When Sasha receives a call from her old university friend Gabby inviting her to spend Christmas at Gabby’s remote Scottish lake house, Sasha knows she shouldn’t go. Twelve years ago, on Christmas Eve, when Sasha and her five closest friends were celebrating the festive season, something truly horrific happened that would change the course of their friendship forever. Something that meant Sasha hasn’t spoken to any of them since that night.

Two little girls stand with their heads bowed in my living room. I’m told they’re my granddaughters. Daisy is nine, and Alice seven. Daisy is the spitting image of her mother. This is the first time I’ve met them since my daughter and I fell out after she married that waste of space, Vince. They’ve come to live with me because their mother — my daughter — was murdered. In her own home while they slept close by. I think Vince killed her. But the police can’t prove it. I’ve always known he was no good. He treated my daughter like dirt. I said he’d cheat on her — but she wouldn’t listen.

Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of best-selling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish. Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity's notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn't expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read.

After the killing of a prominent mob lawyer, NYPD homicide detectives Jacob Jackson and Caitlin Grimes start receive chilling, written “rules” for how to commit the perfect murder. "Rule number one for the perfect murder: Evidence is your enemy. Leave none behind." Jackson (Reid Scott) and Grimes (Cobie Smulders) race to find the killer, setting them on a collision course with the city’s crime underbelly, and a perpetrator who seems happy to toy with them. “Rule number two. No crimes of passion. The perfect murder is always business, never pleasure.”

Jenny sits in the same seat on the same train every week, seeing familiar faces come and go. Until a chance encounter shatters her world. Sixteen years ago, Jenny survived a traumatic ordeal that left her best friend, Susie, missing and presumed dead. The world has its theories about what happened to Susie Patterson, and one of those theories points the finger at Jenny. Now she lives a quiet life, volunteering at a crisis helpline while trying to deal with her own anxiety and the true crime fans obsessed with finding her missing friend.

It’s been two years since Anna Cartwright’s life fell apart. During her first school trip as a young teacher, a student went missing and was never found. Not only was her career ruined, she was also accused of having an affair with fellow teacher and prime suspect Graham. Facing questions from journalists, police and family, Anna said she didn’t know what happened. She was lying. Now, Anna has returned to Australia. Her only hope is Land’s End Area School, an isolated concrete wasteland perched on the cliffs.

Kidnappers grabbed Jenna in broad daylight, right in front of her children and their horrified classmates. Her family was issued an insane ransom demand: $25 million in cash and jewels, payable by the end of the school day, otherwise they’ll never see her again. As Jenna’s mother scrambles to gather the money, detectives Mo Butler and George Ortega follow the trail of the kidnappers, which will lead them through a sordid landscape of jealous lovers, broken dreamers, and twisted schemers. But every second counts, and there’s one thing Jenna Wade doesn’t have: very much time.

My fiancé brought me tea and scrambled eggs in bed that morning, and we snuggled together, talking about buying our rings, and about our perfect wedding next year. Then we headed into town. He held my hand and gazed at the ring I liked best, a smile spreading slowly over his face. Then a glass of bubbly to celebrate. I felt flushed, excited and ready for the rest of my life with the man I loved. We race to get on the train home. It screams to a halt and I run towards its open doors. Made it. I think he’s right behind me — but when I turn around, he’s gone.

Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you're not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent. Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down.

England, 1914. The world is at war. Captain Hastings, injured and shaken, is invited to Styles Court to recover. It’s a grand old country house - the family home of his old friend - and a perfect haven. Or so it seems. But in the blistering summer heat, trouble is afoot. Simmering tensions are tearing the family apart, and it all comes to a head in the most horrifying way.

The impact of the time transposition that brought a twenty-first century cruise ship to the Hellenic world right after the death of Alexander the Great continues to unfold. While President Al Wiley is building a new America in Trinidad and Captain Lars Floden is trying to use the Queen of the Sea to spread enlightenment around the world, Rome is experiencing a wakeup call—and so are its neighbors. If things don't change, the Roman republic is going to become a dictatorship. And if things don't change, the Samnites, Etruscans and other Italian states will become subjects of the Roman ...

A few years ago Eric and I talked about doing a 1632 WarSpell crossover. The idea was that a bunch of gamers playing WarSpell would set their game in a copy of the 1632 universe, but with a little bit of magic. Paula and I wrote the book and then Eric decided that he didn't want to do the crossover. The story was fine and Ring of Fire Press would have published it, but he wanted it changed so that it was no longer a 1632 crossover. That was because he didn't want people starting to think that this was part of the 1632 Canon, At the time I had been thinking that I would have to change ...

Twice before, mysterious cosmic catastrophes have sent portions of the Earth across space and back in time - first, with the Grantville Disaster in West Virginia, and then again with a maximum security prison in southern Illinois. Now, the planet is struck with yet another such cataclysm, whose direct impact falls upon the Queen of the Sea, a cruise ship in the Caribbean. When the convulsions subside, the crew and passengers of the ship discover that they have arrived in a new and frightening world. They are in the Mediterranean now, not the Caribbean.

Michael and Melanie Anderle are hauling a tanker full of oil with their Peterbilt eighteen-wheeler when they're struck by a temporal irregularity that sends them, the truck, and their daughter back in time a thousand years. The bubble that transports them also grabs a chemist and her two young children, along with half a convenience store in the middle of the United States. They just want to make a decent life for themselves in this new world of the past, with their Peterbilt and its oil providing a means of transportation, a generator, and shelter.

Not every hero stands at the forefront of battle, chopping up, or gunning down the foe. Johan Kipper, an old and worn mercenary who had done more than his share of chopping up and gunning down, finally found his hero, his liege lord, not in a great captain, but in David Bartley, a fourteen year old boy who was just trying to make sure his family could get by. A lad who was trying to protect his family by making rather than taking, by building rather than destroying. And, more, a lad who didn't need to knock Johan down to feel tall or make Johan afraid to feel brave. Never in his long life ...

Sam Merchantson rode into the Badlands trying to lose a posse. He should have died, but his luck was in, and the sensors were out. Sam lived in a world of cattle-rustling and muzzle-loading pistols. But it hadn’t always been that way. Once it had been a colony world, filled with the fruits of advanced technology . . . then the enemy came. They got most of the colonists and almost all the tech. There will be new things coming into the world when Sam returns. He’ll bring medicines and machines, history and hope, fear and freedom and—like it or not—he’ll be bringing WAR! When he ...

Vasilii and Miroslava are back at work again. Czar Mikhail wants a rail line built from Ufa, the capital of his United Sovereign States of Russia, to the capital of the USSR’s newest addition, the Khazak Khanate. For that he needs a steam engineer and diplomat—Vasilii’s jobs—as well as a top surveyor. Unfortunately, the surveyor is an arrogant snob who gets himself murdered—and now the czar needs a detective as well. Fortunately, Vasilii’s paramour Miroslava came with him, so she’s there to take on the case. She and Vasilii need to solve the murder quickly without blowing up ...

This anthology includes ten stories from four universes. They all deal with selling stuff or the value of stuff, if you stretch a point. And they are all fun reads and you don’t have to stretch a point to see that. “Signs” from the 1632 universe deals with what money is and what it will and won’t buy. It’s one of my favorites in Eric’s 1632 world. A short fun story to get us started. The second story comes first. “The Sewing Circle” is my first professional sale. It’s what got me into writing and what got me interested in economics. It’s a full-fledged novella at over ...

When the Ring of Fire drags Grantville, West Virginia, back to seventeenth-century Germany, down-time veteran Edgar Neustatter finds himself among the survivors of a unit devastated by the up-time Americans and their Swedish allies. After wintering in Grantville, they return home to find that while they have changed, their village has not. Having glimpsed the promise of a republic ruled by its people rather than lords and tyrants, Neustatter leads his men and their families back to Grantville to establish a new agency: Neustatter's European Security Services.

Miroslava Holmes, the one and only licensed private detective in the United Sovereign States of Russia, has a new case. She's been called in on a locked room murder—and to make things worse, it's the locked room of an agent of the Embassy Bureau, a 17th century Russian James Bond. This is a political case, and the Embassy Bureau isn't talking to anyone. Solving the case is going to leave Miroslava at the crossroads where law and justice part ways. But not everything is murders and spies. No, sometimes it's the theft of a piece of costume jewelry from a girl at the Happy Bottom Club. And ...