Sometimes life seems like a madhouse. And sometimes it's worse . . . Psychiatrist Grace Rendeau struggles to make sense of her husband's untimely death. Left a widow with two children, Grace forges a new life for her family, abandoning her private practice and moving to Minnesota to take on a prestigious position at the Rochester Forensic Center for the Criminally Insane, work that will allow her to spend more time with her children. In striving to heal her patients, Grace herself finds he...

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...

Daley's excellent ability to describe the scene draws the reader into the story as even the minor details of the story are brought to life on the page… sure to strike a chord in horror aficionados everywhere.~ Snakebite HorrorIncludes:The Exhibition: A screamer. My two main characters enjoy a night on the town and venture into a "One Night Only" exhibition called "The Horror Show". They find more terror than they can handle.The Confession: A throwback tale, r...

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,...

Everything has always come easy to Jake West. But when Amy, the girl obsessed with him, commits suicide, the entire town of Raynesville is quick to blame Jake. Now Amy's cousin, Dani, has moved into town.And suddenly Jake has an obsession of his own.Dani Spencer has always dreamed of a home and normal life. When her beloved cousin and grandmother die, her wild, impetuous mother inherits their house in Raynesville. With Amy's diary in hand, Dani intends on finding out what ...

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...

The short story Mediator fans everywhere have been waiting years to read… a fun, fast-paced, never-before-read scene in which Suze Simon agrees to marry her no-longer-dead ghost boyfriend, Jesse de Silva!The last place Suze Simon expects to find herself during Valentine’s Day is a cemetery. But that’s what happens when you’re a mediator—cursed with the “gift” of communicating with the dead.That’s how Suze has ended up at the graves of a pair of tra...

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...

A collection of short stories from the contemporary American master whom the New York Times declared "the most compassionate fiction writer working today."Suffused with Russell Banks’s trademark lyricism and reckless humor, the twelve stories in A Permanent Member of the Family examine the myriad ways we try—and sometimes fail—to connect with one another, as we seek a home in the world.In the title story, a father looks back on the legend ...

Watch out Junie there's a new kid on the block! It's Freddy Thresher a first grader who knows it's a jungle out there. A new chapter book series written by an elementary teacher who's seen it all! Freddy Thresher has a problem: a really really big problem. He's the only one in his class who hasn't lost a tooth! All of the other students in Mrs. Wushy's first grade have signed their names on the Big Tooth and Freddy's determined to get his name on it too. So when Max "The Meanie" Sellars ca...

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 ...