There is a life after death, but only for the terminally cool. . . . Jo-Jo Dyas doesn't believe he has any reason to live, but then he finds the surprisingly lively dead girl in the culvert and she convinces him otherwise. She and her punk band, the Fiendish Lot, come from the Afterlife, a strange, colorless place where souls sometimes pause on the journey between this world and the next. When Jo-Jo follows her there, he gets a chance to make right all the things that have gone wrong in his life . . . but only if he can figure out how before he fades away into nothing. Maybe the answer lies in Jo-Jo's late-breaking realization: Being alive is kind of cool. Rude, raw, and blisteringly funny, Andrew Auseon's new novel is like one of those insanely catchy songs that you can't forget and won't want to. So pay attention: The afterlife you save may be your own.

A teenager struggles through physical loss to the start of acceptance in an absorbing, artful novel at once honest and insightful, wrenching and redemptive. (Age 12 and up) On a sunny day in June, at the beach with her mom and brother, fifteen-year-old Jane Arrowood went for a swim. And then everything -- absolutely everything -- changed. Now she’s counting down the days until she returns to school with her fake arm, where she knows kids will whisper, "That’s her -- that’s Shark Girl," as she passes. In the meantime there are only questions: Why did this happen? Why her? What about her art? What about her life? In this striking first novel, Kelly Bingham uses poems, letters, telephone conversations, and newspaper clippings to look unflinchingly at what it’s like to lose part of yourself - and to summon the courage it takes to find yourself again.

Plagued by a series of frightening murders in San Francisco, Homicide Inspector Clemson Yao enlists the help of Angie Strachan, a realtor who tried—and failed—to become the city’s first female homicide inspector. Facing off against a ghoulish serial killer who whimsically refers to his grotesque murders as "messies," Clem and Angie slowly unravel the murderer’s clues, but their quarry is always one step ahead of them, and even an FBI profiler can't help them pin down the twisted mind behind the crimes. Gripped by a macabre obsession for a decade, the killer has evolved into a grandmaster of slow, anguished death, roaming the globe to catalog the most despicable methods of execution and keeping his research in dozens of leather-bound notebooks. It's a desperate race against time, for his next victims are already picked out, and it seems that no one can stop him.

Arty, an abnormally short fourteen-year-old boy, enlists the help of a group of students, known at school as the "pathetic losers," to take revenge against his abusive, tall fraternal twin brother.