Every instinct tells him to run. Every memory tells him he can’t.

Special Agent Daniel Stansfield is ready for a change. Burnt out and defeated by the job, it’s his last day with the FBI. But before he can turn in his badge, he’s summoned back to Denver, the city he ran from four years ago, with a chilling message: it’s happening again.

Seemingly innocent people are waking up on the side of the highway, with no memory of how they got there, wearing the skin of victims they’ve allegedly never met. And they each share one haunting detail: a strand of a stranger’s hair is tied around their tongue.

Now Daniel is pulled back into the gruesome cycle, and every clue leads him deeper into the shadows of his own past. He will have to confront the ghosts of his traumatic childhood and face what’s been hunting him all along— before he and the people he loves become the next victims.

Perfect for fans of The Shining and Longlegs, bestselling author CJ Leede’s Headlights is a pulse-pounding hunt across the frozen wilderness of Colorado.

I received an advance copy of this book courtesy of the publisher. All thoughts are my own.

I’m a huge CJ Leede fan, and this book was amazing. One of the things I love most about her is that she refuses to box herself into one corner of horror. Every single one of her books is completely different from the last. You never know what you’re going to get, except that it’s going to mess with you. This book creeped me out from the first page all the way to the end, and I was locked in the whole way through.

Daniel Stansfield is an FBI agent who is completely burnt out. He’s done. It’s literally his last day on the job, and he’s ready to walk away for good, but then, right before he can go, he gets called back to Denver, the place he got out of four years earlier, with a message that turns his stomach. A serial killer is back. Regular people are turning up along the highway, dazed and with no idea how they ended up there. The horrifying part is what they’re wearing. They’ve been dressed in the skin of murder victims they’ve supposedly never crossed paths with, and every one of them has a piece of someone else’s hair knotted around their tongue. Daniel gets pulled right back into the middle of it, and the deeper he digs, the more the case drags up things from his own past that he’d rather keep buried.

This is one of the creepiest setups I’ve come across in a while. The whole idea of a killer who turns innocent people into walking evidence, dressing them in the skin of the dead and setting them loose, gave me chills. Then he ties a piece of hair around their tongue? WTF??? It’s grotesque and strange and genuinely unsettling, and Leede commits to it completely. This is creepy-as-hell horror, and I say that with a heap of praise.

I love a good noir, and this book leans into that energy hard. The burnt-out investigator, the case that won’t let him go, the past that keeps clawing at his ankles, the sense that everyone might be hiding something. Pair that noir backbone with the body horror and you get something that feels fresh even while it’s playing with familiar pieces.

One of my favorite things was the setting. Leede doesn’t just set this in Colorado, she makes Colorado a character. The mountains, the highways, the cold, the isolation, all of it presses in on the story. There’s even a great nod to The Shining that horror fans will catch and appreciate, and somehow she works John Denver into the atmosphere too, which sounds like it shouldn’t work but it absolutely does.

Daniel is a solid lead to follow through all of this. His exhaustion and his reluctance feel real. Watching a man who just wanted out get yanked back into the worst thing in his life gives the book a constant tension. He’s running from his own history as much as he’s chasing the killer, and those two threads wind around each other in a satisfying (though kind of confusing) way.

That said, I’ll be honest about my few small gripes. I was a little confused by the why of it all. When the reveal came, I wasn’t fully locked into it the way I was locked into everything leading up to it. The motivation didn’t land as hard as the atmosphere and the horror did. But those are minor complaints. They didn’t ruin the book for me even a little. So much of this worked, and worked at a high level, that a slightly head scratching reveal couldn’t take away what came before.

I immersive read this one with both an eARC and an ALC and the narration by Amdrew Eiden is top notch. He brought every beat of this story to life.

If you love horror that mixes noir and body horror and a powerful sense of place, this is a great one. Leede keeps proving she can do just about anything in this genre, and I cannot wait to read whatever she does next. She’s an auto-buy for me at this point, and books like this are exactly why.