A serial killer is on the loose in Sacramento River Delta. When Sara Mason returns to her hometown to start a new life, she learns that a murderer is terrorizing its residents. Despite battling difficult childhood memories, Sara is determined to make peace with her past. But she soon learns that the elusive psychopath is now stalking her. Sara's attempt to rebuild her life is hindered even more by the discovery of skeletal remains on her property. As the investigation focuses on several suspects, Sara discovers critical clues and bravely volunteers to be a decoy for the sheriff's department. Sara's destiny has brought her back home, but will her decision lead her down a path lined with danger... and straight into the arms of a madman?
A peaceful village and a lakeside paradise. So why do women keep disappearing?Thomas Shepherd returns to Wolf Lake as the county's new sheriff. This is the life he dreamed of. Friends he can rely on. An idyllic home along the water. Then a hiker uncovers human bones, rekindling the mysterious disappearance of Skye Feron, a popular teenager who vanished six years ago. Are these her remains?Disturbed by the grisly discovery, Skye's close friends return to Wolf Lake. But as the investigation unfolds, Thomas links the girls to a ghost from their past. Are they hiding a deadly secret?When Skye's friend vanishes, Thomas tackles his most challenging case to date. And he comes face to face with the monster who has been chasing the girls for six years.
The stakes don't get much higher than murder... It's January 1969 in the small rural community of Center Springs, Texas. Constable Ned Parker suspects a larger mystery behind the seemingly accidental death of his nephew, R .B., who was found in his overturned pickup near Sanders Creek bridge. It appears that R. B. drowned in the shallow water, but something doesn't add up for Ned, who begins turning over stones in search of what really happened the night R. B. died. The mystery leads Ned to the Starlite Club, a dangerous honky-tonk recently constructed in a no-man's land on the Lone Star side of the Red River. His investigations there uncover suspicious characters, drugs, and gambling, but even more troubling are a series of murders that seem designed to eliminate anyone who might know what really happened to R. B. on that cold January night. As he works his way through the cover-up, Ned lands himself in a high-stakes game of consequences with no good end in sight. Are the good citizens of Center Springs conspiring against Constable Parker in his search for the truth? In this thrilling addition to the historical Texas Red River Mystery Series, Constable Ned Parker bets big, but only time will tell if he'll win justice or a grave of his own.
Commissioner Sanders is called upon by the British Government "to keep a watchful eye upon some quarter of a million cannibal folk, who ten years before had regarded white men as we regard the unicorn." Written when world powers were vying for colonial honor, Sanders of the River encapsulates the beliefs and assumptions that motivated such quests. There is religious palava, raiding palava, and all the while, Bosambo, magnificent chief of the Ochori, watches on......
A mama cow’s devotion to her calf provides lessons in motherhood to a poor Southern woman in this novel of family, survival, and human-animal bonds. South Carolina, 1950s. Homemaker Sarah Creamer has been left to care for young Emerson Bridge, the product of an affair between Sarah’s husband and her best friend. But beyond the deep wound of their betrayal, Sarah is daunted by the prophecy of her mother’s words, seared in her memory since childhood: “You ain’t got you one good mama bone in you, girl.” When Sarah finds Emerson a steer to compete at an upcoming cattle show, the young calf cries in distress on her farm. Miles away, his mother breaks out of a barbed-wire fence to find him. When Sarah finds the young steer contently nursing a large cow, her education in motherhood begins. But Luther Dobbins is desperate to regain his championship cattle dynasty, and he will stop at nothing to win. Emboldened by her budding mama bone, Sarah is committed to victory even after she learns the winning steer’s ultimate fate. Will she too stop at nothing, even if it means betraying her teacher? One Good Mama Bone explores the strengths and limitations of parental love and the ethical dilemmas of raising animals for food.
Sure, I can rock a tank top and ponytail while collecting ancient relics, but don’t call me a tomb raider. I knew the guy who built the pyramids… and I mean in the biblical sense. Archaeologist, fashionista, and an ancient immortal with a serious memory problem, Dr. Nia Rivers has spent the last few centuries filling in the blanks of her past, all while outrunning dark assassins and stealing brief moments alone with Zane, her immortal lover. But when a two-thousand year old relic from her past resurfaces, Nia isn't sure if the story connected to it is one she wants told to the world. The fact that Tres Mohandis, a fellow immortal and Nia’s greatest rival, is determined to develop the land and bury the site before Nia can excavate it suggests some dark history lies hidden in the site. Worse, Nia is beginning to realize that she doesn’t dislike the broody billionaire land developer as much as she remembers. Letting Tres have his way might be best for Nia, especially when the truth might expose a horrific crime from Nia's past—one with her name written all over it. But don’t all stories deserve to be told? Even the ugliest ones. Even if it proves she’s not at all who she thinks she is. Get this hot urban fantasy featuring spine-tingling adventure, twists on historical mysteries, and thrilling romance, where Tomb Raider meets Indiana Jones—and they live forever!
How can you know a place? Historian and naturalist Jack Nisbet&—author of Sources of the River: Tracking David Thompson Across Western North America&—looks to the relics of a region to connect the present moment to the distant past. In the vast Western territory defined by the Columbia River, Nisbet tracks the stories and meaning of relics such as a trilobite fossil that points to a tropical prehistoric ecology; the nearly extinct California condor, once the largest thing in the skies, described with amazement by Meriwether Lewis; the indelible stain of the smallpox pandemic that overcame the native peoples of the West; a rare and socially potent strain of indigenous wild tobacco that reveals the presence of vestigial Indian practices; and the remains of one Jaco Finlay, a mixed-blood trapper and scout who seems to have been everywhere in the region two hundred years ago. All of these relics are the visible bones that show how past is present in the Columbia River Country. Together the stories these bones tell lays out a wholly original, hybrid history that connects nature with human endeavor, geography with the passage of time&—all contribute to the biography of a place. The arrow of time travels in one direction, and this is usually how history is told: beginning to end. But Jack Nisbet is up to something else: journeys across time through a place, knitting past to present and back again to assemble a portrait of the land that marked the culmination of Lewis & Clark’s expedition, that saw the sad end of the Indian Wars with the flight of Chief Joseph, that has offered up fossil proof of mammoth species long extinct. In this western territory, the storied past is much in evidence.
The crew of a WWII destroyer face their greatest challenge yet as they try to survive in a strange new world in the next thrilling book in the New York Times bestselling series. Commander Matt Reddy and his crew are afraid it may finally be the end of the USS Walker. Ever since their ship was transported to another world, and they became embroiled in a deadly conflict between the Lemurians and the vicious Grik, the Walker has been taking a pounding. With Walker out of commission for repairs, Reddy takes command of a different ship and joins a desperate battle to block the Grik swarm. Meanwhile, the humans and their allies face a deadly second front in the Republic to the south. All of Reddy's forces are committed, and there's no turning back. Either they'll win—or lose—everything...
“A beautifully written epic that seamlessly intertwines a family’s history with a region’s, and, ultimately, with a nation’s. An ambitious novel.” —Ron Rash, New York Times–bestselling author of Above the Waterfall Ten years after the massacre of more than two hundred Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, J.B. Bennett, a white rancher, and Star, a young Native American woman, are murdered in a remote meadow on J.B.’s land. The deaths bring together the scattered members of the Bennett family: J.B.’s cunning and hard father, Drum; his estranged wife, Dulcinea; and his teenage sons, Cullen and Hayward. As the mystery of these twin deaths unfolds, the history of the dysfunctional Bennetts and their damning secrets is revealed, exposing the conflicted heart of a nation caught between past and future. At the center of The Bones of Paradise are two remarkable women. Dulcinea yearns for redemption and the courage to mend her broken family and reclaim the land that is rightfully hers. Rose, scarred by the terrible slaughters that have decimated and dislocated her people, struggles to accept the death of her sister, Star, and refuses to rest until she is avenged. Jonis Agee’s bold novel is a panorama of America at the dawn of a new century and the durable men and women who dared to tame it. “Deceptively leisurely, intensely heart-rending . . . Rose and Dulcinea are women strong enough to cow John Wayne.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Deadwood has nothing on Nebraska’s Sand Hills. Jonis Agee serves up a gritty, bloody romance.” —Stewart O'Nan, bestselling author of A Prayer for the Dying “The finest western novel since Lonesome Dove . . . an epic saga with elements of a Greek tragedy.” —New York Journal of Books
A century ago, outsiders saw China as a place where nothing ever changes. Today the country has become one of the most dynamic regions on earth. In Oracle Bones, Peter Hessler explores the human side of China's transformation, viewing modern-day China and its growing links to the Western world through the lives of a handful of ordinary people. In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes.
