After he tries to save her from imminent danger, she ends up at his apartment. But in the morning sinister doubts set in. Who is Alyona? A young con artist? A plant for a nefarious blackmailer? Or perhaps a long-lost daughter Aspirin never knew existed? Whoever this mysterious girl is, she now refuses to leave.A game of cat-and-mouse has begun.Claiming that she is a musical prodigy, Alyona insists she must play a complicated violin piece to find her brother. Confused and wary, Aspirin knows one thing: he wants her out of his apartment and his life. Yet every attempt to get rid of her is thwarted by an unusual protector: her plush teddy bear that may just transform into a fearsome monster.Alyona tells Aspirin that if he would just allow her do her work, she’ll leave him—and this world. He can then return to the shallow life he led before her. But as outside forces begin to coalesce, threatening to finally separate them, Aspirin makes a startling discovery about himself and this ethereal, eerie child.

    Hell, his own mother can't remember his name. So when a mysterious clockwork man tries to kill him in modern day Philadelphia, and they tumble through a hole into 1725 London, Charlie realizes even the laws of time don't take him seriously. Still, this isn't all bad. Who needs school when you can learn about history first hand, like from Ben Franklin himself. And there's this girl... Yvaine... another time traveler. All good. Except for the rules: boys only travel into the past and girls only into the future. And the baggage: Yvaine's got a baby boy and more than her share of ex-boyfriends. Still, even if they screw up history - like accidentally let the founding father be killed - they can just time travel and fix it, right? But the future they return to is nothing like Charlie remembers. To set things right, he and his scrappy new girlfriend will have to race across the centuries, battling murderous machines from the future, jealous lovers, reluctant parents, and time itself.

    The embryo, named Prospect, is given a starter kit of human knowledge and its consciousness is inserted into a synthetic twenty-year-old body. What will he make of the modern world with its over-the-counter solutions, rising tide of mean-spiritedness, and senseless violence? He meets a range of people to help him decide, from a greeting card writer with a knack for sympathy cards "because there's so much in the world to be sorry about" to his parents whose first child disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Battling over the soul of Prospect is a scientist who sees an opportunity to help the human race evolve -- and a businessman who is more interested in creating something marketable than something remarkable. Sprinkled with humor, The Prospect of My Arrival is a cautionary tale exploring the triumph of imagination, the limits of modern science, and the perils of losing one's sense of wonder.

    Inside the peculiar case, he discovers a journal, written by the renowned Robert Louis Stevenson, which divulges ominous particulars about his creation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It also promises to reveal a terrible secret—the identity of Jack the Ripper.Unfortunately, the journal—whose macabre tale unfolds in an alternating narrative with Rafe’s—isn’t the only relic in the trunk, and Rafe isn’t the only one to purloin a souvenir. A mysterious flask containing the last drops of the grisly potion that inspired Jekyll and Hyde and spawned London’s most infamous killer has gone missing. And it has definitely fallen into the wrong hands.

    She survives with FBI Special Agent Holt Satterfield's help. But she's not out of the woods yet.In the ensuing days, Penny finds herself under attack. And when news reaches Holt that he may not have gotten his man after all, it will take all he and Penny have to catch a killer--before he catches one of them.Bestselling and award-winning author Lynette Eason is back with another high-octane tale of close calls, narrow escapes, and the fight to bring a nefarious criminal to justice.

    A drug bust at a sex orgy forces a life change and a chance to start again in a new place where nobody knows her. But will her inner demons drive her back on a path of self-destruction? Like Milly Siobhan Russell is pretty and smart. Unlike Milly, she has all the advantages of a loving family. But is she too about to risk everything? From Perth, Western Australia, to a love story in Scotland and a vicious murder in a cheap motel in London; no relationship is safe, most are troubled. Lies and half-truths are told, the truth often far away, until a startling revelation reveals everything. You will never see it coming. This is the only crime thriller you will need to read this year.

    Call Tall Jake and he'll take you to Malice, a world that exists inside a horrifying comic book. A place most kids never leave. Seth and Kady think it's all a silly myth. But then their friend disappears, and suddenly the rumours don't seem so silly.

    In this rough, transient landscape, Sarah Jac and James have fallen in love. They’re tough and brave, and they have big dreams. Soon they will save up enough money to go east. But until then, they keep their heads down, their muscles tensed, and above all, their love secret.When a horrible accident forces Sarah Jac and James to start over on a new, possibly cursed ranch called the Real Marvelous, the delicate balance they’ve found begins to give way. And James and Sarah Jac will have to pay a frighteningly high price for their love.

    This was unexpected and not at all how I envisioned my death. I was supposed to die gardening in a flowerbed as a hundred-year-old woman, not as a seventeen-year-old trapped in a lake beneath inches of ice.Llona Reese is used to living on the run. After the Vykens killed her parents, she knew they would eventually come for her too. She can’t take any chances. But when she starts to make friends for the first time in her life, she gets careless and lets her guard down. Big mistake.As an Aura, Llona can manipulate light and harness its energy. But if she wants to survive, Llona will have to defy the Auran Council and learn to use her power as a weapon against the Vyken whose sole desire is to take her light. Now she’s caught in something even bigger than she can understand, with a power she can’t wield, and no one she can trust, except, just maybe, a mysterious stranger.In this breathtaking and romantic adventure, Rachel McClellan delivers a truly mesmerizing story that will keep you guessing to the very end.

    When Lexie finally finds the man of her dreams, Monica tries to be happy for her. Handsome Trevor Sands may be charming, but Monica doubts he truly loves her sister. Her worst fears are realized when Trevor brutally rejects Lexie when she needs him most. Years pass, and Trevor is just a distant memory. Monica believes Lexie has forgotten him. Then she receives a shocking phone call that shatters her world. Lexie has been arrested for murdering Trevor's family in a Medea-like rage. Monica must choose whether to stick by her sister and believe in her innocence despite overwhelming evidence of her guilt, or abandon her to face the consequences of her actions. Who is Lexie Sparks, monster or sweetly naive sister? And will Monica ever know the truth?

    Army, is implicated in a tragic explosion on the army base while spearheading a top-secret weapons project. During the aftermath, both his parents are labeled as traitors, and he’s haunted by visions he can’t understand.Brandon struggles through adolescence and college, still troubled by hallucinations that are also witnessed by others, leading him to believe that someone—or something—is deliberately laying clues in his path. Doggedly pursuing one clue at a time, Brandon seeks the answers.

    At just the hour when most prairie schools were letting out for the day, a terrifying, fast-moving blizzard struck without warning. Schoolteachers as young as sixteen were suddenly faced with life and death decisions: keep the children inside, to risk freezing to death when fuel ran out, or send them home, praying they wouldn't get lost in the storm?Based on actual oral histories of survivors, the novel follows the stories of Raina and Gerda Olsen, two sisters, both schoolteachers--one who becomes a hero of the storm, and one who finds herself ostracized in the aftermath. It's also the story of Anette Pedersen, a servant girl whose miraculous survival serves as a turning point in her life and touches the heart of Gavin Woodson, a newspaperman seeking redemption. It is Woodson and others like him who wrote the embellished news stories that lured immigrants across the sea to settle a pitiless land. Boosters needed immigrants to settle territories into states, and they didn't care what lies they told them to get them there--or whose land it originally was.At its heart, this is a story of courage, of children forced to grow up too soon, tied to the land because of their parents' choices. It is a story of love taking root in the hard prairie ground, and of families being torn asunder by a ferocious storm that is little remembered today--because so many of its victims were immigrants to this country.

    Not your best friend, not your wife, not the police—and certainly not yourself. Sidney O’Keefe just wants to spend a peaceful weekend alone with his wife and daughter in the vacation paradise of Lake Placid, New York—now that he’s been paroled after a ten year stretch in a maximum-security prison. But any illusion of a peaceful future is destroyed when his eleven-year-old daughter, Chloe, suddenly disappears from the iconic beach scene, leaving Sidney and his wife, Penny, stricken with fear and panic.          When it’s determined that his old crime boss, Mickey Rabuffo, might be behind the abduction, it becomes apparent that the past has not only come back to haunt Sidney, but it’s come back to kill the entire family. With the village police assuming that Sidney, an ex-con with a history of prison violence, is responsible for his daughter’s disappearance, Sidney is left with no choice—he needs to take the law into his own hands—not only to expose the truth about what’s developing into a conspiracy of Biblical proportions, but also to render his own particular brand of rough justice. Perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins

    As girls, they invented Mirrorland, a dark, imaginary place under the pantry stairs full of pirates, witches, and clowns. These days Cat rarely thinks about their childhood home, or the fact that El now lives there with her husband Ross.But when El mysteriously disappears after going out on her sailboat, Cat is forced to return to 36 Westeryk Road, which has scarcely changed in twenty years. The grand old house is still full of shadowy corners, and at every turn Cat finds herself stumbling on long-held secrets and terrifying ghosts from the past. Because someone—El?—has left Cat clues in almost every room: a treasure hunt that leads right back to Mirrorland, where she knows the truth lies crouched and waiting...A twisty, dark, and brilliantly crafted thriller about love and betrayal, redemption and revenge, Mirrorland is a propulsive, page-turning debut about the power of imagination and the price of freedom.

    Most days, she's got other things on her mind. Like hiding her identity among the hundreds of alien species roaming the corridors of Watertower Station. Or making sure her adoptive mother doesn't casually eviscerate one of their neighbors. Again.And most days, she can almost accept that she'll never know the truth--that she'll never know why humanity was deemed too dangerous to exist. Or whether she really is--impossibly--the lone survivor of a species destroyed a millennium ago. That is, until an encounter with a bounty hunter and a miles-long kinetic projectile leaves her life and her perspective shattered.Thrown into the universe at the helm of a stolen ship--with the dubious assistance of a rebellious spacesuit, an android death enthusiast on his sixtieth lifetime, and a ball of fluff with an IQ in the thousands--Sarya begins to uncover an impossible truth. What if humanity's death and her own existence are simply two moves in a demented cosmic game, one played out by vast alien intellects? Stranger still, what if these mad gods are offering Sarya a seat at their table--and a second chance for humanity?The Last Human is a sneakily brilliant, gleefully oddball space-opera debut--a masterful play on perspective, intelligence, and free will, wrapped in a rollicking journey through a strange and crowded galaxy.