Urban Contemporary

In this dark and gritty collection - featuring short stories from Jim Butcher, Seanan McGuire, Kevin J. Anderson, and Rob Thurman - nothing is as simple as black and white, light and dark, good and evil.... Unfortunately, that's exactly what makes it so easy to cross the line.

As a cassandra sangue, or blood prophet, Meg Corbyn can see the future when her skin is cut - a gift that feels more like a curse. Meg's Controller keeps her enslaved so he can have full access to her visions. But when she escapes, the only safe place Meg can hide is at the Lakeside Courtyard - a business district operated by the Others. Shape-shifter Simon Wolfgard is reluctant to hire the stranger who inquires about the Human Liaison job.

Farmer Giles of Ham did not look like a hero. He was fat and red-bearded and enjoyed a slow, comfortable life. Then one day a rather deaf and short-sighted giant blundered on to his land. More by luck than skill, Farmer Giles managed to scare him away. The people of the village cheered: Farmer Giles was a hero. His reputation spread far and wide across the kingdom. So it was natural that when the dragon Chrysophylax visited the area it was Farmer Giles who was expected to do battle with it!

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Iron Druid Chronicles comes book two of an “action-packed, enchantingly fun” (Booklist) spin-off series, as an eccentric master of rare magic solves a supernatural mystery Down Under!

Evelyn Thomas's plans for celebrating her twenty-first birthday in Las Vegas were big. Huge. But she sure never meant to wake up on the bathroom floor with a hangover to rival the black plague, a very attractive half-naked tattooed man in her room, and a diamond on her finger large enough to scare King Kong. Now if she could just remember how it all happened.

My name is Mercedes Athena Thompson Hauptman, and I am a car mechanic. And a coyote shape-shifter. And the mate of the Alpha of the Columbia Basin werewolf pack. Even so, none of that would have gotten me into trouble if, a few months ago, I hadn’t stood upon a bridge and taken responsibility for the safety of the citizens who live in our territory. It seemed like the thing to do at the time. It should have only involved hunting down killer goblins, zombie goats, and an occasional troll. Instead, our home was viewed as neutral ground.

Wedding fever has come to Bon Temps, Louisiana! Unfortunately, buxom, blonde, beautiful, and telepathic cocktail waitress Sookie is not the bride-to-be, so she takes the opportunity to travel to New Orleans on family business. As heir to the estate of her newly dead cousin Hadley, Sookie unearths a big secret. Soon it becomes clear that more than a few people will do anything to stop Sookie from looking into Hadley's past.

Naughty is as naughty always does, and Jaylin Jerome Rogers never disappoints. The aftermath to the Naughty Series picks up nearly three years later, and the tables have clearly turned. Brenda Hampton delivers another pause-resister full of the dramatic antics of bad-boy Jaylin and the women who can't resist him.

Anthony Award-winning author Charlaine Harris has earned a devoted fan base with her USA Today and New York Times best-selling Sookie Stackhouse mystery series. All Together Dead features more dark but frequently hilarious adventures of buxom, blonde, beautiful, and telepathic cocktail waitress Sookie, who prefers the company of vampires to that of the living.

Mattie, an intelligent automaton skilled in the use of alchemy, finds herself caught in the middle of a conflict between gargoyles, the Mechanics, and the Alchemists. With the old order quickly giving way to the new, Mattie discovers powerful and dangerous secrets - secrets that can completely alter the balance of power in the city of Ayona. This doesn't sit well with Loharri, the Mechanic who created Mattie and still has the key to her heart - literally.

Chicago wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden is used to mysterious clients with long hair and legs up to here. But when it turns out the long hair covers every square inch of his latest client's body, and the legs contribute to a nine-foot height, even the redoubtable detective realizes he's treading new ground. Strength of a River in His Shoulders is one of the legendary forest people, a bigfoot, and he has a problem that only Harry can solve. His son, Irwin, is a scion, the child of a supernatural creature and a human.

Un secret ancestral a été dévoilé. Et rien ne sera jamais plus comme avant. Alors que le voile entre les mondes vient tout juste d’être refermé, Aileen n’a pas une seconde à perdre. Munie de sa détermination sans faille et de ses connaissances de druidesse, elle entreprend de réunir une équipe afin d’affronter la plus grande menace qui soit. Le tout en jonglant avec l’arrivée inopinée de son géniteur, ses histoires de coeur et la protection de son petit frère. Tic tac tic tac.

Thirteen years ago, monsters emerged from the shadows and plunged Kierse’s world into a cataclysmic war of near-total destruction. The New York City she knew so well collapsed practically overnight. In the wake of that carnage, the Monster Treaty was created. A truce … of sorts. But tonight, Kierse—a gifted and fearless thief—will break that treaty. She’ll enter the Holly Library … not knowing it’s the home of a monster.

Lucky St. James, orphaned daughter of a bad-ass Métis good-times girl, is barely hanging on to her nowhere life when she finds out that she and her grandmother, Stella, are about to be evicted from their apartment. Bad to worse in a heartbeat. Then one night, doing laundry in the building's dank basement, Lucky finds a tarnished silver spoon depicting a story-book hag over letters that spell out S-A-L-E-M. Which alerts Salem-born Meena Good, finder of a matching spoon and one of the most powerful witches in North America, to Lucky's existence.

Curse weaver Kennedy Bennett has resettled into her beloved hometown and opened a shop selling previously hexed antiques. When she fails to win an online auction for a notorious cursed painting, Aiden Connolly - the wealthy and swoon-worthy luck worker she is not dating - swoops in to buy it for her.

Unchained from fate, the Norse gods Loki and Hel are ready to unleash Ragnarok, a.k.a. the Apocalypse, upon the earth. They’ve made allies on the darker side of many pantheons, and there’s a globe-spanning battle brewing that ancient Druid Atticus O’Sullivan will be hardpressed to survive, much less win.

Clay Bennett is a powerful DarkRiver sentinel, but he grew up in the slums with his human mother, never knowing his changeling father. As a young boy without the bonds of Pack, he tried to stifle his animal nature. He failed... and committed the most extreme act of violence, killing a man and losing his best friend, Talin, in the bloody aftermath. Everything good in him died the day he was told that she, too, was dead.

Fitz, le bâtard royal, a survécu à sa première mission meurtrière, mais son contact avec la mort lui a laissé d'inaltérables séquelles. Revenu à Castelcerf, il retrouve celle qu'il a aimée, mais ne peut lui déclarer sa flamme sous peine de la condamner irrémédiablement. Car autour de lui, la Cour fourmille d'intrigue, les menaces se resserrent, la mort rôde. Il a pourtant quelques alliés dans la place : un prince qui lui fait découvrir les mystères d'une magie toute puissante, un maître assassin qui lui veut malgré tout du bien, et un loup, avec qui il partage lien étrange et périlleux.

Myke Cole continues to blow the military fantasy genre wide open with an all-new epic adventure in his highly acclaimed Shadow Ops universe - set in the early days of the Great Reawakening, when magic first returns to the world and order begins to unravel....US Navy SEAL Jim Schweitzer is a consummate professional, a fierce warrior, and a hard man to kill. But when he sees something he was never meant to see on a covert mission gone bad, he finds himself - and his family - in the crosshairs.

Years ago, the magnificent dragon queen Tintaglia forged a bargain with the inhabitants of the treacherous Rain Wilds. In exchange for her protection against enemy invaders, the humans promised to protect an unhatched brood of dragons. But when the dragons emerged as weak and misshapen hatchlings unable to fend for themselves, dragonkind seemed doomed to extinction. When even Tintaglia deserted the crippled young dragons, the Rain Wilders abandoned the burden of caring for the destructive and ravenous creatures.