked up the first book in the Eve Ronin series, ‘Lost Hills’ back in 2020 because it was offered free on Amazon. The book had a great premise:

A video of Deputy Eve Ronin’s off-duty arrest of an abusive movie star goes viral, turning her into a popular hero at a time when the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is plagued by scandal. The sheriff, desperate for more positive press, makes Eve the youngest female homicide detective in the department’s history.

Lee Goldberg used that starting point to deliver an action-packed story and build a main character that I found myself rooting for.

I had such a good time with ‘Lost Hills’ and so I looked up the author to see if he’d written anything else. Only then did I find out that Lee Goldberg was the guy behind the Monk TV series or that he’d co-written a series with Janet Evanovich.

I’ve been meaning to get back to Eve Ronin for a while now. In the meantime, Lee Goldberg has published three more Eve Ronin books.

I’m hoping that I’ll enjoy ‘Bone Canyon’ as much as ‘Lost Hills’ and can then binge-read the rest of the series.

All the books in this series work for the ‘Golden State Nightmares’ Halloween Bingo square.

‘The Murder Rule’ by Dervla McTiernan (2022)

The Raven square in the centre of the Halloween Bingo card is important to a player’s game strategy as it is a sits a candidate being part of 4 bingo lines. It’s also a square you can pick any mystery, supernatural, horror or thriller book for.

I’ve been saving Dervla McTiernan’s ‘The Murder Rule’, for this spot since it came out in May.

Earlier this year, I enjoyed ‘The Ruin’ (2018), the first book in Dervla McTiernan’s series about Galway police detective Cormac Reilly. I also enjoyed her clever, creepy standalone novella ‘The Wrong One’.

‘The Murder Rule’ is her first standalone novel and I love its premise. My wife read it and recommended it. I’ve just started it and I can already see that it’s a great choice for a two-narrator audiobook.

‘Devolution‘ by Max Brooks (2020)

This isn’t the book I intended to read for the Modern Masters Of Horror square. I had a Stephen King book lined up but decided that it was too long to read during this game. Looking for something new, I saw Max Brooks’ much-recommended ‘World War Z’ on my shelves and looked up the author. When I saw that he’d published a more recent book about people being massacred by Big Foot, I just had to go for it.

I mean, Big Foot. As a killer. That’s so far from the Jim Butcher’s image of the fierce but friendly giant that I find it irresistible.