First Mystery

Army National Guard Colonel Sawyer Kincaid has served her time dueling with death in the deserts of Africa. Now that she's home, the only sand she wants to see is on the beach in South Florida. Too bad Tropical Storm Leo, swiftly gaining strength out over the Atlantic, is about to draw her in to another life or death war, this time on home soil. Dr. Dara Sims has too many critical patients in the intensive care units at Miami Memorial to consider evacuation, no matter how determined the battle-hardened colonel is to make her. As far as Dara is concerned, evacuate is just another word for abandon. When a state of emergency becomes a state of siege waged by Leo, all she can do is hope the rising waters relent before she loses everyone, herself included.

On February 24, 1986, 29-year-old newlywed Sherri Rasmussen was murdered in the home she shared with her husband, John. The crime scene suggested a ferocious struggle, and police initially assumed it was a burglary gone awry. Before her death, Sherri had confided to her parents that an ex-girlfriend of John’s, a Los Angeles police officer, had threatened her. The Rasmussens urged the LAPD to investigate the ex-girlfriend, but the original detectives pursued only burglary suspects, and the case went cold.

Threatening messages from an unknown source. Shallow graves with unidentified bodies. A friend facing impending peril. Police Chief Cassidy Chambers longs for a break from the recent crimes plaguing Lantern Beach. But trouble explodes on the island, sending residents - including Cassidy - into a squall of uneasiness. Cassidy may have more than one enemy plotting her demise, and the collateral damage seems unthinkable.

It's been nine months since the catastrophe in Tucson sent Mia fleeing from her home. But she’s not running away from the darkness—she’s running toward it, obsessively pursuing the man who gave her mother a thirst for blood and destroyed their lives. But when Mia finds the monsters she’s been hunting and infiltrates a secret network of fugitives, she discovers she might have been their prey all along. To escape their clutches, she’ll have to reckon with her mother’s harrowing past and confront a painful truth: that they might be more alike than she ever imagined.

Matthew Bartholomew, unorthodox but effective physician to Michaelhouse college in medieval Cambridge, is as worried as anyone about the pestilence that is ravaging Europe and seems to be approaching England. But he is distracted by the sudden and inexplicable death of the Master of Michaelhouse - a death the University authorities do not want investigated.

Many Christians mistakenly believe that their only choice is either to reconcile themselves to a fundamentalist reading of scripture (a "literal-factual" approach) or to simply reject the Bible as something that could bring meaning and value into their lives. In Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, Marcus Borg shows how instead we can freshly appreciate all the essential elements of the Old and New Testaments - from Genesis to Revelation - in a way that can open up a new world of intelligent faith.

The Spanish Flu killed 30 million people worldwide in 1918. Now with history threatening to repeat itself, a scientific expedition speeds toward a remote island in the Arctic Sea to recover strains of the lethal virus preserved under layers of ice. For Washington Post reporter Frank Daly, it is the story of a lifetime. But his plan to join the expedition is ruined by a ferocious storm that delays him. And when he meets up with the ship upon its return to port in Norway, it is clear something has gone wrong.

Find the missing. Fear the found. Three months have passed since the aliens' arrival, but little has changed in the skies. Motherships still hover, impervious to attack and communication. Spherical shuttles ferry about with unclear intentions. But the abductions of select humans have ended, and most of those taken have been returned - dazed, incoherent, and prophesying glory or doom, but home where they belong. Still, nine seemingly unconnected people remain missing.

Two years after first contact, Astral forces have established their fragile kingdom around the globe. Motherships occupy the cities. Shuttles patrol the lawless outlands. The pacifist class of Astrals known as Titans assist humans in running their alien empire while bloodthirsty Reptar peacekeepers ensure that order is kept. And unseen in the ships above, a third class of visitor calls the shots - the unseen Divinity, worshipped and feared by citizens in equal measure.

For Sandie James, working at her sister's bakery is a way to pay off college debt while her literature degree collects dust. But when she accepts a last-minute wedding booking, she doesn't expect the chaotic night to end in murder. When a guest is found dead, and her father is standing over the body with the murder weapon, Sandie will stop at nothing to prove her dad's innocence. Especially if she can get a little help from Marlowe, the family's springer spaniel, who is all too eager to leap into the action.

MI5 officer David White was always a good father, so when his daughters want to go to a music festival in Israel, he agrees to take them. But his daughters are killed in the Hamas massacre that left 1,400 innocent civilians dead. White is taken hostage down in the tunnels under Gaza and Dan 'Spider' Shepherd and a crack SAS team are sent in to rescue him. Back in London, White is a changed man. He wants revenge for what happened to his family and wants to kill the men who planned and financed the Hamas attacks.

A year after young engineering student Rip Cantrell discovered the first flying saucer buried deep in the sands of the Sahara, another saucer is brought up from the bottom of the Atlantic. The recovery is funded by a pharmaceutical executive who believes that the saucer holds the key to an anti-aging drug formula that space travelers would need to voyage between galaxies. But one of his technicians, Adam Solo, an alien marooned on Earth for a thousand years, steals the saucer, hoping to summon a starship to rescue him.

Detective Peter Decker of the LAPD is stunned when he gets the report. Someone has shattered the sanctuary of a remote yeshiva community in the California hills with an unimaginable crime. One of the women was brutally raped as she returned from the mikvah, the bathhouse where the cleansing ritual is performed.

1915, London: Working in the dusty bookshop that her Aunt Violet mysteriously inherited, Hannah Merrill is accustomed to finding twists in every tale. But discovering her beloved best friend Lily-Anne – with a paperknife through her heart – in the middle of the bookshop, is not a plotline she saw coming. The case is anything but textbook. With the discovery of a coded German message, and Hannah’s instinct that Lily-Anne’s husband is keeping secrets, she determines to get to the bottom of it. She can’t do it alone though.

Danny and Sharon Evans are desperate for answers. Why did their seemingly happy daughter try to take her own life? When a stranger approaches Danny saying he knows who’s to blame, Danny is tempted, despite Sharon’s reservations. And when his new friend offers them revenge, how can he walk away? But little does Danny know he is being invited to play a terrible game. A game that won't just change lives – it will end them. DI Joel Norris knows this is no ordinary case when two seemingly unconnected murders hit his desk within a matter of days.

Death hits close to home for Elizabeth “E. M.” Danniher - or, rather, close to Hovel, as she's dubbed her decrepit rental house in rustic Sherman, Wyoming. Her elderly neighbor has killed a man apparently after her Western artifacts. As a former top-flight national TV reporter, Elizabeth knows self-defense can satisfy the legal system, yet leave her neighbor in danger. Doing what she does best - asking questions - Elizabeth sidesteps her boss to inquire into an eccentric billionaire.

The South American Boreal: one of the last truly unexplored jungles on our planet. In its dark heart is an ancient crater basin, sealed in by a living cage, making it a time capsule for an ancient, deadly ecosystem. Matt Kearns, Carla Nero and a team of scientist explorers have found their way in. In the crater's sunken interior are creatures from a primordial nightmare. Dangers lurk in every treetop, under every rock or loom monstrously over them. It is a place where mankind is out of time.

On a quiet seafront in the middle of the afternoon the sun sets, the clouds part and something like a pale, elongated human figure appears on the horizon. For Maria, watching from the beach, it’s proof that she should never have dared to return. Five years earlier, her life shattered by the arrival of the Stone Man, she’d fled the country. But now she can’t escape: suddenly, there are news reports of ‘Empty Men’ materialising all around the coast, and the roads are gridlocked. The Empty Men are killers, and they’re heading inland.

Does extraterrestrial life exist? Have alien beings actually visited Earth and, indeed, left clear traces of their visits? One man has the answer...and his son can now break the silence. The Roswell Legacy is the story of Major Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer for the 509th Bomber Group (famous for dropping the atomic bomb on Japan), and the first military officer to reach the scene of one of the most famous and enduring UFO events in the recorded history of mankind.

Detective Katie Scott stares in horror at what she and her service dog Cisco have discovered: seven shallow graves, the bodies of young women each wrapped carefully in a blanket and buried in makeshift coffins. Miles of abandoned farmland stretch out from the treeline behind her. Has Katie uncovered the horrifying graveyard of a monster who has been stealing Pine Valley’s daughters for years?