Adult

Quill has lived on the Red Pine reservation in Minnesota her whole life. She knows what happens to women who look like her. Just a girl when Jimmy Sky jumped off the railway bridge and she ran for help, Quill realizes now that she’s never stopped running. As she trains for the Boston Marathon early one morning in the woods, she hears a scream. All she finds are tire tracks and a single beaded earring. When she hears that a second woman has been stolen, she is determined to do something about it. As Quill closes in on the truth about the missing women, someone else disappears. In her quest to find justice for all of the women of the reservation, she is confronted with the hard truths of their home and the people who purport to serve them. When will she stop losing neighbors, friends and family?

Award-winning fantasy editor Paula Guran invites you to join an array of accomplished authors on an extraordinary and enchanting expedition. Seventeen fantastical stories weave a wonderful web of magic, revelation and, of course, adventure. The third volume of The Year's Best Fantasy explores alternative realities that mirror a world much like our own, yet push the limits of one’s imagination. Buckle up and enjoy the ride! This is a collection of tales that fantasy fanatics won’t want to miss.

Ottanger is a rebel and mutant on an Earth governed by a ruthless Committee. But after its Inspectorate experiments on him, Ottanger realizes the mutation allows him to reach alternate worlds. The multiverse is revealed in all its glory and terror --- and he understands that he finally can flee his timeline. Then Ottanger meets the Fenris, an evolved human, visiting his Earth from the far future. He’d engineered the original world-walking mutation, so those altered could escape the Committee’s nightmarish regime. Yet this only worked for a few, and millions continued to suffer. And Ottanger sees that that Committee will become unstoppable if not destroyed. However, the Fenris has drawn yet another threat to Ottanger’s Earth. With the power of its trillion linked minds, it craves world-walking biotech and will do anything to get it.

Henry is a brilliant engineer who, after untold hours spent in his home lab, has achieved the breakthrough of his career. He’s created an artificially intelligent consciousness. He calls the half-formed robot William. No one knows about William. Henry’s agoraphobia keeps him inside the house, and his fixation on his project keeps him up in the attic, away from everyone, including his pregnant wife, Lily. When Lily’s coworkers show up, wanting to finally meet Henry and see the new house --- the smartest of smart homes --- Henry decides to introduce them to William, and things go from strange to much worse. Soon Henry and Lily discover that the security upgrades intended to keep danger out of the house are even better at locking it in.

Chester Newton has built his fortune organizing racehorse syndicates, where top horses are co-owned and managed by several parties. These joint enterprises are high risk and high reward --- and for Chester, it’s almost always been reward. The stakes only get higher as the syndicates grow larger, and every race means the possibility of complete failure --- or ecstatic success. After an anxious morning waiting for the results of the Epsom Derby, the premier flat race in the UK, Chester has an afternoon of explosive triumph --- and an evening of total terror. Someone tries to take over one of his syndicates by force --- and by threats of serious harm to him and his family. For the first time in Chester’s life, it’s not just a horse race or money at stake --- it’s his life and the lives of his loved ones.

Arthur Parnassus is the headmaster of a strange orphanage on a distant and peculiar island, and he hopes to soon be the adoptive father to the six magical and so-called dangerous children who live there. He works hard and loves with his whole heart so none of the children ever feel the neglect and pain that he once felt as an orphan on that very same island so long ago. But when Arthur is summoned to make a public statement about his dark past, he finds himself at the helm of a fight for the future that his family, and all magical people, deserve. And when a new magical child hopes to join them on their island home --- one who finds power in calling himself monster, a name Arthur worked so hard to protect his children from --- Arthur knows they’re at a breaking point: their family will either grow stronger than ever or fall apart.

A string of overdoses in Colorado Springs has Detectives Joe Kenda and Lee Wilson on the lookout for a bad batch of heroin that has been cut with a drug they've never seen before. Meanwhile, at Springs General Hospital, Dr. Blair Moreland --- the notoriously unpleasant head anesthesiologist --- has found a way to feed his deepening addiction to the very same powerful new drug: Fentanyl. But when Dr. Moreland starts supplying the dangerous painkiller to dealer Lula Lopez --- planning to manufacture the drug himself --- he angers a Mexican crime syndicate and sets into motion a cycle of death and violence that threatens to engulf the entire city. Detectives Kenda and Wilson must track down the source of this killer heroin before anyone else can overdose --- and stop Moreland before he can escape the long arm of the law.

A worldly and urbane journalist living in London, Daniel is a young gay man with no relationships outside of sexual ones. Emotionally distant from his elderly, senile father, he nonetheless returns to South Africa to care for him during his final months. Following his father’s death, Daniel learns of an unusual clause in the old man’s will: he will only inherit his half of his father’s considerable estate once he has spent time with Theon, a cousin whom he hasn’t seen since they were boys, who lives on the old family farm in the Free State. Once there, Daniel discovers that the young son of the woman Theon lives with is seriously ill. With the conditions bearing on Daniel’s inheritance shifting in real time, Theon and Daniel travel with the boy to Japan for an experimental cure and a voyage that will change their lives forever.

Annie, Jesse, Noah and Juliette are tied together by their experiences of grief. They are separated by their own versions of the truth of what happened on a single night 12 years ago, when Juliette, a college freshman grieving her mother, and Noah, a high school senior fighting for a place in a world that told him he didn’t matter, found each other. Spanning decades, this complex, captivating story pulls back the curtains of cancel culture to explore ambition, empathy, art, desire, consent, motherhood, and what it really means to lose everything.

Tommy Miller is a man with deadly skills, hiding in Florida under a false identity. After being set up on an overseas mission, he's on the run from terrorists --- and from the government that betrayed him. So when his wife and daughter are violently abducted, it seems his ghosts are finally catching up with him. But Tommy isn't the only one with secrets. His wife has been concealing her own dangerous past. With a hotshot police detective, Lindy Jax, close on his trail, Tommy follows a twisted path that brings him face to face with ruthless enemies. His search for answers soon puts him on the wrong side of the law --- hunted by the police and pursued by men who want him dead. Worst of all, if he hopes to save his wife and daughter, he must become the man he once was --- a killer operating from the deepest shadows.