Urban Historical

These stories present electric messiahs, identity constructs, the Beatles, and even a nuclear Armageddon, which serve as comic foils for Lain's everyman characters. Here is an America where packets of Sea Monkeys arrive in the mail containing secret messages, and the girl next door can breathe underwater. With Last Week's Apocalypse, Douglas Lain arrives with a punch line and a warning.

The final book in USA Today best-selling author Kristen Callihan's critically acclaimed Darkest London series!

Bram Stoker kept secret a tale even more terrifying than Dracula. It begins among the Carpathian peaks, when an intrepid explorer discovers a mysterious golden box. She brings it back with her to the foggy streets of Victorian London, unaware of its dangerous power…or that an evil beyond imagining has already taken root in the city. Stoker, a successful theater manager but frustrated writer, is drawn into a deadly web spun by the wealthy founders of a mission house for the poor. Far from a safe haven, the mission harbors a dark and terrifying secret.

He’s one of my father’s guards at the castle. Goes by the name Mastodon. There’s something about him I don’t like. He takes me into a cavern, and we descend deep underground - to the Bottom of the Cliffs. When I leave for the Capital, Mastodon escorts me. And just as I feared, he kills my guards and captures me. Then he tells me why he’s doing this. Because my family took everything from him - and now he’s about to do the same.

Towner Whitney, the self-confessed unreliable narrator of The Lace Reader, hails from a family of Salem women who can read the future in the patterns in lace, and who have guarded a history of secrets going back generations. But the disappearance of two women brings Towner home to Salem and the truth about the death of her twin sister to light.

In an ancient Japan where the incursions of gods, ghosts, and demons into the living world is an everyday event, an impoverished nobleman named Yamada no Goji makes his living as a demon hunter for hire. With the occasional assistance of the reprobate exorcist Kenji, whatever the difficulty - ogres, demons, fox-spirits - for a price Yamada will do what needs to be done, even and especially if the solution to the problem isn’t as simple as the edge of a sword.

Based loosely on the tale of Puss in Boots, Reserved for the Cat takes place in 1910 in an alternate London. A young dancer, penniless and desperate, is sure she is going mad when a cat begins talking to her mind-to-mind. But her feline guide, actually an Elemental Earth Spirit, helps her to impersonate a famous Russian ballerina and achieve the success she's been dreaming of.

The new novel in Mercedes Lackey’s best-selling series of an alternative Edwardian Britain, where magic is real - and Elemental Masters are in control. Lionel Hawkins is a magician whose act is only partially sleight of hand. The rest is real magic. He’s an Elemental Magician with the power to persuade the Elementals of Air to help him create amazing illusions. It doesn’t take long before his assistant, acrobat Katie Langford, notices that he’s no ordinary magician - and for Lionel to discover that she’s no ordinary acrobat, but rather an untrained and unawakened Fire Magician.

In a world where an industrial revolution is powered by magic, Tyen, a student of archaeology, unearths a sentient book called Vella. Once a young sorcerer-bookbinder, Vella was transformed into a useful tool by one of the greatest sorcerers of history. Since then she has been collecting information, including a vital clue to the disaster Tyen’s world faces.Elsewhere, in an land ruled by priests, Rielle the dyer’s daughter has been taught that to use magic is to steal from the Angels.

Seraphina Winyard is something feared by many…a woman mage. When she comes of age, Sera is determined to seize control of her life, but she faces opposition from an unknown opponent.

It's the end of the 19th century. San Francisco's cobblestone streets are haunted, but Chinatown has an unlikely protector in a young Daoist priestess named Li-lin. Using only her martial arts training, spiritual magic, a sword made from peachwood, and the walking, talking spirit of a human eye, Li-lin stands alone to defend her immigrant community from supernatural threats. But when the body of a young girl is brought to the deadhouse Li-lin oversees for a local group of gangsters, she faces her most bewildering - and potentially dangerous - assignment yet.

It’s 1934. Former medium Dashiel Quicke travels the country debunking spiritualism and false mediums while struggling to stay ahead of his ex-business partner and lover who wants him back at any cost. During a demonstration at a college campus, Dashiel meets Hermann Goschalk, an Egyptologist who’s convinced that he has a genuine haunted artifact on his hands. Certain there is a rational explanation for whatever is going on with Hermann’s relics, Dashiel would rather skip town, but soon finds himself falling for Hermann.

The era is 1988, Detroit is the scene, and crack is the movement. It's a time when young black men can become self-made millionaires seemingly overnight by selling dope. The crack era has become to blacks what Prohibition was to the Italians - a time to get over! It's a time that inspires generations of street dreams.... Fresh out of high school, young Wink has but one thing on his mind - rollin' fresh. Infatuated by all the trappings of the game, Wink and his B-boy crew jump headfirst into the ills of the drug trade, determined to taste the good life.

Rune Tellarus always wanted to become a Guardian: a powerful warrior bonded to a magic-wielding woman known as an Adeptal Mage. Except he failed the test as a youth. He thought he would never get the chance to study at their Academy nor learn magic. But after a terrible tragedy in a nobleman's home, he finds himself suddenly bonded with the nobleman's daughter, Narcissa. This bonding is an irrevocable merging of two spirits that grants both Mage and Guardian magical gifts.

After fighting off a group of bandits, Cha Ming helps a people rebuild. His heart is heavy with guilt, but he can’t stay long. To face an inevitable foe, Cha Ming must journey to Quicksilver City, where he’ll meet the man who once enslaved him. Will he find the courage to face him?

Morgan's world is turned upside down when she is forced into an engagement to Brian DeMacleo. Brian is an infuriating, overbearing, conceited, arrogant bastard who does nothing but treat her like a child. Not only does Brian have to deal with his...condition... but now he has to deal with the lovely Morgan. Or rather, the not so lovely as personality goes. The woman does nothing but argue and try to irritate him. At least they can find some common ground in that neither of them wish to get married. They will get out of the marriage no matter what it takes.

Determined to win the war against the Necorers, Farin and Knight Emicho travel to Hubstone, the capital city. Thanks to stinker’s daemonic meddling, the gravedigger’s son becomes the rising star at the royal court. All too soon, he finds himself dealing with political machinations and intrigues.

In Book 5 of the Shadowdance series... a night of fire and blood heralds Muzien the Darkhand's arrival to Veldaren. With him comes the might of the Sun Guild, eager to spread their criminal empire. Left blind after being attacked by the Widow, Alyssa Gemcroft struggles to hold together the remnants of the Trifect as the Sun Guild's arrival threatens to shatter whatever future her son might have left.

More than 500 years before his friendship with Kitty, noble Ricardo de Avila's life met a fate-changing twist, and his morally complex, blood-soaked existence as an immortal began. Before being turned, Ricardo de Avila would have followed Coronado to the ends of the earth. Instead he found the end of his mortal life - and a new one, as a renegade vampire. For over 500 years as an immortal, Ricardo has followed his own moral code, upsetting the established order in the demon world.

On a cool evening in Kolkata, India, beneath a full moon, as the whirling rhythms of traveling musicians fill the night, college professor Alok encounters a mysterious stranger with a bizarre confession and an extraordinary story. Tantalized by the man's unfinished tale, Alok will do anything to hear its completion. So Alok agrees, at the stranger's behest, to transcribe a collection of battered notebooks, weathered parchments, and once-living skins.