Friendship

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?

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...."

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

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.

Flora, Ruby, Olivia, and Nikki don't understand it. Someone - they don't know who - is leaving books on their doorstep. Each comes with a mysterious message asking them to read the book and do something new. Before they know it, the four friends have a secret, girls-only book club...and are finding out new things about themselves and one another.

Millions of readers of Hatchet, The River, Brian's Winter, and Brian's Return know that Brian Robeson is at home in the Canadian wilderness. He has stood up to the challenge of surviving alone in the woods. He prefers being on his own in the natural world to civilization.

Kevin has a big talent. Some might call it compulsive lying. He calls it common sense.

Henry Mosley decides that he and his pals Riley and Reed need to go on some earth-shaking adventures and make a name for themselves. Henry is the mastermind; Riley's the researcher who's prepared for anything. And somehow fearful Reed always ends up with the scariest, craziest assignments.

This fast-paced, high-energy collection of short works features today's most popular writers and illustrators writing about what it means to be a guy. Contributors include Chris Crutcher, Stephen King, Matt Groening, Daniel Pinkwater, Neil Gaiman, and many more.

Orphaned Kit Tyler knows, as she gazes for the first time at the cold, bleak shores of Connecticut Colony, that her new home will never be like the shimmering Caribbean islands she left behind. In her relatives' stern Puritan community, she feels like a tropical bird that has flown to the wrong part of the world, a bird that is now caged and lonely.

When Melanie Ross first meets April Hall, she's not sure what to think. What other sixth grade girl wears her blonde hair piled in a twist and flaunts false eyelashes? But when the two girls discover the storage shed outside the A-Z Antiques and Curio Shop, they discover they both love anything to do with ancient Egypt. Soon the friends create the Egypt Game.

New York Times best-selling author Cinda Williams Chima is well known for her Seven Realms fantasy series.