Hummingbird Salamander


Jeff VanderMeer - 2021
    Silvina, the dead woman who left the note, is a reputed ecoterrorist and the daughter of an Argentine industrialist. By taking the hummingbird from the storage unit, Jane sets in motion a series of events that quickly spin beyond her control.Soon, Jane and her family are in danger, with few allies to help her make sense of the true scope of the peril. Is the only way to safety to follow in Silvina’s footsteps? Is it too late to stop? As she desperately seeks answers about why Silvina contacted her, time is running out—for her and possibly for the world.Hummingbird Salamander is Jeff VanderMeer at his brilliant, cinematic best, wrapping profound questions about climate change, identity, and the world we live in into a tightly plotted thriller full of unexpected twists and elaborate conspiracy.

3 a.m.


Nick Pirog - 2013
    Henry Bins is awake for one. He wakes up each day at 3 a.m. then falls asleep at 4 a.m. Life is simple. Until he hears the woman scream. And sees the man leave the house across the street. But not just any man. The President of the United States.

The Leaving


Tara Altebrando - 2016
    Eleven years later, five come back--with no idea of where they've been.Eleven years ago, six kindergarteners went missing without a trace. After all that time, the people left behind moved on, or tried to.Until today. Today five of those kids return. They're sixteen, and they are . . . fine. Scarlett comes home and finds a mom she barely recognizes, and doesn't really recognize the person she's supposed to be, either. But she thinks she remembers Lucas. Lucas remembers Scarlett, too, except they're entirely unable to recall where they've been or what happened to them. Neither of them remember the sixth victim, Max. He doesn't come back. Everyone wants answers. Most of all Max's sister Avery, who needs to find her brother--dead or alive--and isn't buying this whole memory-loss story.

Younger


Suzanne Munshower - 2015
    Desperate to prove she is still relevant, the fiftysomething accepts a shady job offer from Pierre Barton, secretive billionaire owner of Barton Pharmaceuticals. Isolated in a facility outside London, she agrees to test a new top-secret product guaranteed to make her look thirty years younger. Anna is starting to look on the outside the way she feels on the inside: ageless. But she soon discovers that her predecessor died under mysterious circumstances, leading her to research just who stands to gain—and lose—with this miraculous product. When Pierre drops dead in front of her, she takes off on a dangerous journey across Europe hoping to stay alive long enough to uncover the truth.With the hard-won knowledge that younger isn’t always better, Anna is determined to escape and reclaim her life before it’s too late.

Hyde


Lauren Stewart - 2012
    It includes lots of cursing, descriptive sex, biting sarcasm, and dark themes. HYDE was inspired by Stevenson's novella but is not a retelling, in part because he and this author have very different definitions of 'bad boy'.Honesty is impossible when you don't know the truth to begin with.Mitchell Turner is everything women want most in a man--he's charismatic, successful, and undeniably gorgeous. But he's not a man--he's a monster. By venting his rage 24/7, Mitch keeps people out of the danger zone that surrounds him. But, after the most incredible night of his life, he realizes that might not be possible. Except the woman he wakes up with claims she doesn't remember any of it. And that kind of thing can make a guy insecure.Eden Colfax is kind, loyal, honest to a fault, and cavity-inducing sweet. To rid herself of the monsters that haunted her broken childhood, Eden doesn't lie, doesn't curse, and definitely never wakes up naked in strangers' beds...until the day she does. Then the flashbacks start--places she's never been, people she's never met, blood she's never spilled. And the only person with any answers is a man she never wants to see again.What they don't know is that someone is manipulating them, determined to find out exactly what they're capable of. And when the truth leaves them nothing to hold onto, they will be forced into a partnership neither expected. Or wanted.But in life, who you trust is as important as who you are. And when you can't even trust yourself, sometimes the only person you can rely on is the last person on earth you should be falling for.

Voices in the Snow


Darcy Coates - 2019
    She remembers abandoned cars and children’s toys littered across the road. She remembers dark shapes in the snow and a terror she can’t explain. And then…nothing.When she wakes, aching and afraid in a stranger’s gothic home, he tells her she was in an accident. He claims he saved her. Clare wants to leave, but a vicious snowstorm has blanketed the world in white, trapping them together, and there’s nothing she can do but wait.At least the stranger seems kind…but Clare doesn’t know if she can trust him. He promised they were alone here, but she sees and hears things that convince her something else is creeping about the surrounding woods, watching. Waiting. Between the claustrophobic storm and the inescapable sense of being hunted, Clare is on edge…and increasingly certain of one thing:Her car crash wasn't an accident. Something is waiting for her to step outside the fragile safety of the house... something monstrous, something unfeeling.Something desperately hungry.

The Echo Wife


Sarah Gailey - 2021
    Everything was right there in the open, right there in front of me, but it still took me so long to see the person I had married.It took me so long to hate him.Martine is a genetically cloned replica made from Evelyn Caldwell’s award-winning research. She’s patient and gentle and obedient. She’s everything Evelyn swore she’d never be.And she’s having an affair with Evelyn’s husband.Now, the cheating bastard is dead, and both Caldwell wives have a mess to clean up.Good thing Evelyn Caldwell is used to getting her hands dirty.

Rabbits


Terry Miles - 2021
    It's an average work day. You've been wrapped up in a task, and you check the clock when you come up for air—4:44 pm. You go to check your email, and 44 unread messages have built up. With a shock, you realize it is April 4th—4/4. And when you get in your car to drive home, your odometer reads 44,444. Coincidence? Or have you just seen the edge of a rabbit hole? Rabbits is a mysterious alternate reality game so vast it uses our global reality as its canvas. Since the game first started in 1959, ten iterations have appeared and nine winners have been declared. Their identities are unknown. So is their reward, which is whispered to be NSA or CIA recruitment, vast wealth, immortality, or perhaps even the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe itself. But the deeper you get, the more deadly the game becomes. Players have died in the past—and the body count is rising. And now the eleventh round is about to begin. Enter K—a Rabbits obsessive who has been trying to find a way into the game for years. That path opens when K is approached by billionaire Alan Scarpio, the alleged winner of the sixth iteration. Scarpio says that something has gone wrong with the game and that K needs to fix it before Eleven starts or the whole world will pay the price. Five days later, Scarpio is declared missing. Two weeks after that, K blows the deadline and Eleven begins. And suddenly, the fate of the entire universe is at stake.

12.21


Dustin Thomason - 2012
    . . Deep in the jungles of Central America, an indigenous man discovers a unique and priceless treasure - a beautifully painted codex that has survived for centuries within the ruins of an undiscovered ancient Maya city. Knowing that this rare artifact could be worth millions, the looter smuggles it into the US - but unbeknownst to him, he has brought something far more dangerous across the border . . . In the first week of December 2012, the codex finds its way into the hands of the Antiquities Curator of the Getty Museum, Chel Manu, the world authority on ancient Mayan inscriptions. She is torn between her duty to alert the authorities and this once in a lifetime chance to translate the codex herself.Meanwhile - in an LA hospital, an unidentified man is dying of Fatal Insomnia, a rare and highly infectious neurological disease. The patient speaks only in a garbled Mayan dialect - and Chel Manu is called in to interpret his dying words . . . just as countless others in the city begin to show signs of infection. Within days the world seems to be unravelling, hurtling towards the prophesied apocalypse . . . and deciphering the codex is the only hope for humanity . . .

The Descent


Jeff Long - 1999
    In the Kalahari Desert, a nun unearths evidence of a proto-human species and a deity called Older-than-Old. In Bosnia, something has been feeding upon the dead in a mass grave. So begins mankind’s most shocking realization: that the underworld is a vast geological labyrinth populated by another race of beings. Some call them "devils" or "demons." But they are real. They are down there. And they are waiting for us to find them…

Daemon


Daniel Suarez - 2006
    Thousands of autonomous computer programs, or daemons, make our networked world possible, running constantly in the background of our lives, trafficking e-mail, transferring money, and monitoring power grids. For the most part, daemons are benign, but the same can't always be said for the people who design them. Matthew Sobol was a legendary computer game designer—the architect behind half-a-dozen popular online games. His premature death depressed both gamers and his company's stock price. But Sobol's fans aren't the only ones to note his passing. When his obituary is posted online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events intended to unravel the fabric of our hyper-efficient, interconnected world. With Sobol's secrets buried along with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed at every turn, it's up to an unlikely alliance to decipher his intricate plans and wrest the world from the grasp of a nameless, faceless enemy—or learn to live in a society in which we are no longer in control. . . . Computer technology expert Daniel Suarez blends haunting high-tech realism with gripping suspense in an authentic, complex thriller in the tradition of Michael Crichton, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson.

The Speed of Sound


Eric Bernt - 2018
    Resident Eddie Parks’s contribution is nothing less than extraordinary: an “echo box” that can re-create never-recorded sounds using acoustic archeology.All Eddie wants is to hear his late mother’s voice. But what he’s created is inadvertently posing a threat to national security.To Harmony House’s shadowy government backers and radical extremists, the echo box is the ultimate intelligence asset—an end to the very concept of secrecy. Now for Eddie and the compassionate Dr. Skylar Drummond, the true nature of the institution is becoming chillingly clear.As ruthless competing enemies close in on Eddie and his miraculous machine, Skylar risks all to take him on the run. Because once that prize is won, Eddie Parks will no longer be considered a “special person” but a dangerous redundancy. An inconvenient echo that must be silenced.

Spare Room


Dreda Say Mitchell - 2019
    The live-in owners are a kind and welcoming couple. Everything is fine until she finds a suicide note hidden in her room. But when the couple insist this man didn’t exist and that Lisa is their first tenant, Lisa begins to doubt herself.Compelled to uncover the secrets of the man who lived in the room before her, Lisa is alarmed when increasingly disturbing incidents start to happen. Someone doesn’t want Lisa to find out the truth.As the four walls of this house and its secrets begin to close in on Lisa, she descends into a hellish hall of mirrors where she’s not sure what’s real and what’s not as she claws her way towards the truth… This room has already claimed one victim? Is it about to take another?

Tyrannosaur Canyon


Douglas Preston - 2005
    known as Tyrannosaur Canyon?

Sleeper agent


John Birmingham - 2021
    Since the car accident that wiped his memories, Cooper has been...a little foggy. Cooper doesn’t know how to do much, but one thing he instinctively seems to know about is strength training, and with his help, Gainesville High’s football team has just won the Mid-States final. With Cooper the hero of the hour, the whole town is getting ready to celebrate in style.When three strangers crash the party and decide to pick on the harmless-looking guy carrying a cooler full of sodas, they trigger something inside Cooper. Afterwards, the folks in Gainesville can never look at him in quite the same way. Is he really just a regular guy who suffered a brain injury in a car crash, or is he someone else? Or something else?As Cooper tries to come to terms with baffling new memories, he’s about to be plunged into a terrifying world of secret experiments and covert assassins that will test his new-found abilities to the limit.