fiction

Tucker Thompson is just an ordinary 8th grader from Detroit, Michigan. He loves school and baseball. Everything seems great for the left-handed pitcher with a big, breaking curveball. That is, until one dreadful event changes his life. Tucker learns that his parents are getting divorced. If that wasn?t bad enough, his mom is making a move. He will be forced to attend a new school, across town in the inner city of Detroit. Struggling to handle his anger, Tucker does the only thing he can think of to get his parent?s attention: cause trouble. Not everyone at his new school finds him entertaining, especially the principal, Mr. David. After pulling off the prank of the century, Tucker gets kicked out of school and shipped off to live with his Uncle Ed and Aunt Loretta in a remote area of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The U.P. is a far cry from the concrete jungle of Detroit. But Tucker quickly realizes there is something magical and mysterious about Uncle Ed?s place. He is warned early and often by his uncle to never venture into the West Woods. But why? Is Uncle Ed hiding something?.

Hunter's life revolves around video games, more video games, and still more video games. Growing up in downtown Denver was the perfect place to live unnoticed from the rest of the world. But Hunter's life suddenly changes when his dad is laid off from his job and their family is forced to move in order to make ends meet. Trying to get back on their feet, Hunter's family relocates to the wild mountains of Colorado, far away from the city life Denver offers. But tiny Pine Bluff is barely big enough to have a school and it offers Hunter no place to hide from prying eyes. As bad as things seem, they're about to get much worse for Hunter.

As the chief forensic anthropologist for the FBI's Chicago field office, Christine Prusik has worked her fair share of bizarre cases. Yet this one trumps them all: a serial killer is strangling young women and dumping their bodies in the steep, forested ravines of southern Indiana. With each victim, the killer leaves a calling card: a stone figurine carved like the spirit stones found among the primitive tribes of Papua New Guinea; the same tribes from whom Prusik narrowly escaped a decade earlier while doing field research. The similarity is eerie and, frankly, terrifying; Prusik still carries the scars from the tribesmen's attack. But is the connection real? Or have the dark details of Prusik's nightmares finally wormed their way into her waking life?.

Lower Manhattan: A sniper's bullet ends the life of a high-profile New Yorker. Five miles uptown, a second prominent victim has his throat slashed. And that's only the beginning. A network of professional assassins is on the loose in New York City. Trained by the US military, they're on their own now, with a new unit called Kappa Omega Delta. Killers On Demand. NYPD Red detectives Kylie MacDonald and Zach Jordan are called in to hunt them down, but these mercenaries are as gifted in the art of escape as they are in snuffing out lives.

When his wife is killed, Thiago, with politicians all looking to turn her death into a symbol for their own agendas, holes up in a secluded cabin in Colorado where he cannot escape from the evil feeding on his grief and rage, determined to make its way into this world.

On the first Tuesday in October, Rosa Hartung is returning to her job as minister for social affairs following a year's leave of absence; granted after the dramatic disappearance of her twelve-year-old daughter. Linus Bekker, a mentally ill young man, confessed to her killing, but is unable to remember where he buried the various parts of her dismembered corpse, leaving Rosa with no choice but to try to move on without closure. The same day Rosa returns to parliament, a young single mother is found brutally murdered at her home in the suburbs of Copenhagen; she's been tortured, and one hand has been cut off. Thulin and Hess, the detectives sent to investigate the crime, arrive at the address to find a figure made of chestnuts hanging from a playhouse nearby. When yet another woman is murdered; this time with both hands cut off; and another chestnut figure is found, Thulin and Hess begin to suspect a connection to the Hartung case.

When Lena Johnson's beloved grandmother dies, and the full extent of the family debt is revealed, the black millennial drops out of college to support her family and takes a job in the mysterious and remote town of Lakewood, Michigan. On paper, her new job is too good to be true. High paying. No out of pocket medical expenses. A free place to live. All Lena has to do is participate in a secret program; and lie to her friends and family about the research being done in Lakewood. The discoveries made in Lakewood, Lena is told, will change the world; but the consequences for the subjects involved could be devastating. As the truths of the program reveal themselves, Lena learns how much she's willing to sacrifice for the sake of her family.

Buried in debt due to his young daughter's illness, his marriage at the brink, Mario reluctantly takes a job as a hitman, surprising himself with his proclivity for violence. After tragedy destroys the life he knew, Mario agrees to one final job: hijack a cartel's cash shipment before it reaches Mexico. Along with an old friend and a cartel-insider named Juanca, Mario sets off on the near-suicidal mission, which will leave him with either a cool $200,000 or a bullet in the skull. But the path to reward or ruin is never as straight as it seems. As the three complicated men travel through the endless landscape of Texas, across the border and back, their hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. One thing is certain: even if Mario makes it out alive, he won't return the same.

There's another kind of spring in Missouri who knows we're all related and need each other.

What place or purpose a seemingly random event has in the tapestry of the whole depends on your level of awareness.