The Lost Army — Christopher Golden

The hero: Forty years after being rescued from Axis powers at the end of World War II, he's a top field agent for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Development. He questions the unknown, then beats it into submission. And he's a blood-red, cloven-hoofed demon with a tail and stone right hand named Hellboy.

The girl: Dr. Anastasia Bransfield is the old flame from Hellboy's past. Beautiful and tough, Anastasia wishes they could reunite under better circumstances. But she needs his raw power and knowledge of the unknown to help her search team solve...

The mystery: Around 525 B.C., a fifty thousand-strong Persian army, while crossing the conquered Egyptian desert, inexplicably vanished from the face of the earth. Two millennia later, amid mounting hostilities between Libya and joint allied forces, a group of British archaeologists has met that same fate, disappearing without a trace along the edge of the Great Sand Sea.

The evil: From the mythical oasis of Ammon, the dead utter a warning to Hellboy, Anastasia and their companions: leave now or die. And be careful of the spiders. Hellboy has no recourse but to dig deeper, below the hot sands of the Sahara. As usual, what he finds is worse than even the world's greatest paranormal agent could bargain for -- an immortal sorcerer named Hazred, who sees Hellboy as the instrument to summon back an even greater evil banished from our world eons before. And any who stand against him will fall before the undead legions of The Lost Army.