When a young girl is snatched on her way home from school, Matty's police detective father knows that every minute counts. For the first time - but not the last - Detective Roger Turner enlists his son's unique help.With over 130,000 copies sold, the Matt Turner Series launched author Michael Siemsen to bestseller status. The Dig (Book 1) and The Opal (Book 2) hint at the troubled psychometrist's shocking childhood, using his ability to "read" an object's history to help his father solve the worst kinds of crimes. Only now, with the short story Matty are we offered a firsthand glimpse into a young Matt's first case - tracking down a kidnapped girl named Joss Lynn Leland.

    “Ethshar” is the invented world that has been the setting for almost a dozen novels from the pen of Lawrence Watt-Evans. Its inhabitants don’t call it that; they call it “the World.” For readers, though, that’s not specific enough. The dominant nation on the World is the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, while the largest, richest city, where most of the stories are set, is Ethshar of the Spices, so “Ethshar” is close enough. The name itself comes from words meaning “safe harbor.” You don’t need to have read any of the novels to enjoy the stories herein; each one should stand alone. And if you've read the novels, you will enjoy this return to the world of Ethshar with 11 stories... This is the first time they have all been collected in one book!

    It’s highly infectious, incredibly lethal, and turns the recently deceased into fast moving zombies with a taste for human flesh. Rookie officer Lacy Sparks is thrust into the action when she is assigned to a federal strike force tasked with preventing the outbreak from becoming a full blown pandemic. It’s a race against the clock as she and her team struggles to survive against the growing forces of the undead.

    Who better to capture the mythical nation's enigmatic spirit? The result is a sumptuous treasure box of history, legend, and fantasy. Inside, the curious will find the very postcards and stamps Mr. Bantock created for this commission, along with a book -- not much larger than a passport -- in which he introduces the history, philosophy, customs, and traditions of this mysterious nomadic tribe.Visit griffinandsabine.com!

    Beautifully illustrated, these stories are an emotional and enlightening journey through magic realism, serial killings, psychic battles, and time travel. See how Indigenous peoples have survived a post-apocalyptic world since Contact.This is one of the 200 exceptional projects funded through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter initiative. With this $35M initiative, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.

    By the end of the first chapter, Sophie Hippolyte’s husband Pierre will have been gone for three days, and the suspense, as a lone horseman approaches their homesteader cabin in the southwest Saskatchewan of the 1880s, is palpable.Wild Rose, an epic story of The West, now long gone, charts Sophie’s journey from underloved child in religion-bound rural Quebec, to headstrong young woman to exhausted homesteader to deserted bride and mother to independent businesswoman finding her way in a hostile, if beautiful, landscape. In language that is haunting, elegiac and rich with detail, Butala casts an unblinking eye on a merciless West that has become obscured behind headlines about wheat and oil prices. Sophie’s West – filled with sodbusters and cowboys, fallen women and proper ladies, settlers and Indians – comes vividly alive in the pages of Wild Rose, Butala’s most unforgettable novel.

    In this piece, Syx is fighting the possibility of depression due to carelessness on her end, while indulging in the most freeing period of her existence. Life has never been more complicated, yet she's never felt so alive in all of her days. Her most shameful moment of weakness happens to be the most gratifying and beneficial experience that she just can't seem to shake. Tag along as Syx continues on her journey through the city. ******THIS IS A NOVELETTE!******

    Lawrence, to the weird saga of Brother XII and his mystic cult on Vancouver Island.

    As a young child, Moth's father smiled, tipped his hat and walked away from her forever. The summer she turned twelve, her mother sold her as a servant to a wealthy woman, with no intention of ever seeing her again. These betrayals lead Moth to the wild, murky world of the Bowery, filled with house-thieves, pickpockets, beggars, sideshow freaks and prostitutes, where eventually she meets Miss Everett, the owner of a brothel simply known as "The Infant School." Miss Everett caters to gentlemen who pay dearly for companions who are "willing and clean," and the most desirable of them all are young virgins like Moth. Through the friendship of Dr. Sadie, a female physician, Moth learns to question and observe the world around her, where her new friends are falling prey to the myth of the "virgin cure" - that deflowering a "fresh maid" can heal the incurable and tainted. She knows the law will not protect her, that polite society ignores her, and still she dreams of answering to no one but herself. There's a high price for such independence, though, and no one knows that better than a girl from Chrystie Street.

    While investigating a suspicious yard sale, M discovers a red chesterfield sitting in a ditch. Looking closer, M finds a running shoe-and a severed foot. Now M is involved in a murder investigation. Meanwhile, older brother K's work for a new political party begins to seem suspicious, while younger brother J navigates the complicated world of young-adulthood, and boss Rhonda demands more and more attention, M must navigate a world of Russian gangsters and neglected wives, biker gangs and suspicious coincidences. On top of everything else, M is determined to track down the owner of that red chesterfield and make sure they get a ticket. The Red Chesterfield is a delightful, unusual novel that upends the tropes and traditions of crime fiction while asking how far one person is willing to go to solve a crime, be it murder or the abandonment of a piece of furniture.

    As the hours drain away, the chaplain must decide if the prisoner’s story is an off-the-cuff confession or a last bid for salvation. As the chaplain listens he realizes a life has many stories, and he has his own story to tell – a last ditch plea for forgiveness told to someone who will never be able to repeat it. Each man is guilty in his own way, and their stories have led them to the same room, a room that only one of them will leave alive. If you had only twelve hours left to live, what would you have to say?

    But even worse, she doesn't care. She blames God for taking her husband and has since lost her way in both her faith, and her community. But life must go on, and to support herself she makes and mends quilts for the Amish and Englishers alike. Living alone in an apartment above her shop, she works only to live and seemingly not much else as she feels the need to almost punish herself, and God, at the same time. But all that changes when Levi, himself a widow, comes into her shop to mend an old quilt as a surprise for his daughter's first child. He's immediately taken with Hannah. And as his job is repair and fixing broken things in his workshop, his trained eye spots a few problems around her home that could use some neighborly help. But his heart spots some problems, too. Yet Hannah doesn't want the help, or the attention. She resists, but Levi won't take no for an answer. He repeatedly shows up to work on things, trying to slowly chip away at her gruff exterior and win a smile, if not a friend. But Hannah is comfortable in her pain. She certainly has no time for friendships, let alone love. Yet God, and Levi, just might have other plans. Can two people find what they need in the other, when they both need it the most? A desire to mend against a desire to harbor old pains. Will love win out, in this sweet Amish Romance? Read this new book by Emma Maas to find out today...

    Seen on one of her thieving missions in the village of Freyzus, she is chased by suspicious townspeople to the edge of a deep gorge, where she jumps and disappears, vanishing into village legend.On the other side of the gorge, in an abandoned estate, Peyre Rouff lives out his self-imposed exile. Following a horrific hunting accident, he now focuses all of his attention on intricate taxidermic dioramas, keeping his thoughts from wandering too close to the day he lost everything.When Peyre encounters the wild girl, they find a link in their mutual estrangement from conventional society. He provides her with her material needs, while she brings light to places Peyre had thought dark forever. The two achieve an easy coexistence. But the careful patterns of the life Peyre has made for himself begin to unravel, and when the wider world learns of the girl's presence at the estate, Peyre is forced to confront not only his choices and their consequences, but society itself.In The Hunter and the Wild Girl, award-winning author Pauline Holdstock spins a haunting tale affirming the persistence of life, the power of human connection, adn the fundamental urge to be free.

    Elrod's picked 15 of her favorite short works for this multi-genre collection spanning 15 years of publication.Also included is a never before published VAMPIRE FILES story, featuring her urban fantasy vampire PI, Jack Fleming!Each story has been polished afresh for this anthology, with pages of new material added.More information -- and previews of the stories! -- may be found at her website vampwriter-dot-com.Titles:1. A Night at the (Horse) Opera (Vampire Files, Fleming)2. The Breath of Bast (Vampire Files), Ecsott)3. Bossman (Original mystery, no vamps)4. Slaughter (Vampire Files, Fleming & Gordy)5. The Devil's Mark (Original historical vampire)6. You'll Catch Your Death (Vampire Files)7. Izzy's Shoe-In (Historical mystery introducing Izzy DeLeon, fearless girl reporter)8. The Quick Way Down (Vampire Files, Fleming and Gordy)9. The Scottish Ploy (Original romance/mystery)10. Grave-Robbed (Vampire Files, Fleming)11. The Company You Keep (Vampire Files, Gabriel Kroun)12. Death in Dover (Jonathan Barrett before he got vamped, historical mystery)13. Drawing Dead (ALL NEW VAMPIRE FILES, Fleming)14. King of Shreds and Patches (Hamlet from a different point of view, mystery)15. Fugitive (Science fiction/space opera)16. BONUS STORY! The Wind Breathes Cold (Quincey Morris: Vampire)

    He and his mother move from motel to motel until, one night in Niagara Falls, his mother is hit by a car after falling asleep in the street.Tucker is sent to live in a youth group home where he meets Meredith, a pregnant sixteen-year-old with hopes of her own; he convinces her to join him on a road trip across the border to America in order to find his father, which takes them from Boston to the west coast. Along the way they encounter some of the most notorious criminals of the 1990s, and arrive in Los Angeles just as the Rodney King riots are unfolding.His cross-country search becomes an epic depiction of mid-90s America at a crossroads as seen through the eyes of a boy, for whom finding his father is the one thing that will make him whole. Told in spare, straightforward prose, Niagara Motel is a biting chronicle during the rise of mass-media in the decade that defined the MTV Generation, and the bittersweet story of a young boy who must learn hard lessons on his way to becoming a man.Ashley Little is the author of Anatomy of a Girl Gang, winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Literary Award.