Metaphysical Mystery Fiction

At the Madrid café where she stops for breakfast each day before work, María Dolz finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Though she can hardly explain it, observing what she imagines to be their "unblemished" life lifts her out of the doldrums of her own existence. But what begins as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement when the man is fatally stabbed in the street.

Poet Gabriel Syme believes in the beauty of order and, as such, is recruited by Scotland Yard to an anti-anarchist police corp. While undercover, Syme meets fellow poet Lucian Gregory, a verse writer devoted to disorder, who introduces him to London’s anarchist underworld. Just as Gregory is to be elected to the central council, Syme’s cover is revealed and he is forced to make a decision that sends the cabal into chaos. Is anyone in this underground faction who or what they seem? Syme suddenly realizes he doesn’t have all the answers.

✦To the Future Us: Stellar Whisper At the moment when the universe was about to reboot and time collapsed to zero, a message in a bottle was launched from Earth, drifting slowly toward the future, passing through thirty-three layers of cosmic frequency. Inside the bottle: a softly glowing blue lotus, an ever-beating flicker of a heart, and a letter, with blurred ink and a tender voice: ✦ Dear Future, If you still remember love, please deliver this letter to someone who can understand it. The bottle wandered across star fields for ages, until it finally arrived at the Starlight Post ...

This book was previously published as Wild Fairy Moonshine by Katharine Sadler. Meeting potential future in-laws is never easy, especially when they can sprout fangs and claws. When Frost’s mother asks him to return to the pack to prove his ex is innocent of murder, Chloe can’t let him go alone. She’s his partner, and a damn good one, even if she’s not sure she can be the mate he needs. There’s nothing ordinary about this case, and Frost’s pack and its problems may be more than his and Chloe’s fledgling relationship can handle. Romance becomes the least of their worries when ...

Allison Moore is making it. Barely. The Seattle area architecture firm she started with her best friend is struggling, but at least they’re free from the games played by the corporate world. She’s gotten over her divorce. And while her dad’s recent passing is tough, their relationship had never been easy. Then the bomb drops. Her dad had a secret life and left her mom in massive debt. As Allison scrambles to help her mom find a way out, she’s given a journal, anonymously, during a visit to her favorite coffee shop.

Memory Signal By Caleb James In the frozen ruins of the last lighthouse on Earth, one man discovers a signal that doesn’t speak in words—it speaks in memories. Silas Ward is the final keeper of Nordhavn Light, a forgotten outpost on the edge of the world. Isolated for over a thousand days after the Collapse, he endures storms, silence, and the haunting lullaby of a daughter lost. But when a mysterious aurora begins pulsing in harmony with an old reel-to-reel recorder, Silas realizes he’s not alone. The signal is alive—and it remembers. Joined by Rhea Ainsley, a crash-landed stranger...

Holistic health guru Chopra makes his fictional debut with a symbolic tale mixing Arthurian legends with a modern-day detective story.

Be careful what you wish for. A year earlier, with the help of enigmatic industrialist Michael Walker, all of Penelope Drayton Spence’s dreams had come true. Now, as one of the country’s top journalists, she has discovered what she thought would make her happy was only making her busy. After months of avoiding her, Michael Walker burst back into her life with an outlandish plan to launch his controversial “Hermes” satellite into space. But she soon learns someone just as resourceful and well-financed is willing to go to any lengths to stop the launch.

Nineteen-year-old Mercy Habernackle is a witch gone off the rails. Causing problems with the law in her hometown, she's faced with two options. Go to a correctional institution or get shipped off to witch boarding school, or as her mother prefers to call it, finishing school. Choosing the latter, Mercy's mother, Linda, drives her daughter cross country to the Paranormal Institute for Witches, situated high in the beautiful Appalachian Mountains in cozy Aspen Falls, Pennsylvania.

The prophecy brought them together. But the Wolf has risen, and now their greatest battle begins. The four members of Warriors Riding have learned to wage war in the supernatural, to send their spirits inside people’s souls, to battle demonic forces, and to bring deep healing to those around them. But their leader Reece is struggling with the loss of his sight.

In The Second Rule of Ten, Norbu investigates the unexplained death of his former client, Hollywood mogul Marv Rudolph, and searches for the sister, lost during World War II, of wizened Los Angeles philanthropist Julius Rosen. With two cases and an unforeseen family crisis that sends him back to Tibet, Ten finds himself on the outs with his best buddy and former partner, Bill, who is heading the official police investigation into Marv's death.

See through the illusion. It’s Mercury Retrograde again on the island. Hannah Skye and her Aunt Jewelia are hosting an exclusive dinner party at Skye Manor to celebrate the opening of the 9/9/9 portal. But something goes terribly wrong, and dinner guests are disappearing faster than Hannah and Jewelia can search for clues. Madame Morgan is in danger, and visiting Jezebelle has unearthed something she didn’t seek. A new sinister force is at play.

Please Note: This story is also part of book 10 of The Hunter Legacy series, The Long Road to Gaia. Thirteen doesn't like humans. The last thing he wants is to be assigned a mission to babysit them. Given a choice, he'd happily let them blow themselves up, after he saved all the cats first. Exactly how humans could ever have anything to do with galaxy wide consequences is completely beyond his ability to understand. When asked to perform an intervention, there was always freewill to choose not to. But in this case, does he really have a choice? This is a 5000 word short story, set in The ...

"Highly recommended!" — The Prairies Book Review. Young runaway Mig isn't like the other children. When Mary Ellen catches him stealing eggs from her henhouse, she decides to help him hide from his pursuers. Little does she know that her simple act of kindness will change the Universe forever.

Penelope Drayton Spence made a choice years earlier, and picked marriage and family over a promising career as an investigative reporter. Now, divorced and with her children spread around the country, she is having second thoughts. A mysterious call from the Managing Editor of the Washington Post, offers her a second chance at big time journalism. He has a story so sensitive that the President of the United States personally asked the Post to leave it alone.

Hugo Award winner Elizabeth Bear has won high praise for her thought-provoking science fiction. The second in Bear’s powerful Jacob’s Ladder series, Chill finds the generation starship Jacob’s Ladder with a new captain—Perceval. As Perceval struggles with the ship’s recent damage, remnants of the rebellion still linger and a threat to the crew grows.

"Fun, fun, fun! Like the love child of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett!" Man plans, the Multiverse laughs! "It's like that book about anti-gravity. You can't put it down." "A story 14 billion years in the making!" "Finally, a treatment for readers suffering "Dirk Gently or Hitchhiker's Guide withdrawal!" "Not only is this case stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine." No other detective is quite like Dr. Ziegfeld Zaggar, Quantum Detective -- and that's probably for the best. Zaggar and his reluctant, obsessively linear-thinking sidekick, Jack Robbins, investigate the ...

I don’t wish to frighten you, reads the anonymous note introverted and bullied eight-year-old Leo Cruz finds in his backpack. All the sender asks is that he avoid a certain spot on a certain day, or he’ll die. Leo has reason to be afraid. The warning hearkens back to nearly a decade ago - to the same site, where a murder has become local folklore and a favorite campfire tale reinvented year after year by the kids of Arenas, a small Spanish town.

A veteran of the Iraq war is appointed undersecretary of defense in order to penetrate a secret government purposely black-shelving zero-point energy, a clean, abundant energy source reverse-engineered from downed UFOs. Steve Alten's Undisclosed is a mind-opening thriller of "faction" that incorporates testimonials from military and intelligence personnel who were actual eyewitnesses and participants involved in the greatest secret in history.

Set in three cities in three eras, The Mirror Thief calls to mind David Mitchell and Umberto Eco in its mix of entertainment and literary bravado. The core story is set in Venice in the 16th century, when the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world's most wondrous inventions: the mirror.