Harriet Abel never shows up for her appointment. Irritating as hell? Sure. It's hard enough to work as a private investigator without potential clients standing you up. Of course, it's difficult to show up when you're dead. A revered community figure in the Oregon coast town of Barnacle Bluffs, the teacher extraordinaire never gets a chance to explain why she wants to hire Garrison Gage before her body turns up in a sandy grave. Seldom deterred by the lack of a client, Gage barrels forward intent on discovering the woman's killer. Unfortunately, the professional curmudgeon stirs up a lot more trouble than he expects, putting innocent people in imminent danger. In the past, Gage always triumphed over whatever dark forces stood in his way, but this time he may have gone too far — and he won't be the only one paying the price.
Playing off today’s headlines, Burying the Dead serves up a high stakes game of love and death set on the power courts of Washington, DC, and other glittering world capitals. There Dimitri “Dimi” Orlov is a rising Russian tennis star whose glamorous, globetrotting career provides the perfect cover for his real day job -- agent and assassin. Trained by his government from the time he’s discovered in an orphanage, Dimi is assigned to assassinate the president of the United States -- a brilliant but arrogant onetime New York prosecutor who’s proved too independent for his Russian backers -- by romancing and enlisting his abused first lady, Catherine Darlington. Dimi courts the lovely, loveless Catherine at Renaissance House, a new cultural center in historic Dupont Circle that’s a front for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and at the US Open. There he’s shadowed by CIA agent Mitch Abramson, who has begun to connect the dots. But just as the various matches – Dimi and Catherine, Dimi and Mitch -- heat up, Dimi makes a choice that could have his bosses take him out of the game permanently.
A contemporary fantasy YA debut from Rochelle Hassan about monsters, magic, and wicked fae, perfect for fans of The Darkest Part of the Forest and The Hazel Wood. As the only hedgewitch in Blackthorn, Massachusetts—an uncommonly magical place—Aziza El-Amin has bargained with wood nymphs, rescued palm-sized fairies from house cats, banished flesh-eating shadows from the local park. But when a dark entity awakens in the forest outside of town, eroding the invisible boundary between the human world and fairyland, run-of-the-mill fae mischief turns into outright aggression, and the danger—to herself and others—becomes too great for her to handle alone. Leo Merritt is no stranger to magical catastrophes. On his sixteenth birthday, a dormant curse kicked in and ripped away all his memories of his true love. A miserable year has passed since then. He's road-tripped up and down the East Coast looking for a way to get his memories back and hit one dead end after another. He doesn't even know his true love's name, but he feels the absence in his life, and it's haunting. Desperate for answers, he makes a pact with Aziza: he’ll provide much-needed backup on her nightly patrols, and in exchange, she’ll help him break the curse. When the creature in the woods sets its sights on them, their survival depends on the aid of a mysterious young necromancer they’re not certain they can trust. But they’ll have to work together to eradicate the new threat and take back their hometown... even if it forces them to uncover deeply buried secrets and make devastating sacrifices.
Set against the backdrop of the Old South on the eve of the Civil War, Secret Tides is a saga of passion, greed, romance, and faith that you will not soon forget. Trouble is brewing on the plantation. When the overseer's daughter, Camellia York, accidentally causes the death of the plantation's owner—who is also the father of the man she plans to marry, Trenton Tessier—life as she knows it will never be the same. As Trenton begins to pull away from her, Camellia seeks solace from Josh Cain, an older relative with a quiet, but unshakable, faith. But when Cain's own wife dies tragically, the stage is set for Camellia to discover the truth about her family's past—and her own destiny.
The riveting story of one of the greatest but least-known sagas in the history of exploration from David Roberts, the “dean of adventure writing.” By 1930, no place in the world was less well explored than Greenland. The native Inuit had occupied the relatively accessible west coast for centuries. The east coast, however, was another story. In August 1930, Henry George Watkins (nicknamed “Gino”), a twenty-three-year-old British explorer, led thirteen scientists and explorers on an ambitious expedition to the east coast of Greenland and into its vast and forbidding interior to set up a permanent meteorological base on the icecap, 8,200 feet above sea level. The Ice Cap Station was to be the anchor of a transpolar route of air travel from Europe to North America. The weather on the ice cap was appalling. Fierce storms. Temperatures plunging lower than –50° Fahrenheit in the winter. Watkins’s scheme called for rotating teams of two men each to monitor the station for two months at a time. No one had ever tried to winter over in that hostile landscape, let alone manage a weather station through twelve continuous months. Watkins was younger than anyone under his command. But he had several daring trips to the Arctic under his belt and no one doubted his judgement. The first crisis came in the fall when a snowstorm stranded a resupply mission halfway to the top for many weeks. When they arrived at the ice cap, there were not enough provisions and fuel for another two-man shift, so the station would have to be abandoned. Then team member August Courtauld made an astonishing offer. To enable the mission to go forward, he would monitor the station solo through the winter. When a team went up in March to relieve Courtauld, after weeks of brutal effort to make the 130-mile journey, they could find no trace of him or the station. By the end of March, Courtauld’s situation was desperate. He was buried under an immovable load of frozen snow and was disastrously short on supplies. On April 21, four months after Courtauld began his solitary vigil, Gino Watkins set out inland with two companions to find and rescue him. David Roberts, “veteran mountain climber and chronicler of adventures” (Washington Post), draws on firsthand accounts and archival materials to tell the story of this daring expedition and of the epic survival ordeal that ensued.
