Adult

It started with a single child and quickly spread: you could get high by drinking your own shadow. At night, artificial lights were destroyed so that addicts could sip shadow in the pure glow of the moon. Gangs of shadow addicts chased down children on playgrounds and rounded up old ladies from retirement homes. Cities were destroyed and governments fell. One hundred fifty years later, Mira, her shadow-addicted friend Murk, and an ex-domer named Bale search for a possible mythological cure to the shadow sickness --- but they must do so before the return of Halley’s Comet, which is only days away.

Madeleine d'Leon doesn't know where Edward came from. He is simply a character in her next book. But as she writes, he becomes all she can think about --- his charm, his dark hair, his pen scratching out his latest literary novel. Edward McGinnity can't get Madeleine out of his mind– --- softly smiling, infectiously enthusiastic and perfectly damaged. She will be the ideal heroine for his next book. But who is the author, and who is the creation? And as the lines start to blur, who is affected when a killer finally takes flesh?

A public meeting becomes a battleground over plans to redevelop the once-proud Brooklyn Navy Yard. Local residents clamor for their own agenda in redeveloping 300 acres overlooking a sparkling downtown Manhattan, while business and real estate experts argue and city officials cower. Erica Donato witnesses the shocking murder of a power-broker that night on the Yard's condemned Admirals' Row. She uncovers the dead man's complicated history with the Yard, his road to wealth and a high-flyer lifestyle. When her daughter, Chris, visits her father's relatives for a family history project, Erica learns that the Donato clan was involved in the Navy Yard's glory days and its slow, politics-ridden death.

If you open your dictionary, you will discover that there is no such word as “bibliomystery.” However, most mystery readers know that the word refers to a mystery story that involves the world of books: a bookshop, a rare volume, a library, a collector or a bookseller. The stories in this unique collection were commissioned by the Mysterious Bookshop and were written by some of the mystery genre’s most distinguished authors --- tough guys like Ken Bruen, Reed Farrel Coleman, Loren D. Estleman, and Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins; bestsellers like Nelson DeMille, Anne Perry and Jeffery Deaver; and Edgar winners such as C. J. Box, Thomas H. Cook and Laura Lippman.

As World War II rages on, Honey Deschamps tediously transcribes decrypted signals from the German Army, doing her part to assist the British war effort. Halfway across the world, Hitler’s armies are marching into Leningrad, leaving a trail of destruction and pillaging the country’s most treasured artworks, including the famous Amber Room. As reports begin filtering into Bletchley Park about the stolen loot, Honey receives a mysterious package postmarked from Russia. Inside is a small piece of amber, and it is just the first of several such packages. When she examines them together, she realizes that someone, relying on her abilities to unravel codes, is trying to tell her something.

Detective Vincent Madigan is a good cop, but he’s up to his neck in debt to Sandia, a notorious East Harlem drug lord. When Madigan devises a scheme to eliminate his debt by robbing Sandia and then repaying him with his own money, he thinks his heist is foolproof. But things go horribly wrong when Madigan is forced to kill his co-conspirators and a child is shot in the crossfire. Now both sides of the law are hunting him down, and the cop assigned to lead the case is the very last person he could have expected. Employing every deception and ruse he can think of, Madigan must stay one step ahead in a battle of wits that will test him to his limits. Can he evade justice for his crimes, or will his own conscience be his final undoing?

Naked and bloody, a seven-year-old girl walks into a bank in central Stockholm in broad daylight and gets away with millions. Leona Lindberg of Stockholm's Violent Crimes Division agrees to work on the case. With a long, distinguished history in the police force, she seems to be the perfect choice. But Leona is grappling with deep issues of her own --- a gambling addiction, a strained marriage --- that could jeopardize the investigation. As she struggles to keep the volatile pieces of her life under control, the line between right and wrong becomes increasingly unclear --- and even irrelevant.

On Ruby’s 13th birthday, a wish she didn’t even know she had suddenly comes true: the couple who raised her aren’t her parents at all. Her real mother and father are out there somewhere, and Ruby becomes determined to find them. Venturing into the forest with nothing but a suitcase and the company of her only true friend --- the imaginary Shadow Boy --- Ruby discovers a group of siblings who live alone in the woods. The children take her in, and while they offer the closest Ruby’s ever had to a family, Ruby begins to suspect that they might need her even more than she needs them. And it’s not always clear what’s real and what’s not --- or who’s trying to help her and who might be a threat.

Pledging to Theta Pi at Merriwether University seemed to offer Emma Danelski a passport to friendship, fun and popularity. But the excitement of pledge training quickly fades, as does the warmth of her so-called sisters. What’s left is a stifling society filled with petty rules, bullying and manipulation. Most haunting are the choices Emma makes in the wake of another sorority sister’s suicide. It doesn’t matter that no one else needs to know what Emma did, or how vastly different life at Theta House is from the glossy image it projects. Emma knows. And now, with her loyalties tested, she must decide which secrets are worth keeping and how far she’ll go to protect them --- and herself.

The Dark Net is real. An anonymous and often criminal arena that exists in the secret far reaches of the Web, some use it to manage Bitcoins, pirate movies and music, or traffic in drugs and stolen goods. And now an ancient darkness is gathering there as well. This force is threatening to spread virally into the real world unless it can be stopped by members of a ragtag crew, including a 12-year-old who has been fitted with a high-tech visual prosthetic to combat her blindness; a technophobic journalist; a one-time child evangelist with an arsenal in his basement; and a hacker who believes himself a soldier of the Internet.