Cody Hoyt, while a brilliant cop, is an alcoholic struggling with two months of sobriety when his mentor and AA sponsor Hank Winters is found burned to death in a remote mountain cabin. At first it looks like the suicide of a man who's fallen off the wagon, but Cody knows Hank better than that.

The newshound in Geneva Chase spurs her to bad if not downright dangerous choices as two unrelated crimes unexpectedly collide. A fifteen-year-old girl at her ward's high school has vanished along with her English teacher. Ant then there's the abused woman who torched her sadistic husband, and how to keep her out of the clutches of powerful mobsters and thus, out of the news. Out on the crime beat, Geneva works to unravel the connection, if any, between...

Timothy Warner, a PhD student who goes by the nickname "Moth," wakes up on his ninety-ninth day of sobriety with an intense craving for drink. He asks his uncle Ed, a former alcoholic and now successful psychiatrist, to meet him at an AA meeting later that day. When Ed doesn't show up, Moth bikes to his office and discovers a grisly scene -- his uncle lying in a pool of blood, shot through the temple. The police pronounce the death a suicide, but...

It's a crime scene worthy of Hieronymus Bosch, so shocking and so senseless it challenges the local law and intrigues veteran reporter Geneva Chase whose career may be dying alongside that of her small town newspaper.The Sheffield Post headline shouts, "Cops Call Murder Scene 'Slaughterhouse." On the scene, Genie spurs the Deputy Police Chief to tell her quietly, "Six bodies...all nude...hacked to pieces." Even tough Geneva shivers. How could such...

"A bitter drunk forsakes civilization and takes to the Mexican jungle, trapping animals, selling their pelts to buy liquor for colossal benders, and slowly rotting away in his fetid hut. His neighbors, a clan of the Lacodón tribe of Chiapas, however, see something more in him than he does himself (dubbing him Wise Owl): when he falls deathly ill, a shaman named Black Ant saves his life-and, almost by chance, in driving out his fever, she exorcises...

Crediting his survival to his supportive Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, former police officer Randy Chalmers is shocked when his sponsor is found dead of an alleged overdose, a situation that compels him to discover the truth.

"Seven hard-won months into her sobriety, sociology professor Maris Heilman has her first blackout. She chalks it up to exhaustion, though she fears that her husband and daughter will suspect she's drinking again. Whatever their cause, the glitches start becoming more frequent. Sometimes minutes, sometimes longer, but always leaving Maris with the same disorienting question: Where have I been? Then another blackout lands Maris in the ER, where she...