1   November 2007 TOP-OF-THE-AFTERNOON  BROADCAST   “Jordan, we’re live in sixty,” said Tracy Klein, my favorite field producer, nudging me to get into place. “Okay, hang on,” I said, distracted by a rush of butterflies and the sudden urge to pee, which happened every single time I was about to go on the air. I guess it was my body’s way of preparing me for the moment that never got old, but soon panic struck. My earpiece was in, but the anchors’ voices sounded like Charlie Brown’s parents. “Hey, you guys. I can’t hear. You’re not coming through very clearly. The echo is killing me,” I said. I looked up. Please, not today. In an instant, the sky darkened over historic Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side, a sign of the dip in temperatures I re- called hearing on this morning’s weather forecast. Chicagoans and people all across this state have to deal with one inescapable fact, and that’s the cold. Sure, I’d heard people who claimed to love the change of seasons. But to a person from Austin, Texas, that sounded like a case of Stockholm syndrome. Or at least that’s what I told my friends from the Midwest…

Excerpt:   A loud rustling in the trees made Zane surge to his feet and draw his pistol. “Don’t shoot. It’s me,” Jilly said. Zane almost fell over backward. Almost shooting a woman shook him badly enough he missed his holster when he tried to shove his pistol into it. “I made noise deliberately, afraid you’d be jumpy.” Jilly came in. Her red hair glowed against the green leaves. Her eyes were so green it was like the trees had shared their color. She led the pinto gelding she seemed partial to. “What are you doing up here?” Zane heard the snap in his voice. That wasn’t fair. “Wow, that’s a rich vein of gold.” Jilly barely glanced at Michelle or Zane. He noticed she only had eyes for the gold, and who could blame her? Michelle gave Zane one very sassy glance, then went to walk with Jilly to study the gold. “I estimate we’ve found around three thousand dollars’ worth of gold this morning.” Jilly picked up one of the rocks Zane had busted the quartz off of. She studied it, turning it in her hand. “I’d say more like four thousand five hundred.” Michelle picked up a…

Some might think there’s no life in the house, but I know otherwise. I’ve made friends with the mighty black snakes who take up winter residence. One has grown from a thin, stringy, mean-looking fellow to a thick band almost six feet long and round as my wrist. He enters the house when the days shorten by climbing the gnarled, vine-covered tree hovering over the back porch. Dropping from a low-leaning branch, he traverses the roof and stretches upward along the wood siding to enter the attic window, triangular snout tap-tapping, seeking entry. Hail has splintered the windowpanes, and he slides over the edge into the attic to hibernate. Sometimes he noses his way through the lime and horse-hair mortar on the central fireplace chimney and drops into the rooms below in search of mice. His compulsion is uncomfortably familiar, though in my case the brown river rat was my prey. Prisoners’ fare. So much time has passed, yet those months in a miserable Union prison camp are as real to me today as then. Famished, I slit my quarry from ear to naked tail, tossed aside the oozing hide, and punctured the pink, shiny body with a stick. Twisting…

Excerpt from DREAM OF MY SOUL by Debra Jess. Copyright © 2022, Debra Jess, Corp. All rights reserved.   Marc retreated downstairs so the guard he’d replaced wouldn’t get suspicious. After what he’d just seen in the nursery—a mother rejecting her child—he didn’t feel quite so bad about snatching the kid. Just as he’d made it to the last step, he heard a door creak. Turning to look, he watched the baby’s mother stomp back into the room where she’d had the argument with her father and slam the door closed. “Hey, bud,” Marc tapped the other officer on the shoulder, “I’ve been ordered to make sure the mother doesn’t leave the house, so I’m going back upstairs, okay?” The other guard frowned. “Fine. I’m off shift in an hour. Make sure you’re back down here before—” BOOM CRASH “What the—” Before Marc could finish, a two-hundred-pound lumbering stack of mottled skin with a blank-eyed stare stepped through the cloud of flying splinters and jagged glass. Forced to raise his hands to keep from getting skewered, Marc could only see out of the corner of his eye. The other guard was in the same position, but only for a second….

Excerpted from UPGRADE by Blake Crouch. Copyright © 2022 by Blake Crouch. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.   That night, after dinner, I beat Ava in three games of chess. None of them were even close, and the last one required only twelve moves to checkmate her. “What the actual hell is going on here?” she asked, tipping her king over when she saw the inevitable end. “Have you been going easy on me all this time, Dad?” “No.” I laughed. “How are you suddenly this good?” “What’s going on?” Beth asked from the couch. “Dad just shellacked me for…… ” Ava counted up the losses in her head. “….. the ninth game in a row.” “Impressive,” Beth said. “Impossible,” Ava said, staring at me suspiciously.   Memories were coming back to me, and not just of every book I’d ever read. Random moments of insignificance. Pivotal events that had shaped my life. From a month ago. From a decade ago. From my childhood. It was an eerie sensation. As if someone…

Chapter 1   1827, London   Fleur Warburton had only recently arrived in London…and now here she was, leaving a trail of blood in her wake. She was trembling—yes, like a leaf, though she detested the expression. She was no shrinking violet, no weak little mouse. The more horrors she went through, the more determined she was to be strong. And yet a man was dead. There, in the alleyway behind her. His body lay in a pool of his own blood, the life utterly gone from him. She would not have left him there otherwise, no matter how commandingly he had told her to run. She had waited. And they had shot him. And then she had run. She was still running. Jasper was going to kill her, she thought, deliriously. If she made it back to him at all. She turned a corner and suddenly was swept up into a sea of people. A busy marketplace. Assorted stalls lined the sides of a wide square. Wagons were weaving their way amongst the crowd, seeking somewhere to unload their goods—sweet-smelling produce fresh from a farm, jars of canned goods, homespun clothes neatly folded, tied, and packaged. Fleur looked about…

Our hero, former spymaster Christian Hawkes, has just regained consciousness (after an attack) in a strange room—unbeknownst to him, at The Grand Palace on the Thames, a boarding house on the docks—when he notices the room’s doorknob turning, and…   He was just about to shake out his shirt so he could drop it over his head when something glinted moved his peripheral vision.  He pivoted sharply. The doorknob was slowly turning. He realized he’d already subconsciously scanned the room for weapons when he at once seized the lantern as the best likely projectile. He could hurl it or bludgeon with it. His breath suspended, his every muscle locked and cocked like a loaded pistol, he watched that doorknob complete its revolution and the door open soundlessly, because of course the doors wouldn’t creak at The Grand Palace on the Thames. A young woman slipped into the room and gently, slowly closed the door. He noted slim shoulders. A long neck. The way her dress poured in a lyrical line from her shoulders to waist to sweetly flaring hips instantly communicated something primal to his groin. Her brown hair shifted to dark gold when she turned into that beam of…

CHAPTER FIVE His smile flickered, fading off his face. My revelation seemed to displease him, but it was like I couldn’t shut up. “You’re that prince or duke or whatever.” “Not a prince. Or a duke. Just an earl.” That teasing lilt in his voice was gone, but I couldn’t focus on that. All I could think about was that this entire situation was completely impossible. How had I ended up at a party, one that I wasn’t even supposed to be at, with the very man Alice had hoped would be here? It was like she was reaching out with her puppet master hands, tugging at my strings, willing this entire encounter into being. For a second I wondered whether I was having some kind of guilt delusion, a wonderful fantasy that I’d conjured up to share with my sister, but it was very real. And he was looking at me like I was a ditzy airhead. Which might have been warranted, considering how I was gawking at him with my mouth hanging open. I snapped it shut. “My sister’s obsessed with you.” The words were out before I could snatch them back. “With me, specifically?” He edged back…

Detective Breaker met the chief and Raven next to the recently poured foundation of the new obstetrics wing of Memorial Hospital. The chief introduced him before stepping away to placate Dr. Fabian Long. Long was CEO of the hospital and wanted the crime scene wrapped up as soon as possible so the fellas, as he put it, could get back to work.   Detective Breaker was a handsome man with curly black hair and a haunted look in his eyes. He wore an expensive three-piece suit under a perfectly draped trench coat. Raven didn’t know what annoyed her more – the gold watch chain or the diamond and onyx pinkie ring. But where was her empathy? She remembered how her stepmother dressed, mini-skirts, matching tops, and always the bright red heels. The more Floyd’s crazy showed itself, the fancier Jean dressed, the higher and sharper the red heels. If she couldn’t control her marriage, at least she could control the way she presented herself to the world. Perhaps Breaker felt the same way about this case.   “Where’s the scene?” she asked him, wanting to get the entire thing finished so she could get back to the restaurant before closing….

Excerpt from VACATIONLAND by Meg Mitchell Moore. © 2022 by Meg Mitchell Moore. Used with permission from William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. All rights reserved.   JUNE Chapter One The Greyhound from Altoona, Pennsylvania, to Rockland, Maine, takes twelve hours and thirty-three minutes with three stops, all of them in places where you don’t necessarily want to use the bathroom but may find you have no choice. Even so, the first part of the journey isn’t too bad—Kristie Turner has two seats to herself. But in New Haven, six hours into the journey, she gains a seatmate in the form of a sixtysomething named Bob who wants to talk with Kristie about the granddaughter he is going to meet for the first time, and also about his abiding love for Creedence Clearwater Revival. Never mind that the bus left Altoona at eleven at night, so by this point it’s five in the morning. Can’t you see I’m tired? Kristie wants to say. Can’t you see I’m grieving? But, of course, Bob can’t see that. Grief is not something you wear on a vest, like a Brownie patch. She rolls up her sweatshirt to form a pillow and angles her…