The ninth installment in the series that inspired the HBO original True Blood offers another exciting undead adventure, which opens with a vampire fashion show, showing just one of the fruits of the author's unique writing style. Original.

Best-selling author, Susan Beth Pfeffer, delivers a riveting companion to Life As We Knew It in this enthralling tale that follows seventeen-year-old Alex Morales as he fights to survive in the aftermath of apocalyptic events in New York City. Alex Morales is an average high schooler focused on his after-school job, helping his dad out with building superintendent responsibilities, and getting good grades so he can make it into an Ivy League college. But when the moon alters its gravitational pull and catastrophic events ensue, everything changes. Now, he has to care for his younger sisters, decide whether it’s ethical to rob the dead, and keep the hope alive that their lost parents will return. Bone-chilling and harrowing, Susan Beth Pfeffer investigates what it takes to survive when the odds are stacked against you in this captivating story about sacrifice and humanity.

An arresting un-coming-of-age story, from a breathtaking talent Becca has always longed to break free from her small, backwater hometown. But the discovery of an unidentified dead girl on the side of a dirt road sends the town--and Becca--into a tailspin. Unable to make sense of the violence of the outside world creeping into her backyard, Becca finds herself retreating inward, paralyzed from moving forward for the first time in her life. Short chapters detailing the last days of Amelia Anne Richardson's life are intercut with Becca's own summer as the parallel stories of two young women struggling with self-identity and relationships on the edge twist the reader closer and closer to the truth about Amelia's death.

From the modern master of noir, Andrew Vachss, comes this heart-topping and bestselling new thriller that completely reinvents the Burke series. Urban Outlaw Burke barely survives an attack by a professional hit squad that kills his partner. With a new face, Burke goes into hiding. And on the hunt. Dead and Gone takes him from the streets of New York City through a cross-country underground, and deep into his own tortured past. The violent journey ends in a place that exists only in the dreams of the darkest degenerates on earth.

The rain-soaked streets of Napua on Hawaii s island of Elima are a far cry from a battlefield but, for returned soldier Kimo Stanner, there s a sudden reminder of warfare when a figure rushes in front of his pickup and he feels the impact. Even before getting out to view the damage, he knows the pedestrian is dead, and there s nothing for it but to report to the police except that when the police arrive, the body has disappeared. When he turns to the firm of Smith, Chu and Yoshinobu to defend him on what is now simply a drunk-driving charge, Kimo s attorney is Laura Correa, newly hired by the firm. Kay Yoshinobu agrees to help the nervous attorney with her first case as a trial lawyer. With no missing persons reported, and no proof that there was actually a body at the scene, the case goes well, the judge is sympathetic, the defense witnesses are effective, and the prosecuting attorney isn t out for blood. And that s when things go wrong terribly wrong. A body turns up in a local gulch, is clearly the one Kimo reported, and the DUI is then raised to manslaughter. As the police look into the matter, they find more and more evidence to indicate even that charge may be changed to something more serious, and Kay s investigative abilities are put to a severe test. That Kimo s pickup clearly struck a pedestrian who was alive at the time seems irrefutable. And, by Kimo s own testimony, the man was dead following the accident. To prove otherwise seems both medically and legally impossible, but Laura and Kay soon find that there may be another explanation. And the search for it takes them off to interview a host of strange people.

A TONIGHT SHOW SUMMER READS FINALIST An electrifying first novel from "a riveting new voice in American fiction" (George Saunders): A young woman returns to her childhood home in the American South and uncovers secrets about her father's life and death Billie James' inheritance isn't much: a little money and a shack in the Mississippi Delta. The house once belonged to her father, a renowned black poet who died unexpectedly when Billie was four years old. Though Billie was there when the accident happened, she has no memory of that day—and she hasn't been back to the South since. Thirty years later, Billie returns but her father's home is unnervingly secluded: her only neighbors are the McGees, the family whose history has been entangled with hers since the days of slavery. As Billie encounters the locals, she hears a strange rumor: that she herself went missing on the day her father died. As the mystery intensifies, she finds out that this forgotten piece of her past could put her in danger. Inventive, gritty, and openhearted, The Gone Dead is an astonishing debut novel about race, justice, and memory that lays bare the long-concealed wounds of a family and a country.

An absorbing collection of ten famous murder stories of North Carolina, spanning the years 1808 to 1914. “An interesting job of reporting....A book that rates a place on the bedside table.”-Charlotte Observer