When Lilith Pierce’s younger sister commits suicide, Lilith consoles herself with cleaning up Eva’s final mess. But when she returns to the coroner’s office to collect the body, she finds that the last few days were all a bizarre waking dream that never actually happened.
Aided by the detective who witnesses her brush with the paranormal, she tears apart her sister’s shadowy new life. Yet after reading hundreds of Eva’s detailed journals Lilith still has no explanation and no suicide note. Her search becomes a maddening obsession uncovering tantalizing questions but no answers…until she meets a stranger at her sister’s funeral.
Drawn to the mysterious man in a way she cannot explain, Lilith seeks the help of his crew of equally bizarre friends, including an immortal, blue-haired hacker and a Desert Storm veteran. As her prophetic visions intensify and she begins to develop even stranger powers, she uncovers a culture woven into the fabric of history—a culture founded on an idea of peace gone horribly wrong.
From philosophy, to faith, to freakish genetic mutation, man’s deepest desires became his greatest flaws, turning all those who succumb into vicious monsters.
Description: Tied for 1st place in the 2012 JS writing contest.
This is an Advance Reader Copy
Billy Moon would have given his life for rock 'n' roll stardom, but the Devil doesn’t come that cheap.
Goth rock idol Billy Moon has it all: money, fame, and a different girl in every city. But he also has a secret, one that goes all the way back to the night he almost took his own life. The night Trevor Rail, a shadowy record producer with a flair for the dark and esoteric, agreed to make him a star. . . for a price.
Now Billy has come to Echo Lake Studios to create the record that will make him a legend. A dark masterpiece like only Trevor Rail can fashion. But the woods of Echo Lake have a dark past, a past that might explain the mysterious happenings in the haunted church that serves as Rail’s main studio. As the pressure mounts on Billy to fulfill Rail's vision, it becomes clear that not everyone will survive the project.
It's time the Devil of Echo Lake had his due, and someone will have to pay.
Description: Tied for 1st place in the 2012 JS writing contest.
This is an Advance Reader Copy
High School Sucks. It’s worse when you’re dead.
Ohneka Falls is a small, Western New York town where everyone knows everyone and nothing of note happens. Ani Romero is a sixteen-year-old girl who wants to play sports, hang out, and kiss Mike, her middle-school crush. A childhood carrier of the zombie virus, she died at fourteen but didn’t become a mindless, brain-eating monster. Her controlling mother forces her to join the emo crowd to hide her condition behind a wall of black clothes and makeup, and her friends abandon her.
When creeper Dylan learns her secret, he falls into obsession, with Ani and with death. She bites him in self-defense. Persecuted by the jocks and ignored by Mike, Ani struggles through the motions of life hoping her other’s research unveils a cure, or Dylan dooms them all to a hungry, walking death.
As her emo facade crumbles in the face of jealousy and obsession, Ani knows that the worst thing she can do is be true to herself.
Description: The vampire who turned Jonathan Stoker did so as a joke: what fun to turn a man named ‘Stoker’!
But life is no joke for Jonathon. He’s fled his family, every vampire he meets attacks him, and he’s consumed by blood urges. Ten years after his mortal life ended, the blind and striking Arial Lockhart delivers Jonathan’s invitation to the Vampire Congregation in Boston. It isn’t a request; Arial’s summoning spell warps time and space to ensure every vampire attends.
Of all the many horrors Jonathan discovers at this murderous congregation, worst of all is to find his mortal son, Jake, has come searching for him. And Jake’s just fallen in love... with a vampire!
Description: Life in the quaint English hampton of Badger’s Waddle is never quite the same as elsewhere in the country... or any other country for that matter. The first sign of impending chaos was when giant rabbits breached the defenses all along the indeterminate length of the vegetable garden of Little Twee cottage. To patch up the defenses took the combined efforts of the resident gastrognome and a Crippin & Hare Indifference Engine operated by Tavarius Truckle, the man with the highest ever score in an apathitude test.
But when tourists start exploding at the village fete, bank deposits build up a critical pressure, and the church’s resident saint finds a loophole in his contract of supra-ecclesiastical employment, the whole hampton must unite to restore some semblance of normality (except for Tavarius Truckle, who’s far too apathetic to care).
Only Goode Nurture, the nice old lady in the tall, pointy black hat, has been preparing for this moment, shaving her gibbons in readiness for the looming crisis.
Description: In the fertile crescent of folklore, the fruit of knowledge is plucked. At that same moment, on the other side of the world, a rabbit named Joonie is born, nearly lifeless. Nurtured by the Sun and the Moon, Joonie must grow to understand his destiny while thundering clouds of change gather across the front range.
From author Daniel Landes and artist Ravi Zupa comes this beautiful myth of worlds in transition and the cataclysmic metamorphosis that threatens to consume all creatures in its wake-They are coming, and a lone rabbit must gather his courage and his friends to face the Great Harbinger Stampede.
Description: Luke Hunter soon realizes that Phoenix is no ordinary town: no cars, no phone, no Internet connection, and a private security team on patrol. This is weird enough, but then he and his new friends, Peter and Jordan, learn that someone is plotting to wipe out the rest of the human race. The clock is ticking. Only 100 days to the end of the world.
This first book in an electrifying, six-part, alternating-narrator serial catapults the reader into an incredibly compelling and suspenseful read that guarantees first class entertainment!
Description: Available formats: ePub (Nook and iPad) and Mobi (Kindle). We will contact you beforehand to determine which format you prefer.
A zookeeper fights to save the animal she loves, even as her own life crumbles around her…
Meg Yancy knows she may be overly attached to Jata, the Komodo dragon that has been in her care since it arrived at the zoo from Indonesia. Jata brings the exotic to Meg’s Minnesotan life: an ancient, predatory history and stories of escaping to freedom. A species that became endangered soon after being discovered, Komodos have a legacy of independence, something that Meg understands all too well. Meg has always been better able to relate to reptiles than to people, from her estranged father to her live-in boyfriend to the veterinarian who is more concerned with his career than with the animals’ lives.
Then one day, Meg makes an amazing discovery. Jata has produced viable eggs—without ever having had a mate. Faced with this rare phenomenon, Meg must now defend Jata’s hatchlings from the scientific, religious, and media forces that converge on the zoo to claim the miracle as their own.
Finally forced to deal with the very people she has avoided for so long, Meg discovers that opening herself up comes with its own complications. And as she fights to save the animal she loves from the consequences of its own miracle, she must learn to accept that in nature, as in life, not everything can be controlled.
Mindy Mejia’s gripping debut novel highlights the perils of captivity and the astonishing ways in which animals evolve.
Description: Welcome to the Hotel Noir, peerless gem of hospitality and sole holder of a Michelin star on the island of St. Germaine.
When the controversial American author Francis Stein is stabbed to death in the hotel’s environs, the search for his murderer takes islander Bat Manley north to the other half of Stein’s double life, south to St. Germaine’s vice-ridden slums, and finally into the realm of the psyche, where the blind see and the dead speak.
A kaleidoscopic striptease of the human soul, Hotel Noir will make you sweat.
“I’m thoroughly intrigued by this novel, though not necessarily for straightforward reasons. I think what has hooked me is that it doesn’t seem like anything else. Casper Silk has a wholly unique voice. It’s an entirely bizarre one, too, and Hotel Noir is a dark yet evocative portrait of an island quickly changing, a hotel of another era, and a man caught in the midst, still suffering over the long-ago death of his wife, trying to help a young girl, and falling through the cracks that society allows to widen as the times change.” - Lexy Bloom
"A noirish combination of F. Scott Fitzgerald and early P. D. James on steroids, as told by a narrator who knows how to weave a web and pull you in without your realizing that you are caught... an intriguing literary crime novel filled with wonderfully zany characters Agatha Christie would have killed for." - New York Review of Books
Genre: Quirky literary suspense with mild paranormal undertones Formats available: mobi, epub, pdf
Description: When it comes to animals, the fluffy, the handsome, and the strong get all the attention. But children have every reason to love the critters that scuttle, slither, buzz, and sting. Naturalist and author Diane Lang and artist Lauren Gallegos take children on a guided tour of the animals that do so many good things for us, yet don't get enough love. Through lively, witty rhymes and warm, friendly illustrations, Vulture Verses helps children appreciate and befriend even the scariest critters. That's right, even the vampire bat!
An oversized appetite for fine dining, flashy suits, and Las Vegas call girls has made Cleveland councilman Bert Loftus the target of media scrutiny and an FBI investigation that may end his career. Now he says someone is trying to kill him. Eager to identify his attacker but not so eager to work with the cops, Loftus turns to private investigator Milan Jacovich (pronounced MY-lan YOCK-ovitch) for help.
A working P.I. can't afford to be too choosy about his clients, so Milan takes the job—though he’s not inclined to take Loftus’s story seriously. At least it will be an opportunity to break in his new employee, young powder-keg Kevin "K.O." O'Bannion.
Milan and K.O. quickly notice that something smells fishy—and it isn’t just the Whiskey Island Marina, where local power brokers down pricey drinks in front of Lake Erie sunsets. Loftus and several Cleveland landlords appear to be involved in something much darker than a typical cash-for-favors trade.
After a kinky call girl is found dead near the Cleveland Zoo and secret sex tapes are discovered in her downtown high-rise, Milan and K.O. must follow a trail of bribes, bullet casings, and debauchery to find the killer and uncover the true menace amid the muck of local government corruption.
Luckily they have the help of Cleveland police detective Tobe Blaine, a tough-as-nails officer recently relocated from Cincinnati. She and Milan team up in their search for clues and discover they have much more in common than crime . . . Available formats: EPUB (for Nook, iBooks, others) or MOBI (for Kindle)
Description: This is an EBOOK. We will send winner a .pdf copy.
When K-5 students understand how to read text features like bullets, insets, and bold print, they are reading the whole page—essential for deep comprehension of non-fiction and fiction text.
In Reading the Whole Page: Teaching and Assessing Text Features to Meet K-5 Common Core Standards, seasoned educators Michelle Kelley and Nicki Clausen-Grace show you how to explicitly teach K-5 students to read text features, use them to navigate text, and include them in their own writing. The classroom-proven mini-lessons, activities, and assessment tools in Reading the Whole Page help you:
Teach relevant Common Core Reading Standards and grade-level expectations;
Diagnose, monitor, and meet student needs with one of two level-appropriate assessments;
Evaluate knowledge with a unique picture book on CD that illustrates all the text features; and
Monitor and guide differentiated instruction with a convenient class profile.
Sixty mini-lessons for teaching print, graphic, and organizational features provide ample choices for meeting the standards while adapting to students’ needs. Flexible lessons, which follow the gradual release of responsibility model and increase in difficulty, can be used within the typical ninety-minute reading block, during content-area instruction, in small groups, and as part of independent practice opportunities like literacy centers.
This book is an eBook, not a physical book.
