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...

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...

"A year has passed since Pete Fernandez's latest, closest brush with death. After months of recovery, the newly sober Pete has managed to rebuild his life, contentedly running a small Miami bookstore and steering clear of the dangers of private eye work. So when an aging Cuban mobster asks Pete to find out who killed his drug-addicted, jazz pianist son and to locate his missing daughter-in-law, Pete balks. Until another victim suggests that the murder...

"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...