Not the Best Place for a Good Night's Sleep Deb Powers finally gets to work. Helping an old friend with new potential upgrade his life. This time her cousin brings a case at a B&B in town that threatens the owner's sanity. A free stay plus a chance to investigate the bizarre proves too much for Deb to resist. Will she figure out the trouble before she loses her own sanity in the process? Also available in the collection Investigations Beyond Belief An excerpt from The Strange Critter at the Old Johnston Place: When an Old Friend Fears His Own Mind "Cliff's been finding things like his razor in the freezer," Terri said. "An egg inside his pillowcase, which unfortunately had not been hard-cooked first. Piles of salt and pepper in his underwear drawer, potting soil in the silverware drawer, and the remote for the television inside the oven. Apparently he checked inside before he turned it on a couple of days ago, because he melted a pair of his reading glasses in there last week." "And no one else has been inside?" Deb said. "Nope, not until he called me personally to come take a look," Terri said. "He hasn't seen anyone skulking around on any of the security recordings." "Maybe he'll let us install a few just for this?" Jeff said. "Help ease his mind?" "I don't think that would help Cliff feel better," Deb said."Not unless it shows him sleepwalking, right? I'm going to guess he's afraid he's doing all of it himself but just can't remember."

When Clues Point to Impossible, Deb Takes the Case Deb Powers probes an odd case of disappearing tools. Opening her eyes to all the strange goings on around her. Deb returns to an old haunt that now lives up to the name. A case too eerie and weird to ignore right under her feet. Strange nights at a new B&B threaten the owner’s sanity. What Deb discovers makes her doubt her own mind. Eerie incidents at the local trail threaten the town’s plans. A hidden mystery stirring up fear and trouble for everyone. Renovation at the old train depot uncovers bizarre clues. Deb calls in help to solve the puzzle before work derails. Deb Powers leaves life as a big city private investigator behind. Trying to ignore all the weird at the heart of her new hometown. But Deb’s sheriff cousin needs help with so many unusual cases in Estonoa, Virginia. And wants a talented PI back on the job. Will Deb’s ornery curiosity draw her into her old line of work with a new paranormal twist? Join Kari Kilgore on a delightful trip into the unexpected corners of her home, and imagination. With five original tales: Making a Change for the Stranger, A Cave of Whispering Secrets, The Strange Critter at the Old Johnston Place, An Eddy of the Unexplained, and Finding the Tracks to the Past

Something Strange Lurks in a Shadowy World Deb Powers settles into her new mountain home town, hoping to build a new career to match. But her cousin brings a case too eerie and weird to ignore. A return to a childhood haunt that now lives up to the name. And an unconventional friend to help Deb see the other side. What will the Otherworldly PI discover in the underworld? Also available in the collection Investigations Beyond Belief An excerpt from A Cave of Whispering Secrets: The Mysterious World Underfoot “What kind of noises?” Deb said. Terri picked up Deb’s empty coffee mug and tapped it with her non-existent fingernails. “Well, that’s the part that got my attention, to tell you the truth. I’m sure you remember how the cave entrance is close to the maintenance shed around back? Apparently one of the janitors was out there for a while a couple of weeks ago. The whole time, something in the cave was tapping.” “Tapping? Like you’re doing right now, even though you know it gets on my nerves?” Terri stared into Deb’s eyes and nodded slowly, continuing her increasingly more annoying random noise. “Like this, yes. Other folks have heard what sounds like deep breathing, or a rumble like a train was going by under there.” She paused—thankfully both talking and tapping—as more distant thunder muttered outside. “One of them mentioned it sounded like a thunderstorm underground.”

From an acclaimed and award-winning young writer comes an intensely moving debut collection set in the eye of life’s storms. In Corpus Christi, Texas—a town often hit by hurricanes— parents, children, and lovers come together and fall apart, bonded and battered by memories of loss that they feel as acutely as physical pain. A car accident joins strangers linked by an intimate knowledge of madness. A teenage boy remembers his father’s act of sudden and self-righteous violence. A “hurricane party” reunites a couple whom tragedy parted. And, in an unforgettable three-story cycle, an illness sets in profound relief a man’s relationship with his mother and the odd, shifting fidelity of truth to love. Told in fresh, lyrical voices and taut, inventive styles, these narratives explore the complex volatility of love and intimacy, sorrow and renewal—and expose how often these experiences feel like the opposite of themselves. From the woman whose young son’s uncanny rapport with snakes illuminates her own missed opportunities to the man confronting his wife and her lover in a house full of illegal exotic birds, all the characters here face moments of profound decision and recognition in which no choice is clearly or completely right. Writing with tough humor, deep humanity, and a keen eye for the natural environment, Bret Anthony Johnston creates a world where where cataclysmic events cut people loose from their “regular lives, floating and spiraling away from where we had been the day before.” Corpus Christi is a extraordinarily ambitious debut. It marks the arrival of an important, exquisitely talented voice to American fiction.

When you are all out of heroes, all that’s left are the villains. Black Herran was a dread demonologist, and the most ruthless general in all Essoran. She assembled the six most fearsome warriors to captain her armies: a necromancer, a vampire lord, a demigod, an orcish warleader, a pirate queen, and a twisted alchemist. Together they brought the whole continent to its knees… Until the day she abandoned her army, on the eve of total victory. 40 years later, she must bring her former captains back together for one final stand, in the small town of Tarnbrooke – the last bastion against a fanatical new enemy tearing through the land, intent on finishing the job Black Herran started years before. Seven bloodthirsty monsters. One town. Their last hope. File Under: Fantasy [ Heroes or Horrors? | Flames and Faith | Blood and Guts | Hell Demons ]

Parting company with the trend in recent scholarship to treat the subject in abstract, highly theoretical terms, Magic in Ancient Greece and Rome proposes that the magic-working of antiquity was in reality a highly pragmatic business, with very clearly formulated aims - often of an exceedingly malignant kind. In seven chapters, each addressed to an important arm of Greco-Roman magic, the volume discusses the history of the rediscovery and publication of the so-called Greek Magical Papyri, a key source for our understanding of ancient magic; the startling violence of ancient erotic spells and the use of these by women as well as men; the alteration in the landscape of defixio (curse tablet) studies by major new finds and the confirmation these provide that the frequently lethal intent of such tablets must not be downplayed; the use of herbs in magic, considered from numerous perspectives but with an especial focus on the bizarre-seeming rituals and protocols attendant upon their collection; the employment of animals in magic, the factors determining the choice of animal, the uses to which they were put, and the procuring and storage of animal parts, conceivably in a sorcerer's workshop; the witch as a literary construct, the clear homologies between the magical procedures of fictional witches and those documented for real spells, the gendering of the witch-figure and the reductive presentation of sorceresses as old, risible and ineffectual; the issue of whether ancient magicians practised human sacrifice and the illuminating parallels between such accusations and late 20th century accounts of child-murder in the context of perverted Satanic rituals. By challenging a number of orthodoxies and opening up some underexamined aspects of the subject, this wide-ranging study stakes out important new territory in the field of magical studies.