Showing results for "Wendy Webb" in All Categories

Ghosts don't exist in our world of today. Life is too pragmatic, too consuming, too busy for past lives to linger on longer than their allotted time, or so Halcyon had believed, until she received a letter from a lawyer claiming that her mother, whom she had thought long dead, had actually been living in another part of the country since Halcyon's early childhood. She had only recently passed away, leaving Halcyon heir to an unexpected fortune and an estate on an isolated island in the middle of the Great Lakes.

Recently widowed and rendered penniless by her Ponzi-scheming husband, Julia Bishop is eager to start anew. So when a stranger appears on her doorstep with a job offer, she finds herself accepting the mysterious yet unique position: caretaker to his mother, Amaris Sinclair, the famous and rather eccentric horror novelist whom Julia has always admired...and who the world believes is dead.

Grace Alban has spent 20 years away from her childhood home, the stately Alban House on the shores of Lake Superior - for reasons she would rather forget. But when her mother’s unexpected death brings Grace and her teenage daughter home, she finds more than just her own personal demons haunting the halls and passageways of Alban House.

In the tourist town of Wharton, on the coast of Lake Superior, Tess Bell is renovating her old family home into a bed-and-breakfast during the icy dead of winter… As the house’s restoration commences, a shuttered art studio is revealed. Inside are paintings Tess’s late grandfather, beloved and celebrated artist Sebastian Bell, hid away for generations. But these appear to be the works of a twisted mind, almost unrecognizable as paintings she and others familiar with his art would expect.

At the end of a metaphysical conference, reluctant attendee Camille Dare discovers an envelope with her name on it. Filled with travel documents, a photograph, and bloody scarf material, the source of the envelope and its contents remain anonymous, but the directive is clear: Find the missing person in this unusual case. The missing person, Katherine Agurre, comes from a high-profile family. A growing obsession with the missing person case and her own quest for self-understanding compel Camille to begin a trip to meet people she never knew and locations she never expected to visit.

When Eleanor Harper becomes the director of a renowned artists' retreat, she knows nothing of Cliffside Manor's dark past as a tuberculosis sanatorium, a "waiting room for death". After years of covering murder and violence as a crime reporter, Eleanor hopes that being around artists and writers in this new job will be a peaceful retreat for her as much as for them.

After a devastating loss, Brynn Wilder escapes to Wharton, a tourist town on Lake Superior, to reset, and checks into a quaint boardinghouse. In her fellow lodgers, she finds a friendly company of strangers: the frail Alice, cared for by a married couple with a heartbreaking story of their own; LuAnn, the eccentric and lovable owner of the inn; and Dominic, an unsettlingly handsome man inked from head to toe in mesmerizing tattoos. But in this inviting refuge, a mystery begins to swirl. Alice knows things about Brynn, about all of them, that she shouldn’t.

After the end of her marriage, Kate Granger has retreated to her parents' home on Lake Superior to pull herself together - only to discover the body of a murdered woman washed into the shallows. Tucked in the folds of the woman's curiously vintage gown is an infant, as cold and at peace as its mother. No one can identify the woman. Except for Kate. She's seen her before. In her dreams...

In Metsan Valo, her family home on Lake Superior, Anni Halla’s beloved grandmother has died. Among her fond memories, what Anni remembers most vividly is her grandmother’s eerie yet enchanting storytelling. By firelight she spun tall tales of spirits in the nearby forest and waters who could heal - or harm - on a whim. But of course those were only stories.

Hackers have a bad reputation, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. In Coding Democracy, Maureen Webb offers another view. Hackers, she argues, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power, mass surveillance, and authoritarianism enabled by new technology, the hacking movement is trying to "build out" democracy into cyberspace.

Carrie Soto is fierce, and her determination to win at any cost has not made her popular. But by the time she retires from tennis, she is the best player the world has ever seen. She has shattered every record and claimed twenty Grand Slam titles. And if you ask Carrie, she is entitled to every one. She sacrificed nearly everything to become the best, with her father, Javier, as her coach. A former champion himself, Javier has trained her since the age of two.

Everyone has secrets, and Rachel Holloway is no exception. She’s worked hard to keep the past where it belongs: dead and buried. And so far, she’s been very successful. But now the small newspaper where she works wants to produce a podcast on a cold case: the disappearance 12 years ago of young Molly Forster. Some secrets should never see the light of day, and, as far as Rachel is concerned, whatever happened to little Molly is one of them.

When Cassie Graves discovers her husband’s affair, it’s enough to chip away at the foundation of her life. But after researching her family’s Italian ancestry, it completely crumbles beneath her. Her grandmother Gia’s often-told stories about the past are a lie. Her much-romanticized great-grandfather Giovanni may not even have existed. Most alarming of all, it appears her mysterious great-grandmother Violetta died by stregoneria—witchcraft.

There is a river that flows through the misty landscape of imagination, seeping up through the rocky earth high in the Appalachian Mountains. It winds southward through the foothills and the piedmont: It tumbles past the fall line, widens and deepens, and then meanders across the coastal plain until it finally reaches the gulf of Mexico.And all along its length the great river inspires stories to tease listeners into wonder, or send a shiver down their spines.

At 24 years old, Kat Phillips has a stable job, an apartment, and her favorite taco place on speed dial. She should be happy, but she’s not. When she realizes her life might be stuck in neutral forever, Kat goes into full panic mode. She jumps in her car and heads south to the one person whom she knows will understand. With her grandmother’s advice comes revelations that rock Kat’s world. Generational secrets come to light, and a shocking possibility sends Kat on a thrilling search for answers before her next birthday.

Childless couple Robin and Wendy have developed an obsession with Mayfield - the model village they've built in their garage. However, running a model village is slightly more complicated than they expected, especially as they live next-door to Derek, a former superstar salesman who is struggling with the erratic side effects of mental health medication, and Maureen, who is always getting involved in get-rich-quick schemes.

Callie moved all the way to Chicago to find love, and it's been failure after failure. Almost ready to give up on the notion, she stumbles across a new dating website with an incredible promise: true love with a million-dollar satisfaction guarantee. Determined to make this her last attempt at finding her match, Callie signs up. When the results turn out to be nothing like she expected, she decides to call the whole thing off and abandon romance for a while. 

The summer solstice is the longest day of the year, but even the light can't keep away all that goes bump in the night. From rituals and witches to summer slasher and sunny horror, this anthology has it all.