Newly unemployed teacher Mary Malone never suspected she would become a Miss Marple wannabe when she and her recently widowed aunt decide to sublet her private investigator brother's apartment in the Foley complex near downtown Minneapolis. After having listened to a message intended for the PI's ears only, Mary is determined to solve what sounds like an easy case for Reed Griffin, owner of the Bar X Ranch, and soon finds herself not only facing down her demons from childhood—fear of horse...

Throughout Minnesota, from Austin to International Falls, people flock every year to more festivals--county fairs, arts and craft shows, ice-fishing contests, and music festivals--than you can shake a stick at. Most come for the food and fun, but a few festival-goers have more devious intentions in mind.In this diverse collection of short stories, members of Twin Cities Sisters in Crime reveal the chilly underside of dog-sled races, gang rivalries at a Cinco de Mayo festivals, erra...

Historical Society President Murdered, Lexie Starr Investigates in The Extinguished Guest, A Cozy Mystery by Jeanne GlidewellAt the Grand Opening of Stone Van Patten's new B&B, the local Historical Society's soon-to-be inaugurated new president, Horatio Prescott III, is found murdered in the inn's grandest suite.Much to Van Patten's chagrin, Lexie, a widowed library assistant, decides to aid in the investigation.Despite several foiled attem...

Nightmares come in many forms. Some rend the veil of sleep with heart-stopping madness. Others defy sanity to leave a helpless corner of your mind twitching for release. Sometimes, hours after waking, a nightmare drifts across your memory, tainting your day with wisps of discomfort. NIGHTMARES UNHINGED reveals horror in all its mutable forms—abject to absurd—through twenty tales of terror.Contributors include Mario Acevedo, Edward Bryant, Dustin Carpenter, Sean Eads, Keith Ferrell,...

Nickolas Butler's bestselling Shotgun Lovesongs ("Impressively original." —New York Times) is that rare work of fiction that evokes a specific time and place, yet movingly describes the universal human condition. A truly remarkable book that, once read, will never be forgotten.Welcome to Little Wing.It's a place like hundreds of others, but for four boyhood friends**—all born and raised in this small Wisconsin town—**it is...

This captivating digital original story set in the world of Lauren Oliver's New York Times bestselling Delirium series focuses on Alex, Lena's first love.When Alex sacrificed himself to save Lena, he thought he was committing himself to certain death, but what he got was almost worse. Imprisoned and tortured by the guards, his mind forces him to relive a past he would rather forget. But in the dark he grows stronger. Both hopeful and terrified, he fights t...

Tsara Adelman is a happily married mother of two (three if you count the dog), enjoying her unruffled existence in the Boston suburbs. One day she receives an invitation to a lavish housewarming party at the New Hampshire estate of her uncle, Castle Thornlocke, from whom she has been estranged for twenty-five years due to a family quarrel. With some hesitation she accepts but leaves her husband and young children behind for the weekend.The night of the party Tsara is abducted by tw...

All We Want is Everything, Andrew F. Sullivan’s exceptional debut collection of short stories, finds the misused and forgotten, the places in between, the borderlands on the edge of town where dead fields alternate with empty warehouses—places where men and women clutch tightly at whatever fragments remain. Motels are packed with human cargo, while parole is just another state of being. Christmas dinners become battlegrounds; truck cabs and bathroom stalls transform into warped confessiona...

The acclaimed author "assembles a stellar collection of twenty stories that create their own worlds in twenty pages or less" ( USA Today ).Tom Perrotta explains in his introduction that "all of [these stories] took me somewhere I didn't expect to go, and jolted me into that state of heightened awareness and emotional receptivity that's one of the great rewards of reading good fiction."In Nathan Englander s What We ...

Now a major film starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland, a novel "like life itself: joyous, painful, moving, tragic, mysterious, and not to be missed" ( Booklist, starred review).The Robinas have shared a wonderful life for more than sixty years. Now in their eighties, Ella suffers from cancer and John has Alzheimer's. Yearning for one last adventure, the self-proclaimed "down-on-their-luck geezers" kidnap themselves from the adult children and doctors...

Chicken Soup for the Soul: Loving Our Cats will delight readers with its heartwarming, amusing, inspirational, and occasionally tearful stories about our best friends and faithful companions -- our cats.We are all crazy about our mysterious cats. Sometimes they are our best friends; sometimes they are aloof. They are fun to watch and often surprise us. These true stories, the best from Chicken Soup for the Soul’s library, will make readers appreciate their...

From USA Today bestselling author Kelly Rey comes a holiday novella that is ho-ho-hilarious…When Jamie Winters' elderly neighbor Jack disappears a week before Christmas, Jamie pairs up with her landlord's fearless teenaged niece to find him. Only the more they look into his disappearance, the more they begin to believe Jack is not the man they thought he was...and he bears a suspiciously striking resemblance to jolly old Santa Claus! One carjacking, some spooky reindeer, a little p...