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The Great Hotel Murder

Vincent Starrett

In a grand Chicago hotel, a mysterious death sets a puzzling whodunnit in motion

When a New York banker is discovered dead from an apparent morphine overdose in a Chicago hotel, the circumstances surrounding his untimely end are suspicious to say the least. The dead man had switched rooms the night before with a stranger he met and drank with in the hotel bar. And before that, he’d registered under a fake name at the hotel, told his drinking companion a fake story about his visit to the Windy City, and seemingly made no effort to contact the actress, performing in a local show, to whom he was married. All of which is more than enough to raise eyebrows among those who discovered the body.

Enter theatre critic and amateur sleuth Riley Blackwood, a friend of the hotel’s owner, who endeavors to untangle this puzzling tale as discreetly as possible. But when another detective working the case, whose patron is unknown, is thrown from a yacht deck during a party by an equally unknown assailant, the investigation makes a splash among Chicago society. And then several of the possible suspects skip town, leaving Blackwood struggling to determine their guilt or innocence―and their whereabouts.

Reissued for the first time in over eighty years, The Great Hotel Murder is a devilishly complex whodunnit with a classical aristocratic setting, sure to please Golden Age mystery fans of all stripes. In 1935, the story was adapted for a film of the same name.

Acting Married

Victorine Lieske

Tara McDermott needed a job, so she took the only thing available—cleaning house for the swoon-worthy actor, and Hollywood Bad Boy, Rick Shade. When he comes up with a crazy plan to tame his wild reputation by marrying her, she reluctantly agrees so she can pay off her debts and move her daughter back to the Midwest where life is simpler. If only he wouldn’t make her heart pound every time he kisses her.

Rick’s reputation is in the toilet and it’s affecting his job. In order to get a good role, he needs to show Hollywood he’s now a family man. After enticing Tara with a large sum of money to go through with the farce, he sets out to show the public he’s in love. But Tara’s soft lips keep calling to him and soon he doesn’t know what’s pretend and what’s real.

Blissfully Married

Victorine Lieske

The United Continuums

Jennifer Brody

In the epic conclusion to the award-winning Continuum Trilogy, Aero leads a group insurgents from the Second Continuum to overthrow his rival, Supreme General Vinick, and unite his space colony’s military forces, while Seeker embarks on a secret mission back to her home colony to reinforce Earth's defenses and protect the First Continuum against an even greater threat. Meanwhile, Myra’s nightmares have become a reality as the Dark Thing hurtles toward Earth with designs on eradicating the planet’s fledgling populace. The only thing standing in the way are the three Carriers and those who would join them to fight against a second coming of the Doom.

Return of the Continuums

Jennifer Brody

Reaching the surface was just the beginning.

As Myra Jackson and her friends set out to find the First Continuum, Captain Aero Wright and two companions from the outer space Second Continuum find themselves banished for treason and stranded on Earth. Wright has vowed to complete his late father’s mission to recolonize their ancestral planet, but his true mission is to find the mysterious girl who haunts his dreams. Meanwhile, Myra and the young refugees of the underwater Thirteenth Continuum must make an unlikely ally if they are going to survive the hostile surface world and reach their destination, the nexus of humanity’s hope for survival. As their paths begin to converge, the Beacons that guide and connect Myra and Aero begin to prove their power, and a shadowy force with a centuries-old grudge reveals itself.

The 13th Continuum

Jennifer Brody

Gold Medal Winner, Young Adult Fiction ― Fantasy/Sci-Fi, Independent Publisher's Moonbeam Children's Book Awards

One thousand years after a cataclysmic event leaves humanity on the brink of extinction, the descendants of the chosen survivors take refuge in thirteen contingency shelters buried deep underground, at the bottom of the ocean, and in the far reaches of outer space. In the underwater 13th Continuum, sixteen-year-old Myra Jackson has heard rumors and whisperings all her life of a magical place called "The Surface” where people could breathe fresh air, feel the warmth of something called sunlight on their skin, and see things known as stars and trees and mountains. Myra has never dared to ask whether the stories are true, since the act of speaking such words aloud is an offense punishable by death. But after she discovers that the air supply aboard her underwater colony is running out, she realizes that her only hope for survival is to find this mysterious place. To get there, she must first recover the only guide to the Surface―the Beacon, an ancient device that also connects her to Captain Aero Wright, a dashing young soldier from one of the only remaining space colonies. With the fate of all humankind depending on them, Myra and Aero must escape the tyrannical forces that rule their colonies, journey through the black depths of the ocean and across the cold void of space, to find each other on the Surface that their ancestors once called home.

The Perpetual Summer

Adam Phillips

An HR exec-turned-private eye goes deep into a rich LA family’s dangerous secrets in this “crackling crime yarn” by the author of The Silent Second (Kirkus Reviews).
 
Corporate HR executive Chuck Restic found a new sense of purpose when he started moonlighting as LA’s most unassuming private investigator. And when he’s offered a hundred grand to find a rich old man’s missing granddaughter, it seems like the kind of case even full-time PI’s only dream about. Then reality sets in. It turns out real estate tycoon Carl Valenti has already paid a hefty ransom for his granddaughter’s release—to no avail. Also, Valenti’s chauffer Hector will be at Chuck’s service throughout his investigation—whether he likes it or not.
 
The trail leads Chuck to a high-profile fight over a new art museum and a forty-year-old murder that won’t stay in the past. As the list of suspects expands to include the girl’s fitness-obsessed mom, her personal life coach, and even the girl herself, all roads seem to lead back to Valenti. And Chuck begins to wonder if this dream job is going to leave him sleeping with the fishes.

The Silent Second

Adam Phillips

Chuck Restic has achieved the American dream: a successful career with a large corporation, his own home, the best health care insurance and retirement package... but he's crumbling inside. Twenty years in Human Resources have pushed him into an existential crisis. He realizes there is so little value in what he does all day, and it is only when he embarks on a mission to find a missing employee from his firm that he truly starts to feel alive again.

This is Chuck's first step toward moonlighting as a private detective ― a job in which he turns out to excel. Constantly balancing the inane demands of his office and the excitement of his new "job," he finally finds what he's been missing. By applying his HR skills and wit to his new passion for detective work, Chuck unravels a web of crooked real estate deals and three murders, staving off a fourth: his own.

The first in the Chuck Restic mystery series, The Silent Second began life as the novel Smile Now, Cry Later, a self-publishing success story that led to a series commitment from publisher Prospect Park Books. Thoroughly re-edited, improved, re-designed, and re-titled, this smart, witty crime novel introduces an engaging (if sometimes bitter) private eye for the corporate era.

Farewell Transmission

Will McGrath

In Farewell Transmission, Will McGrath guides us on a rambling quest into the enlightenment of other lives. Funny and heartbreaking, intimate and galvanizing, these essays venture from Yemen to Lesotho to the Bronx and beyond. We find Caravaggio at an Arizona homeless shelter and meet Elvis in rural Canada. We encounter diamond miners and professional wrestlers, night watchmen and righteous ex-cons—those wilderness prophets too frequently cropped from the picture.

This is a book of hiddenness: of secret lives and ghost stories and obscure passions. Whether he’s unraveling the fraught history of a noose in Namibia or wandering the Driftless Area with a modern-day goatherd, McGrath is on an excavation into landscapes rarely seen. Like Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead, these essays pulse with electric prose and vivid characters, seeking out the invisible forces that bind us across our wondrous and troubling planet.

In Farewell Transmission is a book about paying attention: to the concealed lives we encounter every day, and to the hidden worlds that exist within our own.

Everything Lost is Found Again

Will McGrath

Funny and heartfelt, this amalgamation of memoir and essay collection tells the story of twenty months the author spent in Lesotho, the small, landlocked kingdom surrounded by South Africa. There he finds a spirit of joyful absurdity and resolve, surrounded by people who take strangers’ hands as they walk down the road, people who―with sweetest face―drop the dirtiest jokes in the southern hemisphere. But Lesotho is also a place where shepherds exact Old Testament retribution, where wounded pride incites murder and families are devastated by the AIDS epidemic.

Driven by a spirit of openhearted cultural exchange in the style of Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country and Alexandra Fuller’s Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, Will McGrath’s Everything Lost Is Found Again is a love-drunk ballad to Lesotho, infusing humor and heart into pop ethnography.

Cold Country

Russell Rowland

Montana, 1968: The small town of Paradise Valley is ripped open when popular rancher and notorious bachelor Tom Butcher is found murdered one morning, beaten to death by a baseball bat. Suspicion among the tight-knit community immediately falls on the outsider, Carl Logan, who recently moved in with his family and his troubled son Roger. What Carl doesn't realize is that there are plenty of people in Paradise Valley who have reason to kill Tom Butcher.

Complications arise when the investigating officers discover that Tom Butcher had a secret―a secret he kept even from Junior Kirby, a lifelong rancher and Butcher’s best friend. As accusations fly and secrets are revealed one after another, the people of Paradise Valley learn how deeply Tom Butcher was embedded in their lives, and that they may not have known him at all.

With familiar mastery, Russell Rowland, the author of In Open Spaces and Fifty-Six Counties, returns to rural Montana to explore a small town torn apart by secrets and suspicions, and how the tenuous bonds of friendship struggle to hold against the differences that would sever us.

Call it Horses

Jessie van Eerden

Set in small-town West Virginia in the twilight of the eighties, Call It Horses tells the story of three women—niece, aunt, and stowaway—and an improbable road trip.

Frankie is an orphan (or a reluctant wife). Mave is an autodidact (or the town pariah). Nan is an artist (or the town whore). Each separately haunted, Frankie, Mave, and Nan—with a hound in tow—set out in an Oldsmobile Royale for Abiquiú and the desert of Georgia O’Keeffe, seeking an escape from everything they’ve known.

 rankie records the journey in letters to her aunt Mave’s dead lover, a linguist named Ruth, sketching out her troubled life and her complicated relationship with Mave, who became her guardian when Frankie was orphaned at sixteen. Slowly, one letter at a time, Frankie exposes the ruins of herself and her fellow passengers: things that chase them, that died too soon, that never lived.

With lush prose and brutal empathy, Frankie tells Ruth—and herself—the story of liminality experienced by a woman standing just outside of motherhood, fulfillment, and love.