James Patterson presents two heartwarming tales about the power of a good story to open our eyes to life's possibilities. Tell me your best story: Anne McWilliams has lost everything. Her marriage fell apart so she turned to photography, only to have her world turned upside down again when a hurricane destroyed her home and all of her beloved photos. In the aftermath of the storm, Anne takes to the road to ask long-lost family, friends, and strangers...

"The four never-before-published novellas in this collection represent horror master King at his finest, using the weird and uncanny to riff on mortality, the price of creativity, and the unpredictable consequences of material attachments. A teenager discovers that a dead friend's cell phone, which was buried with the body, still communicates from beyond the grave in 'Mr. Harrigan's Phone,' which reads like a Twilight Zone episode infused with an...

"Homecoming" takes us back to Ford County, the fictional setting of many of John Grisham's unforgettable stories. Jake Brigance is back, but he's not in the courtroom. He's called upon to help an old friend, Mack Stafford, a former lawyer in Clanton, who three years earlier became a local legend when he stole money from his clients, divorced his wife, filed for bankruptcy, and left his family in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again--until...

A canny young woman is struggling to survive by perpetrating various levels of mostly harmless fraud. On a rainy April morning, she is reading auras at Spiritual Palms when Susan Burke walks in. A keen observer of human behavior, our unnamed narrator immediately diagnoses beautiful, rich Susan as an unhappy woman eager to give her lovely life a drama injection. However, when the "psychic" visits the eerie Victorian home that has been the source of...

The award-winning master of psychological suspense is in top form in this collection of diverse and diabolically clever stories - including one never-before-published novella. These brilliantly crafted stories of deception, murder, dangerous games, and love gone wrong - irrefutable evidence that Laura Lippman's riveting fiction will more than satisfy any crime reader.

"3 Days to Live": a CIA-agent bride is on her European honeymoon when she and her husband are poisoned--leaving her seventy-two hours to take revenge; "Women and Children First": when a deal goes bad on a tech executive in Washington, DC, he turns an order to kill his family into a chance to relive his military glory days; "The Housekeepers": a Los Angeles doctor trusts her two housekeepers, but when she's murdered in a botched attempt to steal...

"It all begins with a father telling a story to his son on Christmas Eve. But this isn't your typical Christmas story. The father admits to his son that he's taken a life but he won't say whose--not yet. One week earlier, in a hospital late at night, the man met a five-year-old girl with cancer. She's a smart kid--smart enough to know that she won't beat cancer by drawing with crayons all day, but it seems to make the adults happy, so she keeps doing...

A collection of three holiday-themed novellas includes Leslie Meier's "Christmas Card Murder," in which the discovery of an old Christmas card with a nasty message finds Lucy Stone investigating a decades-old murder.

A holiday adventure finds Stephanie Plum struggling to remove an intruder from her apartment and falling for a mysterious newcomer.

"From one of the most important contemporary American writers, Cardiff, by the Sea is a bold, haunting collection of four previously unpublished novellas. Starting with the title novella - in which a romantic-minded young art historian is led to (re)discover a terrifying trauma after inheriting property in faraway Cardiff, Maine - through to "The Surviving Child" - which finds the young new wife of a famous poet's widow haunted by the dead poet's...