Urban City

Police Officer Nate Hammond led a well-ordered life in Coldwater Bay until a chance meeting with a girl from his past drags him into an extraordinary adventure. Libby Parish never intended to visit her hometown again. Is the strange obsession to return related to a mysterious comic book? Or someone she left behind? Sucked into an alternate comic book universe, Nate and Libby find themselves in Second Chance City, home of half-hearted superheroes and a villain with a grudge. Can they find a way home or will their second chance at happily ever after end in death?

A propulsive debut of visionary scale, Make Me a City embroiders fact with fiction to tell the story of Chicago's 19th century, tracing its rise from frontier settlement to industrial colossus.

This exploration begins by tracing the concentration of IT in Greater Silicon Valley and the resulting growth in start-ups, jobs, and wealth. This is followed by a look at the new working class of color and the millions earning poverty wages. The middle chapters survey the urban scene, including the housing bubble and the newly exploded metropolis, and the final chapters take on the political questions raised by the environmental impact of the boom, the fantastical ideology of TechWorld, and the tech-led transformation of the region.

Adam Smith has a tent, blankets, a water bottle, friends, and a school voucher. What more could he need? He’s doing great overall, but winter is coming fast, the gangs know his face, and he is failing cooking class! Choices have to be made. Stay and fight, or run? But if he stays, how will he survive? And if he runs, will she come with him?

All Sophia Fontanelle wanted was to be left alone. On the run from New Orleans and its vampire council, she heads to Los Angeles to start a new life. But when the Caballero, the ancient peacekeeper rumored to be the great Zorro himself, is murdered, Sophia finds herself caught up in a fight to clear her name. Threatened by a 1950s-era gangster turned vamp by the Caballero himself, can she survive in Vamp City?

Roger, Blue Knight's alternate identity, finds his New York City visit very different than expected. He is there when Azzam from Amman, Jordan, succeeds in his 20-year search for a jinni in a lamp. The arrival of powerful marid, Kadar, makes life more interesting for everyone on Manhattan Island...and nervous, as well. Kadar's puzzling presence and difficult demands are a new challenge for Blue Knight.

My name is Mike Raven. I hunt nightmares. Demons murdered my parents when I was eight. Turns out my folks were paranormal investigators, and hell always settles its scores. Naturally I decided to join the family business. For two decades, I've studied the occult and traveled the world fighting monsters. But my biggest challenge lay ahead. From the moment Celeste stepped into my office, I knew she was in trouble. Her father had promised her soul to a powerful demon on the day she was born. Now, 21 years later, the forces of darkness were gathering to collect their long-awaited prize.

Jon Gilligan is the only man with a pulse in a city of the undead. It's his job to maintain order between the factions of walking corpses and disembodied spirits. The workload has been driving him a little insane, leading him to take on the persona of a noir detective. He narrates his adventures, casting himself as a hero to all those under his watch.

Nina is a harried young mother who spends her evenings spying on the older couple across the street through her son's binoculars. She is drawn to their quiet contentment - so unlike her own lonely, chaotic world of nursing. One night, she spies a young couple in the throes of passion. Who are these people, and what happened to her symbol of domestic bliss?

Empire City tells the story of the dreams that inspired the changes in the landscape and the problems that eluded solution. Author David Scobey paints a remarkable panorama of New York's uneven development, a city-building process careening between obsessive calculation and speculative excess. Envisioning a new kind of national civilization, “bourgeois urbanists” attempted to make New York the nation's pre-eminent city.

In 1925, earthquakes and a rising sea level left Lower Manhattan submerged under more than 30 feet of water, so that its residents began to call it the Drowning City. Those unwilling to abandon their homes created a new life on streets turned to canals and in buildings whose first three stories were underwater. Fifty years have passed since then, and the Drowning City is full of scavengers and water rats, poor people trying to eke out an existence, and those too proud or stubborn to be defeated by circumstance. Among them are 14-year-old Molly McHugh.

Inspired by the real-life murder of a British army soldier by religious fanatics, and the rampant burning of mosques that followed, Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City is a snapshot of the diverse, frenzied edges of modern-day London. A crackling debut from a vital new voice, it pulses with the frantic energy of the city’s homegrown grime music and is animated by the youthful rage of a dispossessed, overlooked, and often misrepresented generation.

Xander Spade fled to Wonderland to escape the devil who took his soul, and fell prey to the Queen of Hearts instead. Now he has a chance to go home - but first he must find a missing girl before all Hell breaks loose.

Since he became the guardian of the Gate between our world and Feirie 1600 years ago, Nick Medea, once Saint George, has battled to keep the darkest Feirie - the Wyld - from invading the mortal plane. With the dragon an unwilling part of him, Nick maintains balance between realms, often at great cost to him and those nearest to him. Nick and his ragtag confederates - including the shape-shifter Fetch and Nick's reincarnated love, Claryce - have battled the Wyld, but mortals as sinister as the darkest Feirie.

For more than 1600 years, Nick Medea has followed and guarded the Gate that keeps the mortal realm and that of Feirie separate, seeking in vain absolution for the fatal errors he made when he slew the dragon. All that while, he has tried and failed to keep the woman he loves from dying over and over. Yet in the 50 years since the night the dragon breathed over the city of Chicago, the Gate has not only remained fixed, but open to the trespasses of the Wyld, the darkest of the Feiriefolk.

During the years of the Early Republic, prominent Native leaders regularly traveled to American cities primarily on diplomatic or trade business, but also from curiosity. They were frequently referred to as "the Chiefs now in this city" during their visits. Colin Calloway has gathered together the accounts of these visits and created a new narrative of the country's formative years, redefining what has been understood as the "frontier." Calloway captures what Native peoples observed as they walked the streets, sat in pews, attended plays, drank in taverns, and slept in hotels.

Meet Malik. He was born into a fire that raged around him, engulfing him in a messed-up upbringing that would shape his destiny. He learned to fend for himself, navigating the concrete jungle like a lone warrior. Join us on this journey. The book is about hopes and dreams in the middle of life and death.

Liz, an ambitious headhunter in London, is beholden to nobody and determined to keep it that way. Emily, a homebody with a countryside cottage, seems happy to be surrounded by her family and her crafts. Chrissy, a writer turned realtor, is living the American dream in sunny California. But are their lives as idyllic as they seem? When a long-forgotten school friend unexpectedly takes her own life, the three women are reunited once more, but just as they reconnect, their lives begin to shatter.

My name is Octavius Septimus Stalk, but my friends call me Oss. I live in the City of Keys, a town of gears, keys, locks, and wonder. Our forefathers banished magic long ago, bolted the doors and locked everything up tight to keep people out and the town's secrets in. Four Lock Lords control what information is left, and everyone else is left struggling to survive.

College freshman Owen Sage has just started to understand the darkness trying to overtake Everville and the earthly realm. With the help of The Keeper and the Fron army, Owen has managed to buy some time, but new problems have already emerged, new secrets need to be revealed, and the race against time to stop Them from conquering both dimensions has only just begun. The Keeper, Owen Sage, and his friends at Easton Falls University must now battle threats from within.