Maren Longbella, The Minnesota Star Tribune

Books about older amateur sleuths are all over the bestseller lists (Richard Osman’s “ Thursday Murder Club ” series, Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong mysteries, among others).

It isn’t much of a leap, then, to see the appeal of setting a horror novel in a retirement community, or upping the stakes and making it into a slasher story, which is exactly what Philip Fracassi does in “The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre.” (Weirdly, “Jenny Cooper Has a Secret” also is about a care home menaced by a maniac.)

You gotta love a title that lays it all out for you, and the book follows the expected trajectory: A mysterious assailant picks off residents one by one by at Autumn Springs. By virtue of having “a sixth sense when things aren’t right,”

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