First Mystery

Daidoji Shin, unrepentant wastrel with a taste for scandal and dice, coasts through his role as Crane Clan's trade envoy in the City of the Rich Frog. But when a case of poisoned rice threatens the brittle peace between the competing clans, the Imperial Governor drags Shin from his indolence and orders him to find the culprit. Despite himself, Shin uncovers an intriguing conspiracy involving more than just dead rats.

The human race is at a crossroads; we know that we are not alone, but details about the alien presence on Earth are still being withheld from the public. As the political climate grows more unstable, the world is forced to consider the ramifications of granting human rights to nonhuman persons. How do you define “person” in the first place?

A terrorist doesn't let strangers in her flat because they might be undercover police or intelligence agents, but her children bring their mates home, and they run all over the place. The terrorist doesn't know that one of these kids has bugged every room in her house, made copies of all her computer files and stolen her address book. The kid works for Cherub. Cherub agents are aged between 10 and 17. They live in the real world, slipping under adult radar and getting information that sends criminals and terrorists to jail.

In 2018, Canadian archaeologist Ron Jackson makes a mind-boggling discovery in Antarctica - right before disappearing without a trace, leaving behind only his controversial theory that humans have lived on Earth far, far longer than we think they have. Decades later, in 2042, when Jackson's wife dies under mysterious circumstances, an unlikely pair of investigators, Agatha Devenworth and Pano Hofer, begin investigating whether her death might be connected to Jackson's disappearance.

Jealousy breeds betrayal. A young woman is strangled in her bed. The door is smashed in and the apartment ransacked. Is this a robbery gone wrong? A random attack? A jealous lover? Or, a serial killer? It’s up to Detective Erin O’Reilly, her K-9 Rolf, and the rest of her Major Crimes squad to find out the truth before anyone else dies. It’s a simple case; or is it? Erin has been able to keep an uneasy balance between her personal and work lives. She’s always known it was risky to let herself fall for a gangster.

At 12, Gideon Crew witnessed his father, a world-class mathematician, accused of treason and gunned down. At 24, summoned to his dying mother's bedside, Gideon learned the truth: His father was framed and deliberately slaughtered. With her last breath, she begged her son to avenge him. Now, with a new purpose in his life, Gideon crafts a one-time mission of vengeance, aimed at the perpetrator of his father's destruction. His plan is meticulous, spectacular, and successful.But from the shadows, someone is watching. A very powerful someone, who is impressed by Gideon's special skills.

J. M. Adovasio has spent the last thirty years at the center of one of our most fiery scientific debates: Who were the first humans in the Americas, and how and when did they get there? At its heart, The First Americans is the story of the revolution in thinking that Adovasio and his fellow archaeologists have brought about, and the firestorm it has ignited.

A man waits at a London airport for Ingrid Ostermann, the love of his life, to arrive. Across the Atlantic, a retired NYPD cop waits in a bar in Florida’s Key West for his first date with the lady who is, without question, his soulmate. The two men are about to discover they’ve been scammed out of almost every penny they have in the world – and that neither women exist.

Across America a mysterious disease is turning ordinary people into raving, paranoid murderers who inflict brutal horrors on strangers, themselves, and even their own families. Working under the government’s shroud of secrecy, CIA operative Dew Phillips crisscrosses the country trying in vain to capture a live victim. With only decomposing corpses for clues, CDC epidemiologist Margaret Montoya races to analyze the science behind this deadly contagion. She discovers that these killers all have one thing in common.

The final novel from Richard Wagamese, the best-selling and beloved author of Indian Horse and Medicine Walk, centres on an abused woman on the run who finds refuge on a farm owned by an Indigenous man with wounds of his own. A profoundly moving novel about the redemptive power of love, mercy, and compassion - and the land's ability to heal us.

Lora Weaver follows romance from New York to Montreal and expects to find a touch of Paris in North America — cobblestone streets, sidewalk cafés, fabulous shopping, and a little joie de vivre [zest for life]. Not dangerous liaisons. But, when she takes a job at a PI agency owned by a French brother and sister team, her life takes on more twists and turns than a Cirque du Soleil show.

Find the missing. Fear the found. Three months have passed since the aliens' arrival, but little has changed in the skies. Motherships still hover, impervious to attack and communication. Spherical shuttles ferry about with unclear intentions. But the abductions of select humans have ended, and most of those taken have been returned - dazed, incoherent, and prophesying glory or doom, but home where they belong. Still, nine seemingly unconnected people remain missing.

Scientists in the past few decades have made crucial discoveries about how our cosmos evolved over the past 13.8 billion years. But there remains a critical gap in our knowledge: We still know very little about what happened in the first seconds after the Big Bang. At the Edge of Time focuses on what we have recently learned and are still striving to understand about this most essential and mysterious period of time at the beginning of cosmic history.

The Bridge has been triggered, but the surprises don’t end there. What Rex found on the other side was unsettling, and with fresh information, he must race against time with his new allies as they search for their salvation. The mysterious objects are closer, nearly at Earth, and the efforts of the alien cult have reached a devastating level. Fear escalates as the entire planet senses the global threat, but Rex is more determined than ever to prevent what’s coming.

The 22nd Century. Dr. Charles Forbin is Earth's most powerful man. As mediator between Colossus, the Super Computer, and the rest of humanity, Forbin holds the key to Earth's fate. When Colossus, an awe-inspiring technological creation, suddenly became self-aware and took upon itself the task of righting humanity's wrongs with no regard for humans themselves, Forbin intervened. He took the decision to turn off his great machine - but could not do it alone. Forbin called upon invaders from Mars.

A girl named Rose is riding her new bike near her home in Deadwood, South Dakota, when she falls through the earth. She wakes up at the bottom of a square hole, its walls glowing with intricate carvings. But the firemen who come to save her peer down upon something even stranger: a little girl in the palm of a giant metal hand.

MI5 officer David White was always a good father, so when his daughters want to go to a music festival in Israel, he agrees to take them. But his daughters are killed in the Hamas massacre that left 1,400 innocent civilians dead. White is taken hostage down in the tunnels under Gaza and Dan 'Spider' Shepherd and a crack SAS team are sent in to rescue him. Back in London, White is a changed man. He wants revenge for what happened to his family and wants to kill the men who planned and financed the Hamas attacks.

The entire human race balances on the razor's edge of annihilation, beset by an enemy that turns our own bodies against us, that changes normal people into psychopaths or transforms them into nightmares. To some, Doctor Margaret Montoya is a hero-a brilliant scientist who saved the human race from an alien intelligence determined to exterminate all of humanity. To others, she's a monster - a mass murderer single-handedly responsible for the worst atrocity ever to take place on American soil. All Margaret knows is that she's broken. The blood of a million deaths is on her hands.

The first book in C.J.Cherryh's eponymous series, Foreigner begins an epic tale of the survivors of a lost spacecraft who crash-land on a planet inhabited by a hostile, sentient alien race. From its beginnings as a human-alien story of first contact, the Foreigner series has become a true science fiction odyssey, following a civilization from the age of steam through early space flight to confrontations with other alien species in distant sectors of space. It is the masterwork of a truly remarkable author.

Light years from Earth, an alien planet forced their queen from power and cast her into space. For millions of years, the queen's ship wandered the cosmos, until it crashed on Earth. As a child, Michael Hems first lost his mother to cancer, and then his father to the bottom of a bottle. Growing up in a small town, Michael's friends became his life. The only one he knew. The only one he wanted. But the night he found the ship, everything he loved was thrown into jeopardy.