Living Ghosts and Mischievous Monsters

Living Ghosts and Mischievous Monsters

Dan SaSuWeh Jones

Dan SaSuWeh Jones

Perfect for fans of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark! A shiver-inducing collection of short stories to read under the covers, from a breadth American Indian nations.Dark figures in the night. An owl's cry on the wind. Monsters watching from the edge of the wood.Some of the creatures in these pages might only have a message for you, but some are the stuff of nightmares. These thirty-two short stories — from tales passed down for generations to accounts that could have happened yesterday — are collected from the thriving tradition of ghost stories from American Indian cultures across North America. Prepare for stories of witches and walking dolls, hungry skeletons, la llorona, and deer woman, and other supernatural beings ready to chill you to the bone.Dan SaSuWeh Jones of the Ponca Nation tells of his own encounters and selects his favorite spooky, eerie, surprising, and spine-tingling stories, all paired with haunting...
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Benedict and Brazos 17

Benedict and Brazos 17

E. Jefferson Clay

E. Jefferson Clay

It was a case of mistaken identity when Galloway's two lawmen arrested Hank Brazos on a charge of rustling. Brazos went quietly, sure that his saddle pard, Duke Benedict, would soon arrive to help him clear everything up. But the law had other ideas. No ifs, no buts ... Hank Brazos was going to stay behind bars until the circuit judge could find him guilty and sentence him to hang!Benedict could always help the big Texan escape ... but if things went wrong, it might come to gunplay and innocent parties could die. So he decided to take a different route – to ride solo and find and arrest the real culprits himself.Trouble was, to stand any chance of success, he had to swap one partner for another ... in this case, Brazos' irascible hound, Bullpup!
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Cure for Insomnia

Cure for Insomnia

Laina Villeneuve

Laina Villeneuve

According to her family, Karla Hernandez spends far too many hours working in the lab. A dedicated research scientist, she has contributed to a drug that could vastly improve the quality of life in diabetic patients. Her quality of life, however, could use some help. She thought she would sleep better when she finished grad school or her post-doc, but launching a cutting-edge clinical trial isn't helping. So when her eleven-year-old niece approaches her about participating in a school science project about insomnia, Karla agrees. Finding a girlfriend was not the conclusion she had anticipated, but Karla is not one to deviate from protocol—especially not when the judge at the science fair has some ideas about helping to cure her insomnia. All research requires troubleshooting, but Karla isn't prepared for the complications that threaten to shut down more than her love life. Does she need to find a new project or dig in deeper to her professional work? Or will...
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Dial 'M' for Maine Coon

Dial 'M' for Maine Coon

Alex Erickson

Mystery

Animal rescue is always risky business, but Liz Denton, owner of the Furever Pets, finds out it's also dangerous when someone puts down one of her prospective pet adopters . . . Liz is thrilled to find a forever home for her latest rescue, Sheamus, a Maine Coon cat. But on adoption day, she discovers Sheamus's would-be owner, Joe Hitchcock, murdered in his study. Joe's shocking death reveals an even more startling secret: his real name was Joe Danvers . . . a man accused of killing his wife thirty years ago. Liz knows she should focus on finding Sheamus a new home, but this mystery already has its claws in her. So Liz begins vetting the clues from both investigations. But with a stalker sniffing at her heels and a rival swatting at her business, Liz's curiosity may come at a hefty price . . . especially since Joe's case has more lives than a cat.
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All the Best Nights

All the Best Nights

Hanna Earnest

Hanna Earnest

Some realities are better than the fantasy. Coming down off his tour, an album long overdue, singer-songwriter Bran Kelly feels like everyone wants a piece of him. What Bran wants is inspiration from no-need-for-a-last-name pop star Nelle, the blazing talent he's been dreaming of for over a year. Ever since the magic moment she slipped her number into his pocket at an industry after-party, her breath raising the hairs on his neck as she whispered into his ear.You're it. Nelle's achieved every one of her professional dreams and now it's time to get personal with a few hours of hot hotel sex with Bran Kelly—as long as she doesn't get caught. Finally in the same city, on the same night, the lyrics spark...and so does the sexual tension. Except that one night isn't enough. And when Bran proposes they up the ante—create something off the record, just for the two of them—they'll have to decide how far they'll go to keep the biggest secret of...
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Lords of the Sands: An Epic Dark Fantasy Novel

Lords of the Sands: An Epic Dark Fantasy Novel

Paul Yoder

Paul Yoder

Power behind the undead army is growing stronger. A friend is falling into darkness. Strange allies band together to stop it. Can this odd group of companions save the living from extinction? The army of the dead has begun to rally from their recent defeat, slaughtering the nomads of the out-regions. Reza and company have been preoccupied with mending their wounds from their last encounter with the arisen lord, but the task has drawn them thin, and to their wits end. Met with indolence from the region’s leaders, they are left to make strange connections and allies to help in defending their home state from impending doom. The dead are within the Southern Sands borders, and few have prepared for the imminent tides of war.
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AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future

Kai-Fu Lee

Kai-Fu Lee

How will artificial intelligence change our world within twenty years? “This inspired collaboration between a pioneering technologist and a visionary writer of science fiction offers bold and urgent insights.”—Yann LeCun, winner of the Turing Award; chief AI scientist, Facebook   “Amazingly entertaining . . . Lee and Chen take us on an immersive trip through the future. . . . Eye-opening.”—Mark Cuban AI will be the defining development of the twenty-first century. Within two decades, aspects of daily human life will be unrecognizable. AI will generate unprecedented wealth, revolutionize medicine and education through human-machine symbiosis, and create brand-new forms of communication and entertainment. In liberating us from routine work, however, AI will also challenge the organizing principles of our economic and social order. Meanwhile, AI will bring new risks in the form of autonomous weapons and smart technology that inherits human bias. AI is at a tipping point, and people need to wake up—both to AI’s radiant pathways and its existential perils for life as we know it. In this provocative, utterly original work, Kai-Fu Lee, the former president of Google China and bestselling author of AI Superpowers, teams up with celebrated novelist Chen Qiufan to imagine our world in 2041 and how it will be shaped by AI. In ten gripping short stories, they introduce readers to an array of eye-opening 2041 settings, such as: In San Francisco, the “job reallocation” industry emerges as deep learning AI causes widespread job displacement In Tokyo, a music fan is swept up in an immersive form of celebrity worship based on virtual reality and mixed reality In Mumbai, a teenage girl rebels when AI’s crunching of big data gets in the way of romance• In Seoul, virtual companions with perfected natural language processing (NLP) skills offer orphaned twins new ways to connect In Munich, a rogue scientist draws on quantum computing, computer vision and other AI technologies in a revenge plot that imperils the world By gazing toward a not-so-distant horizon, AI 2041 offers urgent insights into our collective future—while reminding readers that, ultimately, humankind remains the author of its destiny.
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