Chapters: Living Dead in Dallas, Dead to the World, Definitely Dead, Club Dead, Dead Until Dark, Dead as a Doornail, Dead and Gone, All Together Dead, From Dead to Worse, a Touch of Dead, Dead in the Family. Excerpt: A Touch of Dead A Touch of Dead is a collection of short stories from Charlaine Harris 's series The Southern Vampire Mysteries . This title was released on October 6th, 2009. This book only contains the short stories Harris has published in which Sookie Stackhouse is present. Stories References (URLs online) A hyperlinked version of this chapter is at All Together Dead All Together Dead is the seventh book in Charlaine Harris 's series The Southern Vampire Mysteries . After being betrayed by her vampire love, Bill Compton, Sookie Stackhouse attends an all-important central U.S. Vampire Summit on the shores of Lake Michigan as a "human geiger counter" for Sophie-Anne Leclerq, Vampire Queen of Louisiana and who will be tried during the event for murdering her husband, King of Arkansas. The summit is a tense situation. The queen is in a precarious position, her power base weakened by hurricane damage to New Orleans. And there are some vamps who would like to finish what nature started. Sookie knows the queen is innocent, but she is hardly prepared for other shocking murders, not to mention protests by the Fellowship of the Sun, a right-wing anti-vampire movement. Sookie's bond with Eric Northman gets closer and she discovers Quinn 's past. Plot summary The summit, which has attracted undead power players from all over the central United States, is sure to be tense, due in no small part to the rampi...

    By day, Larue Donavan is a down-to-earth bookstore owner. But by night, she's a world-renowned psychic investigator dedicated to helping lost spirits find peace. Dead people won't leave her alone and Abraham Lincoln thinks he's in charge of her lovelife. Larue can handle ghosts and undead presidents. It's the living that drive her crazy. When Callahan Weiss moves to town, the handsome newcomer opens a coffee shop right next door. She's smitten from the start, but she's not the only one -- The boutique owner across the street has her eye on Callahan too, and uses witchcraft to fight dirty. When Callahan gets hit by a love spell, Larue will need more than a little help from her ghoul-friends to save the day...

    Her remarkable gift may help others rest in peace, but it also made for an unsettling childhood and destroyed her marriage. Finally content as the real estate writer for a local newspaper, Aubrey keeps her extraordinary ability hidden—until she is unexpectedly assigned the story of a decades-old murder.Rocked by the discovery of a young woman’s skeletal remains, the New England town of Surrey wants answers. Hard-nosed investigative reporter Levi St John is determined to get them. Aubrey has no choice but to get involved, even at the terrifying risk of stirring spirits connected to a dead woman’s demise and piquing her new reporting partner’s suspicions.As Aubrey and Levi delve further into the mystery, secrets are revealed and passion ignites. It seems that Aubrey’s ghost gifts are poised to deliver everything but a normal life.

    The world is not the way it was. The dead have risen, and the living are under attack. The powerful Church of Real Truth, in charge since the government fell, has sworn to reimburse citizens being harassed by the deceased. Enter Chess Putnam, a fully tattooed witch and freewheeling ghost hunter. She’s got a real talent for banishing the wicked dead. But Chess is keeping a dark secret: She owes a lot of money to a murderous drug lord named Bump, who wants immediate payback in the form of a dangerous job that involves black magic, human sacrifice, a nefarious demonic creature, and enough wicked energy to wipe out a city of souls. Toss in lust for a rival gang leader and a dangerous attraction to Bump’s ruthless enforcer, and Chess begins to wonder if the rush is really worth it. Hell, yeah.

    He comes from a line of Charmings — an illustrious family of dragon slayers, witch-finders and killers dating back to before the fall of Rome. Trained by a modern day version of the Knights Templar, monster hunters who have updated their methods from chainmail and crossbows to kevlar and shotguns, he was one of the best. That is — until he became the abomination the Knights were sworn to hunt.That was a lifetime ago. Now, he tends bar under an assumed name in rural Virginia and leads a peaceful, quiet life. One that shouldn't change just because a vampire and a blonde walked into his bar... Right?

    and there's nothing wrong with Joe Ledger's skills. And that's both a good, and a bad thing. It's good because he's a Baltimore detective that has just been secretly recruited by the government to lead a new taskforce created to deal with the problems that Homeland Security can't handle. This rapid response group is called the Department of Military Sciences or the DMS for short. It's bad because his first mission is to help stop a group of terrorists from releasing a dreadful bio-weapon that can turn ordinary people into zombies. The fate of the world hangs in the balance...

     Not until she woke up with one trying to kill her. But now she knows the truth. The paranormal world is real and all sorts of weird magical beings like vampires, elves, werewolves not only exist but live among us. In fact, she is one of those weird paranormal beings. Now with the help of her new friends in the Magical Bureau of Investigation she'll learn how to use her magical powers and hopefully survive the next attack.

    Seven days ago, I was struggling to survive without my magic. Now I’m on the run with a family of werewolf super-soldiers. Not gonna lie. I’m in trouble—a lot of trouble: a cult of dragon-worshipping fanatics wants to cut my heart out, vampire assassins hunt me, and even my own countrymen want to hang me for treason.Oh, and a dark empire plots to conquer the entire West Coast. It may be led by a pair of dragons, honest-to-god dragons.Did I mention I’m possessed by an ancient entity of unimaginable power?Last week was hell on Earth, literally. I think this week is gonna be worse.At least my magic’s back—wow, is it ever back!Warning: Contains scenes of sexual situations, realistic violence, and soldiers talking like soldiers.If you like Myke Cole, Michael Anderle, K.F. Breene, and Shayne Silvers, you’ll love this exciting new series.

    He chooses the military. For the first time, he thinks he has a shot at a better life. But survival is not guaranteed. Leading an elite team of mech operators, he is deployed to a frozen planet called Ferrous where dangerous relics of a past war lurk beneath the ice and savage creatures prowl the barren wastelands. Scientists on Ferrous are chasing rumors of godlike technologies buried in the ruins of a long-extinct civilization. When Shaw and his team are assigned to protect the researchers, they face an unexpected, merciless new enemy desperate to stop them. An ancient secret has been awakened on Ferrous. The deadly race to claim this terrifying power has only just begun.

    Seventeen years ago, five knights from Earth's magical twin, Theia, entombed Asmodeous the Pale, Lord of the Drynn, in Skip's town. Now that the dark god is free again, he's anxious to get back home and finish the war he began…to enslave all life. It begins with killing the knights who trapped him.Deprived of their magic, the knights fight back using whatever they can get their hands on, from samurai swords to assault rifles. Skip gets reluctantly drawn in to their struggle while Donovan Smith, the demi-god murderer whom Skip was after in the first place, plots to find the Lord of the Underworld and butcher him on his own.Together, these unlikely heroes might just save the world. If they don't kill each other first.

    It’s 1926, and New York is filled with speakeasies, Ziegfeld girls, and rakish pickpockets. The only catch is that she has to live with her uncle Will and his unhealthy obsession with the occult. Evie worries her uncle will discover her darkest secret: a supernatural power that has only brought her trouble so far. But when the police find a murdered girl branded with a cryptic symbol and Will is called to the scene, Evie realizes her gift could help catch a serial killer. As Evie jumps headlong into a dance with a murderer, other stories unfold in the city that never sleeps. A young man named Memphis is caught between two worlds. A chorus girl named Theta is running from her past. A student named Jericho is hiding a shocking secret. And unknown to all, something dark and evil has awakened…

    For Addison, it seems like she’s finally found the house of her dreams…until the spirit of Roxanne “Roxy” Rafferty comes to call. Who is Roxanne, why is she haunting Grayson Manor, and how will Addison’s connection reveal a key to her own past that she thought no longer existed?

    Buses rumble towards Ealing Broadway and I'm expected to do battle with the powers of darkness. It all seems a little unfair...'You could say it all started with the red-eyed tramp with the slimy fingers who put the wind up Neville, the part-time barman, something rotten. Or when Archroy's wife swapped his trusty Morris Minor for five magic beans while he was out at the rubber factory.On the other hand, you could say it all started a lot earlier. Like 450 years ago, when Borgias walked the earth.Pooley and Omally, stars of the Brentford Laboiur Exchange and the Flying Swan, want nothing to do with it, especially if there's a Yankee and a pint of Large in the offing. Pope Alexander VI, last of the Borgias, has other ideas...

    There's not much excitement in their small town of Cross Creek, so Mila and Riley make their own fun, devoting most of their time to Riley's favorite activity: amateur witchcraft.So when Riley and two Fairmont Academy mean girls die under suspicious circumstances, Mila refuses to believe everyone's explanation that her BFF was involved in a suicide pact. Instead, armed with a tube of lip gloss and an ancient grimoire, Mila does the unthinkable to uncover the truth: she brings the girls back to life.Unfortunately, Riley, June, and Dayton have no recollection of their murders, but they do have unfinished business to attend to. Now, with only seven days until the spell wears off and the girls return to their graves, Mila must wrangle the distracted group of undead teens and work fast to discover their murderer...before the killer strikes again.

    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.