Fiction

When Herculeah Jones's best friend, Meat, decides to take a comedy class, he just expects to get a few laughs. But then he discovers a dead body in the bathroom, and realizes that there's nothing funny about murder. Things can't get any worse - until the body disappears!

Together with her best friend and reluctant sidekick Meat, Herculeah Jones meets a famous mystery author, Mathias King, aka The Murder King. King's novels mirror gruesome, real-life murders - particularly A Slash of Life, which is about an unsolved local stabbing. Many people believe Mathias King knows too much. Could he be responsible for the crime?

At the eerie Hunt mansion, Herculeah Jones has been reading aloud to Lionus Hunt, an elderly stroke victim who can only communicate by blinking his eyes (once for yes, twice for no). Mr. Hunt seems to be trying to tell Herculeah something, but his gruff nurse won't allow her to ask any questions. What is Mr. Hunt trying to say?

Herculeah Jones finds herself in the middle of another mystery when her best friend, Meat, barely escapes a hitman's bullet. Someone must have mistaken Meat for someone else. But who? Herculeah is determined to solve the mystery, before the assassin comes after her!

When Herculeah Jones discovers a letter in her secondhand coat, she instantly recognizes it as a cry for help. It doesn't take Herculeah long to uncover the clues and track down the truth. But what Herculeah doesn't realize is that someone is stalking her - someone who would kill to keep the truth under wraps.

"My second life began when I was kidnapped by two complete strangers...."

Leo's papa stood in the doorway, gazing down at him. "Leo, you make gold from pebbles," and the way he said it, Leo could tell that this was a good thing.

He may have been given a bit part in the school play, but Leo dreams he is the biggest star on Broadway.

It started out as an ordinary summer. But the minute thirteen-year-old Zinny covered the old, overgrown trail that ran through the woods behind her family's house, she realized that things were about to change.

In the summer of 1849, Lucy Whipple's mother packs up her household and her two young children, and leaves their home in Massachusetts for the gold fields of California.

Francine lives down the street from a Hollywood film studio, adores screen dreamboat Montgomery Clift, and sometimes sees her home life as a scene from a movie: Dinner at the Greens. She wishes she really were a movie star, brave and glamorous and always ready to say the right thing.

Seven superb stories, from the world's number-one storyteller

A taste of her own medicine. George is alone in the house with Grandma. The most horrid, grizzly old grunion of a grandma ever. She needs something stronger than her usual medicine to cure her grouchiness. A special grandma medicine, a remedy for everything. And George knows just what to put into it.

Banished! Old Witch likes nothing better than to fly about on her broomstick crying "Heh-Heh!" and casting abracadabras, but now she has been sent away, by two young girls.

Nyle's life with her grandmother on their Vermont sheep farm advances rhythmically through the seasons until the night of the accident at the Cookshire nuclear power plant. Without warning, Nyle's modest world fills with protective masks, evacuations, contaminated food, disruptions, and mistrust.

Rifka knows nothing about America when she flees from Russia with her family in 1919. But she dreams that in the new country she will at last be safe from the Russian soldiers and their harsh treatment of the Jews. Throughout her journey, Rifka carries with her a cherished volume of poetry by Alexander Pushkin.