The Rook


Daniel O'Malley - 2012
    With no recollection of who she is, Myfanwy must follow the instructions her former self left behind to discover her identity and track down the agents who want to destroy her.She soon learns that she is a Rook, a high-ranking member of a secret organization called the Chequy that battles the many supernatural forces at work in Britain. She also discovers that she possesses a rare, potentially deadly supernatural ability of her own. In her quest to uncover which member of the Chequy betrayed her and why, Myfanwy encounters a person with four bodies, an aristocratic woman who can enter her dreams, a secret training facility where children are transformed into deadly fighters, and a conspiracy more vast than she ever could have imagined.Filled with characters both fascinating and fantastical, The Rook is a richly inventive, suspenseful, and often wry thriller that marks an ambitious debut from a promising young writer.

Into the Shadows


Karly Kirkpatrick - 2010
    This is the first book in the Into the Shadows Trilogy.Paivi Anderson has it all - friends, a spot on the varsity basketball team, wonderful parents, and quite possibly, her first boyfriend. It was everything a freshman in high school could ask for. Her perfect life begins to crumble when she discovers her name on a list distributed by a power-hungry presidential candidate. How could anyone think of Paivi as an Enemy of the State? Could it be because of her special powers? No one was supposed to know about them, but the mysterious messages in her tater tots say otherwise. In INTO THE SHADOWS, Paivi quickly learns who her friends are and is forced into a reality she didn’t see coming.

Girls with Sharp Sticks


Suzanne Young - 2019
    The Girls of Innovations Academy are beautiful and well-behaved—it says so on their report cards. Under the watchful gaze of their Guardian, they receive a well-rounded education that promises to make them better. Obedient girls, free from arrogance or defiance. Free from troublesome opinions or individual interests. But the girls’ carefully controlled existence may not be quite as it appears. As Mena and her friends uncover the dark secrets of what’s actually happening there—and who they really are—the girls of Innovations Academy will learn to fight back. Bringing the trademark plot twists and high-octane drama that made The Program a bestselling and award-winning series, Suzanne Young launches a new series that confronts some of today’s most pressing ethical questions.

The Waking Dark


Robin Wasserman - 2013
    Twelve people dead, in the space of a few hours. Five murderers: neighbors, relatives, friends. All of them so normal. All of them seemingly harmless. All of them now dead by their own hand . . . except one. And that one has no answers to offer the shattered town. She doesn't even know why she killed—or whether she'll do it again.Something is waking in the sleepy town of Oleander, Kansas—something dark and hungry that lives in the flat earth and the open sky, in the vengeful hearts of upstanding citizens. As the town begins its descent into blood and madness, five survivors of the killing day are the only ones who can stop Oleander from destroying itself. Jule, the outsider at war with the world. West, the golden boy at war with himself. Daniel, desperate for a different life. Cass, who's not sure she deserves a life at all. Ellie, who believes in sacrifice, who believes in fate, who believes in evil. Ellie, who always goes too far.They have nothing in common. They have nothing left to lose. And they have no way out. Which means that they have no choice but to stand and fight, to face the darkness in their town—and in themselves.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War


Max Brooks - 2006
    Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the twelve-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.Most of all, the book captures with haunting immediacy the human dimension of this epochal event. Facing the often raw and vivid nature of these personal accounts requires a degree of courage on the part of the reader, but the effort is invaluable because, as Mr. Brooks says in his introduction, "By excluding the human factor, aren't we risking the kind of personal detachment from history that may, heaven forbid, lead us one day to repeat it? And in the end, isn't the human factor the only true difference between us and the enemy we now refer to as 'the living dead'?"Note: Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission.

The Uninvited


Liz Jensen - 2012
    An isolated incident, say the experts. The experts are wrong. Across the world, children are killing their families. Is violence contagious? As chilling murders by children grip the country, anthropologist Hesketh Lock has his own mystery to solve: a bizarre scandal in the Taiwan timber industry.Hesketh has never been good at relationships: Asperger's Syndrome has seen to that. But he does have a talent for spotting behavioral patterns and an outsider's fascination with group dynamics. Nothing obvious connects Hesketh's Asian case with the atrocities back home. Or with the increasingly odd behavior of his beloved stepson, Freddy. But when Hesketh's Taiwan contact dies shockingly and more acts of sabotage and child violence sweep the globe, he is forced to acknowledge possibilities that defy the rational principles on which he has staked his life, his career, and, most devastatingly of all, his role as a father.Part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare, The Uninvited is a powerful and viscerally unsettling portrait of apocalypse in embryo.

Quiet River


Natasha A. Salnikova - 2011
    But evil lives in quiet water, don't you know?Lisa and Matt Collins spend a weekend in the town of Quiet River, Washington, where their son Evan meets a woman who says he looks like her son. She gives him cookies. The hotel clerk, an older woman, also gives him cookies, explaining to his mother that they came from the hotel's kitchen. Lisa ignores the clerk's strange behavior and forgets about her. The family goes back home to Seattle where Matt returns to his job as a magazine editor and Lisa finds out she is pregnant for the second time. Soon Matt's personal assistant dies in a car accident and he hires a new one: Kristine. One day Kristine presents Matt and Lisa with tickets to a ballet performance and that night their quiet lives change forever when they get involved in a violent store robbery and Lisa loses her unborn child.Lisa and Matt think it is their worst nightmare, but how little did they know. They have to return to Quiet River to learn what the darkest dark is and what face it can wear.Psychological Thriller - 94,000 words

Amanda's Eyes


Kathy Disanto - 2012
    It's even worse if you can't remember what hit you.The bad and the ugly are crime reporter Amanda "A.J." Gregson's business. But learning she had a ringside seat for an explosion that vaporized two federal agents, incinerated an entire block of warehouses, and peppered her eyes with so much shrapnel they had to be surgically removed? Well, that gives the darker side of life a whole new meaning.Haunted by will-o-the-wisp nightmares, A.J. waits for her transplant and struggles to remember the events leading up to the fateful night of September 4, 2075. She isn't the only one who wants that information. Special Agent Jack "Iceman" Eagan is as determined to get the facts as she is to remember them. When memory floods back in brutal detail the night before surgery, fed and reporter form an uneasy alliance against the architects of her personal disaster, a lethal band of killers-for-hire known as Ferrymen. The Ferrymen. My not-so-magnificent obsession for more than a year. Only a cataclysm could have made me forget. I guess you could call them hitmen. You could also call Einstein a math whiz. Think ruthless. Think unstoppable. Think killers so proficient 'caught the ferry' was fast replacing 'bought the farm' in common usage, and you have the Ferrymen in a nutshell. A.J. is raring for a rematch with Hell's Boatmen, eager to come out swinging as soon as the bandages come off. But fate has a surprise in store for both her and Eagan. Before long, her new baby blues reveal a power that turns her world upside down--the power to see hidden dimensions of the human heart.When the Sight unmasks the mastermind behind the Ferrymen, A.J. realizes she's onto a story no one will believe--least of all the ultra-cynical Iceman--and it propels her toward a second head-collision with evil. Will she survive the final encounter?A paranormal fantasy that will appeal to those who don't normally read them, the near-future thriller Amanda's Eyes blends suspense, drama, and humor in an exploration of the capacities for good and evil in each of us, the cost of doing the right thing, and the push-me-pull-you relationship between the Fourth Estate and the Long Arm of the Law.

Extinction Horizon


Nicholas Sansbury Smith - 2014
    When a top secret Medical Corps research facility goes dark, Team Ghost is called in to face their deadliest enemy yet--a variant strain of Ebola that turns men into monsters.After barely escaping with his life, Beckham returns to Fort Bragg in the midst of a new type of war. The virus is already spreading... As cities fall, Team Ghost is ordered to keep CDC virologist Dr. Kate Lovato alive long enough to find a cure. What she uncovers will change everything.Total extinction is just on the horizon, but will the cure be worse than the virus?

Spirit Legacy


E.E. Holmes - 2013
    Jess' life has never been what anyone would call easy; doing damage control in the wake of your nomadic, alcoholic mother doesn't exactly make for a storybook childhood. But now her world has fallen apart just when it should be coming together: her mother gone—dead under mysterious circumstances; her life uprooted to stay with estranged relatives she’s never met; and there’s something odd about some of the people she’s been meeting at school:They’re dead.Aided by Tia, her neurotic roommate, and Dr. David Pierce, a ghost-hunting professor, Jess must unravel the mystery behind her hauntings. But the closer she gets to the truth, the more danger shadows her every move. An ancient secret, long-buried, is about to claw its way to the surface, and nothing can prepare Jess for one terrifying truth......her encounters with the world of the dead are only just beginning.Spirit Legacy is the first of three thrilling novels in The Gateway Trilogy by E.E. Holmes.

Madhouse


Miguel Estrada - 2017
     Faced with his parents’s divorce, eleven-year-old Lucas runs away from his house with the hope that his family will get back together to find him. On his way walking through the empty streets, he is picked up by a mysterious woman who offers to take care of him and provide him with a loving family. The boy then wakes up in shackles, confined to a bed in a decrepit house in the middle of nowhere and will have to face his deepest fears in order to survive in his new home. Join Lucas in a desperate attempt to get back to his family in Madhouse, the first published book from horror-thriller author Miguel Estrada.

The Breach


Patrick Lee - 2009
    It is the world's best-kept secret-and its most terrifying. Trying to regain his life in the Alaskan wilds, ex-con/ex-cop Travis Chase stumbles upon an impossible scene: a crashed 747 passenger jet filled with the murdered dead, including the wife of the [resident of the United States.Though a nightmare of monumental proportions, it pales before the terror to come, as Chase is dragged into a battle for the future that revolves around an amazing artifact. Allied with a beautiful covert operative whose life he saved, Chase must now play the role he's been destined for-a pawn of incomprehensible forces or humankind's final hope-as the race toward Apocalypse begins in earnest. Because something is loose in the world. And doomsday is not only possible...it is inevitable.

Afterlife


Marcus Sakey - 2017
    He wakes without a scratch. The building is in ruins. His team is gone. Outside, Chicago is dark. Cars lie abandoned. No planes cross the sky. He’s relieved to spot other people — until he sees they’re carrying machetes.Welcome to the afterlife.Claire McCoy stands over the body of Will Brody. As head of an FBI task force, she hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks. A terrorist has claimed eighteen lives and thrown the nation into panic. Against this horror, something reckless and beautiful happened. She fell in love… with Will Brody. But the line between life and death is narrower than any of us suspect — and all that matters to Will and Claire is getting back to each other.From the author of the million-copy bestselling Brilliance Trilogy comes a mind-bending thriller that explores our most haunting and fundamental question: What if death is just the beginning?

IN SITU


David Samuel Frazier - 2013
    When paleontologist Alexandra Moss ventures into the high deserts of Utah in search of a rare dinosaur fossil she gets more than she bargained for: she inadvertently discovers a highly intelligent species from the late Cretaceous that has been in hibernation since the great K-T asteroid disaster--and he is alive!

What We Saw


Ryan Casey - 2012
    As the story twists and turns towards a shocking conclusion, the secrets of the seemingly sleepy community begin to unravel…What We Saw is a touching and thrilling British mystery novel with elements of comedy, friendship, fear and loss. Told from the innocent perspective of a child, it poses the ultimate question: if you stumbled upon a shocking discovery as a child, how would you react?