A grandmother meets a six-year-old boy named Jack at a bus stop as he returns from school. She promises that she will be waiting for him there tomorrow, too. Yet, unexpectedly, something changes, and the bus arrives without the boy one day. Will Bennett gets...

Life had been going well for young James Fields until his father died in 1984, when James was thirteen. Bills began to pile up, and since his mother’s meager salary could only cover so much, life became a tough struggle. They moved to Oakland in...

A call for help unravels a plot to return native land to its rightful owners in R.L. Keck’s Absence of Mercy. The story features two explosive crises. In Wyoming, a radical “Professor” is said to be falsifying soil contamination reports, and E.J. Lonetree is dispatched...

Dorothy Van Soest’s Until It’s Over is an enthralling thriller told through two distinct timelines that rise and ebb like the tides of a turbulent sea. Sylvia Jensen is an octogenarian activist who suffers a heart attack at a rally at the state Capitol when...

Mich Solo’s novel, Failsafe (The Failsafe Series, Book 1), is a near-future, gripping cyberthriller. Nathan Harris is a sharp data analyst in a U.S. government agency. He is frustrated and extremely puzzled when he encounters an unusual programming problem. He tests a revised code. It...

In Nick Iuppa’s Evolution’s Angels, when four children survive separate disasters, their hospital scans reveal a brain structure that scientists at Leland University have never seen before. Dr. Kathleen Kelly studies Melissa Washington, a Rochester shooting survivor; Ángel Rivera, a Tucson ranch boy; Lillie Allonzo,...

In Eli Quinn’s Godless, every child is branded by a god at age nine, but Cal receives no mark and is cast outside the city’s sanctioned paths. Years later, while working near the Bone Market, he handles a relic taken from a corpse and awakens...

In Lynn Crandall’s Move Me, after Dark Sides, a supernatural criminal faction, loses its hold on Auralia, city manager Cassie Butler tries to leave behind the name Diane and the crimes attached to it. Her new life is interrupted when Peter, a surviving Dark Aspect,...

In Richard Paolinelli’s Of All The Gin Joints In The Universe, on Station 1964, a space layover called Norma, private investigator Samuel Archer Spade accepts Natasha Carter’s request for protection from Spencer Holloway, an antiquities dealer linked to a stolen jeweled eagle statue rumored to...

Lynn Hesse’s Part of the Stars begins in 1878, Arkansas, when midwife Myra Logan vanishes after visiting the McCurdy family and wakes inside a mountain cave ruled by pale beings. Her husband Zepeda searches across the winter frontier while Myra’s aunt, Nellie Gatewood, presses officials...