A collection of absurdist and thought-provoking stories from the author's Return to the Dirt, Just Speculating, and more, including unreleased, exclusive, audio-only content! Performed by a cast of award-winning and Audie® nominated narrators. Fans of the macabre, dark humor, and cerebral thrillers are guaranteed a good listen. Occupational Hazards is an unflinching ride through the absurdity of it all. Existentialism, absurdism, and outlandish humor merge with ordinary, workaday life for a truly unique perspective of the human experience. Not recommended for the faint of heart or easily offended. But if meaty stories are what you're after....We hope you're hungry.

Teddy Telemachus is a charming con man with a gift for sleight of hand and some shady underground associates. In need of cash, he tricks his way into a classified government study about telekinesis and its possible role in intelligence gathering. There he meets Maureen McKinnon, and it's not just her piercing blue eyes that leave Teddy forever charmed but her mind - Maureen is a genuine psychic of immense and mysterious power.

Stephen King's first full-length solo novel since Dreamcatcher, the long-awaited From a Buick 8 is "nearly flawless and one terrific entertainment," says Publishers Weekly. A strange car acts as a conduit between our world and some other...and the boogeyman of this creepy story is our collective fascination with deadly things.

When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car drove up their street. One boy got in the car, two did not, and something terrible happened - something that ended their friendship and changed the boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con. And Dave is trying to hold his marriage together and keep his demons at bay - demons that urge him to do horrific things. When Jimmy's daughter is murdered, Sean is assigned to the case.

It is an obsession that has haunted Nick Malick for seven years - to avenge the murder of his young son. In his gut Malick knows who did it. But the psychopath is in prison for another crime, scheduled to be released in a year. All Malick has to do is wait...and survive.

With novels like Mystic River and Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane has dramatically altered the landscape of the crime thriller—while boldly overstepping the boundaries that have long separated mystery from literature. Now two of his sensational early novels have been combined in a single volume—two gritty and mesmerizing masterworks of suspense featuring the private eye duo of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro.

Matthew Worth is a mess. Somewhere between a good cop and a bad screwup, he botched a marriage and a career. His fellow officers think he’s a joke. His commanders are tired of cutting him breaks. Even his wife has left him for a flashy homicide detective. Busted to night patrol at a robbery-prone Omaha supermarket, Worth is doing time, wearing his uniform and asking shoppers if they want paper or plastic. If that isn’t enough, he suspects he might be falling for Gwen, the shy checkout girl who may be an even bigger mess than he is. It couldn’t get any worse. Until it does.

Jason Steadman is a thirty-year-old sales executive living in Boston and working for an electronics giant, a competitors to Sony and Panasonic. He's a witty, charismatic guy who's well liked at the office, but he lacks the "killer instinct" necessary to move up the corporate ladder. To the chagrin of his ambitious wife, it looks as if his career has hit a ceiling. Jason's been sidelined. But all that will change one evening when Jason meets Kurt Semko, a former Special Forces officer just back from Iraq.

In one hand small-time crook Stokes holds a backpack stuffed with someone else's money--$350,000 of it. In the other hand, Stokes has a cell phone, which he found with the money. On the line a little girl he doesn't know asks, "Daddy? Are you coming to get me? They say if you give them the money, they'll let you take me home."

Dr. Morton Handler practiced a strange brand of psychiatry. Among his specialties were fraud, extortion, and sexual manipulation. Handler paid for his sins when he was brutally murdered in his luxurious Pacific Palisades apartment. The police have no leads, but they do have one possible witness: seven-year-old Melody Quinn.

Jamie Gabriel gets on his bike before dawn to deliver newspapers in his suburban Indianapolis neighborhood. He is 12 years old. Somewhere en route, he vanishes without a trace. Crushed by frustrating dead ends and exhausted by a police force that cannot (or will not) find their son, the Gabriels finally stumble upon a name - an elusive private investigator who may represent their last chance for answers.

Twelve-year-old Billy Straight - precocious, heartbreakingly perceptive, relentlessly moral - has fled the chaos and abuse of his life at home and is fighting to survive on L.A.'s meanest streets. All alone, Billy has fashioned a precarious existence for himself, using principled tricks to nourish his body and his mind. Late one night he watches from his hiding place as a man viciously butchers a woman. Billy becomes the center of terrifying attention - from the media, from violent bounty hunters, and from the murderer himself.

For a fee so big he can't turn it down, Simeon Grist is hired to watchdog the kind of guy he'd usually prefer to throw through the nearest window. Toby Vane is the golden boy of prime-time television, whose gee-whiz smile and chiseled features mask a dark secret that would take the shine off for his millions of adoring female fans: every now and then he beats up a woman, and almost any woman will do.

Junior Bender is a Los Angeles burglar with a magic touch. Since he first started breaking into houses at age fourteen, he's never once been caught. But now, after twenty-two years building an exemplary career, Junior has been blackmailed by Trey Annunziato, one of the most powerful crime bosses in LA, into acting as a private investigator on the set of Trey's porn venture, which someone keeps sabotaging.

After he finds himself stranded at a truck stop in Missouri, Mark Sieber gets one of the biggest shocks of his life when he recognizes the face of a little girl on a Missing poster as belonging to the same little girl he saw only a few minutes before. Looking around for some sign of her, he comes back to his table in the restaurant to find the little girl sitting there, waiting for him. "I'm sorry, mister," is all she seems capable of saying.

It's the middle of a sweltering late-summer heat wave in Los Angeles. In the nearby mountains, a seasonal wildfire burns out of control. If not for this fire, authorities might never have discovered wreckage of an Alfa Romeo convertible - or the body of the car's driver - in the dense underbrush at the bottom of Topanga Canyon. But when firefighters happen across the crash site while battling the nearby blaze, it's only a matter of time and basic forensics before the apparent accident is upgraded to homicide.

Haunted by a series of horrifying and violent episodes in their past, Grace McBride and the oddball crew of her software company, Monkeewrench, create a computer game where the killer is always caught, where the good guys always win. But their game becomes a nightmare when someone starts duplicating the fictional murders in real life, down to the last detail.

Webster Fillmore Goodhue has found temporary work as one of the mop-up crew for the Los Angeles County crime division. In other words, he cleans up grisly crime scenes for the cops. When the daughter of a recent Malibu suicide victim asks for his help cleaning up after her brother has gotten into a little trouble, every cell in Web's brain is telling him to turn her down. But she's very attractive, and before he knows it, he's well on his way to getting his face kicked in.

Detective Peter Decker of the LAPD is stunned when he gets the report. Someone has shattered the sanctuary of a remote yeshiva community in the California hills with an unimaginable crime. One of the women was brutally raped as she returned from the mikvah, the bathhouse where the cleansing ritual is performed.

In the year 2010, computers are the new superpowers. Those who control them control the world. To enforce the Net Laws, Congress creates the ultimate computer security agency within the FBI: the Net Force. It's the rich man's drug of choice - and it's being sold on the Internet for a thousand dollars a capsule. A potent mixture of smart drugs, psychedelics, angel dust, and steroids, it can turn a 50-year-old into a raging beast of aggression and sexual desire. Now it's up to the Net Force to find the source of this dangerous designer drug.

Jamie Gabriel gets on his bike before dawn to deliver newspapers in his suburban Indianapolis neighborhood. He is 12 years old. Somewhere en route, he vanishes without a trace. Crushed by frustrating dead ends and exhausted by a police force that cannot (or will not) find their son, the Gabriels finally stumble upon a name - an elusive private investigator who may represent their last chance for answers.

Matthew Worth is a mess. Somewhere between a good cop and a bad screwup, he botched a marriage and a career. His fellow officers think he’s a joke. His commanders are tired of cutting him breaks. Even his wife has left him for a flashy homicide detective. Busted to night patrol at a robbery-prone Omaha supermarket, Worth is doing time, wearing his uniform and asking shoppers if they want paper or plastic. If that isn’t enough, he suspects he might be falling for Gwen, the shy checkout girl who may be an even bigger mess than he is. It couldn’t get any worse. Until it does.

Lieutenant Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels is having a bad week. Her live-in boyfriend has left her for his personal trainer, chronic insomnia has caused her to max out her credit cards with late-night home shopping purchases, and a frightening killer who calls himself "The Gingerbread Man" is dumping mutilated bodies in her district.

Meet smart-aleck Southampton attorney Jackie Swaitkowski. Her business relies on constant movement of Hamptons' real estate market. After making an odd request to evict his sister-in-law from his home, one of her clients turns up dead. Jackie would have expected that to be the end of it, but an envelope found on the corpse contains an item so unusual that she finds herself working on something bigger, and more dangerous, than real estate.

Three days after Christmas, a lonely bartender looking for a reason to live rescues an abused puppy from a trash can and meets a damaged woman looking for something to believe in. As their relationship grows, they cross paths with the Chechen mafia; a man grown dangerous with age and thwarted hopes; two hapless stick-up artists; a very curious cop; and the original owner of the puppy, who wants his dog bac.k…

International best-selling author Linwood Barclay delivers pulse-pounding suspense that puts him among the masters of the genre. A Tap on the Window finds private investigator Cal Weaver making an ill-advised decision to pick up a young female hitchhiker who reminds him of his dead son. But something is off about the girl, and Cal is soon drawn into a host of nightmarish secrets.

The title character from ABC's hit television series Castle kicks off his new series of books featuring tough and sexy New York police detective Nikki Heat with a bang.

In Aurora, Illinois, Aubrey Wheeler is just trying to get by after her semi-criminal ex-husband split, leaving behind his unruly teenage son. Then the lights go out—not just in Aurora but across the globe. A solar storm has knocked out power almost everywhere. Suddenly, all problems are local, very local, and Aubrey must assume the mantle of fierce protector of her suburban neighborhood.

In a quiet suburban neighborhood, in the house next door, a family is brutally murdered for no apparent reason. You can't help thinking, "That could have been us". And you start to wonder, "What if we're next?" That's the question Jim and Ellen Cutter are asking, and the answers aren't reassuring.

For Mike Muñoz, a young Chicano living in Washington State, life has been a whole lot of waiting for something to happen. Not too many years out of high school and still doing menial work - and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew - he knows that he's got to be the one to shake things up if he's ever going to change his life. But how?