Dying Bites

36-year old actuary Gerald Blumenstein despised every aspect of his life. His butterball-esque appearance was unappealing, his dull job unnerving, his cramped apartment uncomfortable, and his love life nonexistent. And yet, not a soul in the world was more petrified of death than Gerald. In fact, Gerald Blumenstein would do anything to avoid dying, even if it meant remaining trapped forever in an existence that, quite frankly, sucked. Then, one fateful night, while attending a highly unorthodox therapy session mandated by his boss, Gerald Blumenstein died. Now his life will never be the same ...Life Sucks, Death Bites is a dark comedy about the inconveniences of daily life and nightly undeath, with some romance and a bit of psychotherapy thrown in for good measure. If the three critically acclaimed HBO series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, True Blood, and In Treatment, could procreate, this novel would undoubtedly be the lovechild that they would produce.

DD Barant launches The Bloodhound Files with Dying Bites—a "fresh and original take on urban fantasy" (Romantic Times) with a heroine who's "remarkable, strong-willed and smart" (Publishers Weekly). Her job description is the "tracking and apprehension of mentally-fractured killers." What this really means in FBI profiler Jace Valchek's brave new world—one in which only one percent of the population is human—is that a woman's work is never done. And reality is getting stranger every day... Jace has been ripped from her reality by David Cassius, the vampire head of the NSA. He knows that she's the best there in the business, and David needs her help in solving a series of gruesome murders of vampires and werewolves. David's world—one that also includes lycanthropes and golems—is one with little knowledge of mental illness. An insane serial killer is a threat the NSA has no experience with. But Jace does. Stranded in a reality where Bela Lugosi is a bigger box office draw than Bruce Willis and every full moon is Mardi Gras, Jace must now hunt down a fellow human before he brings the entire planet to the brink of madness. Or she may never see her own world again...

A sexy FBI profiler teams up with a member of the vampire elite to put a stop to a series of gruesome murders tearing up the streets of Seattle, in this first novel of a stunning new fantasy series.

Its bite is seven times more lethal than a rattler, twenty-five times more deadly than a cobra. It will kill a horse in five minutes. It is nineteen feet long and moves with deadly speed. It is soundless, lashing out at its victim without warning. It is the taipan, the world's deadliest snake. AND NOW IT IS LOOSE. When will it strike again?

This book is the first significant contribution to thoroughly examine the potential hazards associated with snakes of the former family, Colubridae. This family contained >65% of living snake species (approximately 3,000 taxa) and has recently been split into multiple families. Many of these snakes produce oral secretions that contain toxins and other biologically-active substances. A large variety of these snakes figure in the pet industry, yet little documented information or formal study of their potential medical importance has been published. Therefore, although the possible medical importance of many of these species has been subjected to speculation since the mid-nineteenth century, there is a limited amount of useful descriptive information regarding the real hazard (or lack thereof) of snakes belonging to this diverse, artificial family. There is a need for "one-stop shopping" offering information regarding their possible toxicity and clinical relevance as well as recommendations for medical management of their bites. This book is the first synthesis of this information and includes evidence-based risk assessment, hazard rankings and specific recommendations regarding important species, many common in captivity. Fills a gap in the toxinological, medical and herpetological literature by providing a comprehensive review of this entire assemblage of snakes, with particular attention given to their capacity, real or rumored, to cause harm to humans A patient-centered, evidence-based approach is applied to analyzing documented case reports of bites inflicted by approximately 100 species. Clinical management of medically significant bites from non-front-fanged colubroids is methodically reviewed, and specific recommendations are provided