Chapter One CORDELIA I didn’t know how long I sat cross-legged in the snow, waiting for the dead man crumpled on the ground in front of my building to wake up. Might have been five minutes. Might have been five hours. As I watched, pellets of snow accumulated on his flannel pajama-clad legs and fuzzy-sock-covered…
Chapter Four Silence in the garden. I gaped at the pale foot and the ankle beneath it, then the boot in my hand and the sock hanging limply from it. I looked back at the foot. The freshly turned soil enveloped whatever was beneath it. “Oh my god,” someone gasped. A woman’s voice. Somewhere behind…
Chapter One WHEN BRUCE MESSANE’S PHONE WOKE HIM at half past midnight, he knew it couldn’t possibly be good news— good news never came this late. He tried to guess what calamity was waiting for him on the other end of the line. Best-case scenario was more supply chain issues and shipping delays, a constant…
Prologue Temperatures were in the high teens, and a light snow was falling on the morning of March 16, 2015, as an employee for Columbia Gas Transmission drove along County Road 1908, a narrow lane that ran through cornfields and wooded areas of Ashland County, Ohio. The driver was proceeding slowly because low fog…
Chapter 1 At 92,000 feet, the Vulture suddenly developed a mind of its own. It dove like the hunter it was, screaming down through the stratosphere, looking for something to eat. Fifty miles away, from his chair in the control center at Groom Lake, a white rectangular box about the length of a shipping…
Chapter 1 The Mediterranean Sea, off the coast of the French Riviera Alexandra Martel turned, spotting her approaching quarry weaving through the crowd. Got you now. All around her was the smell of the sea, the briny scent cutting through the cologne and perfume of the well-heeled guests aboard the luxury megayacht Aurora as if…
When the Reverend Grayson Call finally arrived at the pulpit at a quarter past the hour, he was not dressed in his customary robe. Instead, he was in civilian clothes and his trouser legs up to his knees were caked in thick dark mud that had dried in spots and formed small peaks and whorls,…
Liked by goodnightpetergraham and others pheebsinwonderland Hi everyone! I’m Phoebe and I’m a travel addict and vanlifer about to take me, myself and I off on an adventure of a lifetime: THE BIG LAP OF AUSTRALIA! Only two more sleeps to go. And before you ask: no, I’m not scared. The first thing people say…
Preorder Pitch Dark by Paul Doiron 3 When I got Charley on the phone and told him what Brandon had told me and what Stacey and I had subsequently learned—or not learned—about Mark Redmond and Hammond Pratt, and after I had explained my plan to ask Josie to fly us to Prentiss Pond, his response…
The advertisements are hard to miss. If you live in North Jersey, in Paterson or quite a few other cities, you are familiar with the phrase CALL JIM! It’s on billboards, benches, bus stops, and everywhere else that can contain an ad. The all-caps bold type, as well as the exclamation point, unsubtly convey the…
