Twelve-year-old Rosie and her brother face homelessness in Honolulu when their parents, Americans of German descent, are interrogated and imprisoned as suspected spies after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Includes historical notes.

In celebration of their 20th anniversary, Poisoned Pen Press commissioned original short stories from thirty-five of its authors, past and present.

"Jeffrey Stepakoff's The Melody of Secrets is an epic love story set against the 1960s U.S. space program, where deeply-buried secrets could threaten not just a marriage, but a country. Maria was barely eighteen when WWII was coming to its explosive end. A brilliant violinist, she tries to comfort herself with the Sibelius Concerto as American bombs rain down. James Cooper wasn't much older. A roguish fighter pilot stationed in London, he was shot...

A young woman climbs the tallest tree in Istanbul's centuries-old Gulhane Park, determined to live out the rest of her days there. Perched in an abandoned stork's nest in a sanctuary of branches and leaves, she tries to make sense of the rising tide of violence in the world below. Torn between the desire to forget all that has happened and the need to remember, her story, and the stories of those around her, begins to unfold. Then, unexpectedly, comes...

"When H.G. Wells left school in 1880 at the age of thirteen he looked destined for obscurity. Defying expectations, he went on to become one of the most famous writers in the world, remaining active into the era of the atomic bomb, which he had predicted thirty years earlier. Along the way he created classic science-fiction tales such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds, reinvented the Dickensian novel in Kipps and The...

In 1955 California, as "Invasion of the body snatchers" is filmed in their hometown, thirteen-year-old Arnie discovers a real enemy when he and three friends go against a young government agent determined to find communists at a nearby university or on the movie set.

"An odyssey wrapped in a love story, set in a near-future of artificial people The Sisters Sputnik are a time-traveling trio of storytellers-for-hire who are much in demand throughout the multiverse of 2,052 alternate worlds. Each world was created by the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Earth Standard Time, home of the Sisters' leader, aging comic book creator Debbie Reynolds Biondi, her 20-something apprentice Unicorn Girl, and their pop culture-loving...