Kara keeps hearing voices and seeing images that aren’t there. Perhaps she is working too hard at her dull engineering job where she spends hours a day correcting documentation. Her love life is non-existent. Her friends just want to drink and get drunk. Life is dull and boring. However, the voices talk of war and espionage. There are moments she feels intense love or like she’s flying. But then there are the moments where she feels a heart stop and she finds herself experiencing what she calls an out-of-body experience. Whatever it is, it’s more exciting than her current life. And then there is that odd smell. It’s a faint musty smell of peppermint. No. It can’t be. Dragons?

For fans of Gabrielle Zevin and Lurlene McDaniel, In a Heartbeat explores the ties of family and the weight of regret when a mistake costs Eagan her life during a figure-skating competition. Left in the afterlife, reflecting on what she could have done differently, Eagan's still-beating heart is given to Amelia who has been waiting patiently for a transplant. When their thought, feelings, and dreams begin to mysteriously overlap, Amelia knows she must search for Eagan's family and find a way to give them all the closure they need move on.

Forgiveness is a choice—love isn’t Nate Hendrick’s and Anna Grainger’s lives were changed—and entwined—forever, in one terrifying instant. That’s all it took for Anna’s husband to die saving the life of Nate’s daughter. Battling heartache and guilt, Nate offers Anna the only consolation he can: a place for her family to stay while she figures things out. Neither expects the arrangement to be anything more than a convenience, but as their families come together, old wounds begin to heal and hearts mend. Nate knows they have a chance to salvage something beautiful from tragedy—if Anna can ever truly forgive him.

“This splendid collection of border fiction is haunting and intense. Bravo to San Diego Sisters in Crime.” —T. Jefferson Parker, Edgar Award-winning author of The Last Good Guy Good stories start with characters crossing borders and finding themselves in worlds filled with hurt, harm, and danger. In Crossing Borders, the first anthology from Partners in Crime, the San Diego Chapter of Sisters in Crime, fifteen stories capture moments before, during and after characters cross borders and find themselves stumbling around strange lands that abound with saints, sinners, and monsters. Crossing Borders explores that liminal space—the place where people cross from not just from one place to another, like national boundaries, but the dividing line between life/death, stability/insanity, or innocence/guilt. This anthology contains stories that look at the duality of our lives, as we cross borders between people, values, and beliefs. Join us as we explore crossings, where a character, involved somehow in a crime, must pass over a border, literally or figuratively. As Rachel Howzell Hall says in our foreword: “Be prepared to hold your breath” as we enter that special space of crossing, transitioning, change, and death. Welcome to the border. Contributors: Lauren Avenius, Greta Boris, Pam Clark, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Cornelia Feye, Cheryl Garrett, B. J. Graf, S.J. Haworth, Kim Keeline, Kathy Krevat, Melinda Loomis, Gerald Martin, Jo Perry, Barrie Summy, and Carl Vonderau.

DOES THE HEART REMEMBER LOVE? Caleb McMann embarked on the most emotional journey of his life, the search for the little girl who had received the ultimate gift a new heart. His daughter's heart. Hitting pay dirt, he temporarily moved next door to Erica Clemmons and her child, Hannah, to secretly check up on the young girl. However, Caleb had never counted on bonding with Hannah or falling for her beautiful mother, whose compassion and life–affirming kisses made him whole again. But in a heartbeat everything could change, especially since he couldn't keep his true identity under wraps forever. Was a fresh start with this woman and child too much to hope for ?

As they migrated across great distances, ancient humans may have used birdsong and bird sightings to find food and water in unseen territory. Today, attending to birds helps scientists track not only avian migration but also environmental change. Birds remain our sentinels. Feathered Entanglements offers a rich tapestry of human-bird relations across the Indo-Pacific. In this era of uncontrolled industrialization, we have grown increasingly disconnected from the natural world. The ways in which birds feature in the daily life, symbolic systems, and material culture of humans, from pigeon keeping on the rooftops of Amman to the rituals of Indigenous peoples in Taiwan, can teach us how to live with other species amid the challenges of the Anthropocene. In a time of intensifying ecological crisis, we need, more than ever, to protect and appreciate non-human lives. Feathered Entanglements embraces the connection between humans, birds, and our shared world.