"When Ruby McTavish Callahan Woodward Miller Kenmore dies, she's not only North Carolina's richest woman, she's also its most notorious. The victim of a famous kidnapping as a child and a widow four times over, Ruby ruled the tiny town of Tavistock from Ashby House, her family's estate high in the Blue Ridge mountains. In the aftermath of her death, that estate--along with a nine-figure fortune and the complicated legacy of being a McTavish--pass...

"CHICAGO, SOMETIME-- Two people meet in the Art Institute by chance. Prior to their encounter, he is a doctoral student who manages his destructive thoughts with compulsive calculations about time travel; she is a bipolar counterfeit artist, undergoing court-ordered psychotherapy. By the end of the story, these things will still be true. But this is not a story about endings. For Regan, people are predictable and tedious, including and perhaps especially...

All Hunt Jackson has to do is sign the insurance policy on the dotted line - and note the minor provisions: If we abuse you over the phone, don't hang up. If we vandalize you home, don't get mad. If we authorize treatment at an iisolated hospital that's strangely empty, don't get scared. If we require a pounf of flesh for our investment, don't bother running.

Flowing seamlessly between time and place (from the present-day hassles of HMOs to the once-uncharted territory of the American West), the Bram Stoker Award- winning author's ability to transfix his audience while relinquishing scant details about the foreboding evil is superb.

Prone to giving people nightmares, The Summoning portrays a dusty Arizona town that suddenly suffers a decline in its population as a vampire starts feeding at night

"Set during the heroism and heartbreak of World War I, and in an occupied France in an alternative timeline, Sarah Adlakha's Midnight on the Marne explores the responsibilities love lays on us and the rippling impact of our choices. France, 1918. Nurse Marcelle Marchand has important secrets to keep. Her role as a spy has made her both feared and revered, but it has also put her in extreme danger from the approaching German army. American soldier...

"Edward Ashton's Antimatter Blues is the thrilling follow up to Mickey7 in which an expendable heads out to explore new terrain for human habitation. Summer has come to Niflheim. The lichens are growing, the six-winged bat-things are chirping, and much to his own surprise, Mickey Barnes is still alive--that last part thanks almost entirely to the fact that Commander Marshall believes that the colony's creeper neighbors are holding an antimatter bomb,...